The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (40 page)

Thousands of foreign Jews who lived in Hungary had to pay for the regent’s appeasement tactics. In the course of August 1941, 18,000 of these foreign Jews (almost all Polish, some of whom had barely escaped from occupied eastern Galicia) were rounded up by the Hungarian police and turned over to the SS in the western Ukraine, in the area of Kolomea and Kamenets-Podolsky. On August 27–28 the expellees and a few thousand local Jews (around 23,600 in all) were exterminated.
¹³⁹
When the news of the massacre seeped back to Hungary, the minister of the interior ordered an end to the deportation. In the meantime, however, first thousands, then tens of thousands of Jewish men were being drafted for forced-labor in the occupied Ukraine. By the end of 1941 some 50,000 Jews had been conscripted; some 40,000 of the first lot would not return. It became apparent, however, that Horthy was not ready to go beyond a certain limit in his anti-Jewish measures, despite repeated German prodding. A stabilization of sorts would last from March 1942, when the relatively liberal Miklós Kallay replaced the pro-German Laszlo Bardossy as the head of government, until the German occupation of the country in March 1944.

VII

For the SS Reichsführer the conquest of immense expanses in the East meant first and foremost the sudden possibility of implementing his colonization dreams: SS strongholds of racially perfect warrior-farmers would become the infrastructure of German domination from the Lublin district in the General Government to the Ural Mountains. Hostile population groups (Russians and Ukrainians) would be subdued, deported (part of the Polish population), or annihilated by expulsion to the polar wastes of northern Russia or by mass-murder operations (the Jews). Such extraordinary prospects demanded immediate action.

After Hitler’s decision of July 16 about the division of authority between the SS chief and Rosenberg, Himmler finalized the administrative technicalities in a conversation with Lammers and Brautigam on the seventeenth.
¹⁴⁰
On July 20, he was in Lublin. It was probably there, in a meeting with Globocnik and Oswald Pohl (the chief of the SS Main Office for Economy and Administration) that the first measures required by the new projects were decided upon.
¹⁴¹
Existing workshops on Lipowa Street in Lublin (with Jewish forced laborers) would be expanded; a new and much larger slave labor camp would be set up in the city (Lublin-Majdanek) for Jews, Poles, and Russians, and the first settlement plans for
Volksdeutsche
in the Zamóść area of the district were discussed.
¹⁴²

Of course the complementary aspect to the grandiose colonization plans had to be implemented simultaneously: The group considered as most hostile and dangerous for the security of the newly conquered territories, the Jews, had to be eliminated. Himmler’s plans fitted perfectly with the killings that had started immediately after the beginning of the campaign, and with Hitler’s new directives regarding “partisans.” In this sense the rapid expansion of the murder operations from Jewish men only to that of entire Jewish communities was determined by a convergence of policies; these new dimensions in the scope of the killings in turn demanded the most efficient mass murder methods. The execution of women and children seemed to Himmler to be too stressful for his commando members; toxic gas was more promising.

In the euthanasia program the gassing of mental patients had been used alongside other killing methods. Carbon monoxide was released from bottles into stationary gas chambers or into vans (first adopted for this purpose in the Warthegau in the summer of 1940). In September 1941 a technical modification in the euthanasia gas vans, developed at the Criminal Technical Institute of the RSHA, opened new possibilities. The redesigned vans (Saurer models equipped with powerful engines) would become mobile suffocating machines for batches of around forty people per van and per operation: A metal pipe connected to the exhaust gas hose would be inserted into a hermetically sealed van. Running the engine sufficed to asphyxiate its human cargo. The van was first tested on Soviet prisoners in Sachsenhausen, and the first units were activated in Poltava, in the Southern Ukraine, in November 1941, under the direct command of Paul Blobel’s
Einsatzkommando 4a
, which itself belonged to Max Thomas’s
Einsatzgruppe C.

In his postwar testimony, commando member Lauer described the process: “Two vans were in service [in Poltava]…. They drove into the prison yard, and the Jews—men, women and children—had to get straight into the vans from their cells…. The exhaust fumes were piped into the interior of the vans. I can still hear the hammering and the screaming of the Jews—‘Dear Germans, let us out!’…As soon as the doors were shut, the driver started the engine. He drove to a spot outside Poltava. I was there when the van arrived. As the doors were opened, dense smoke emerged, followed by a tangle of crumpled bodies. It was a frightful sight.”
¹⁴³
Within a few months some thirty gas vans were to become operational in the Baltic countries, in Belorussia, in the Ukraine, in the Warthegau, and in Serbia.

It was but a short step from the gas van to the stationary gas chamber, which functioned on the same technical principles: the use of carbon monoxide produced by attached engines. As we shall see, while several gas vans were used at the Chelmno extermination site in the Warthegau from early December 1941 on, the construction of gas chambers—activated by the exhaust gas from various engines—began in November on the site of the future Belzec extermination camp. Somewhat earlier, in September 1941, a different set of murder experiments by gas had started at Auschwitz.

Auschwitz had undergone several stages of development since opening its gates in June 1940 as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners. Situated near the eastern Upper Silesian town of the same name (half of whose fourteen thousand inhabitants were Jewish), it was conveniently located between the rivers Vistula and Sola and close to a railway junction of some importance. On April 27, 1940, Himmler had decided on the setting up of the camp and, on May 4, Rudolf Höss, formerly on the staff of Dachau, was put in charge. On June 14, as the Wehrmacht marched into Paris, the first transport of 728 Polish political prisoners from Tarnów in Galicia arrived at the new camp.
¹⁴⁴

In September 1940, Pohl, who, during a visit, had grasped the possibilities offered by the camp’s location at the rim of sand and gravel pits, ordered Höss to add a second story to each of the existing barracks; new batches of inmates would become slave laborers in the production of building materials, a cost-effective addition to the usual fare of torture and executions.

Pohl’s project was soon overshadowed by plans of a totally different scale. In March 1941 it was Himmler’s turn to visit the Upper Silesian camp, in the company of representatives of the chemical industry giant, I.G. Farben. This visit had been preceded by arduous negotiations between I.G. Farben, officials of Göring’s four-year-plan administration and the SS. The continuation of the war with England and the planned attack on the Soviet Union had convinced Hitler and Göring that the production of synthetic rubber and gasoline should be given the highest priority. I.G. Farben, the German pioneer in this domain, was ordered to expand its production capability considerably. A new plant had to be built as rapidly as possible.

Otto Ambros, the head of the Commission for Rubber and Plastics at I.G. Farben, had been aware for some time of the favorable conditions for a new plant in the Auschwitz area (abundant water supply, flat land, a nearby railway junction). Yet the firm’s directorate hesitated to send its workers and engineers to the rundown Polish town.
¹⁴⁵
In March and April 1941 Himmler finalized the deal by promising the supply of cheap slave labor (from Auschwitz and other concentration camps) and the construction of adequate housing for the German personnel. Höss was ordered to expand the capacity of the camp from 11,000 to 30,000 inmates. The Jews from the town of Auschwitz were expelled and their homes taken over while Poles were rounded up for construction work both at the camp and at I.G. Farben’s future Buna plant site at Dwory.
¹⁴⁶

As these vast expansion plans were set in motion and as, in the meantime, the new campaign in the East had started, the function of the camp as a mass murder center was also taking shape. By sheer coincidence, just after the beginning of the Russian campaign, an Auschwitz disinfection team “discovered” that the powerful pesticide Zyklon B—used for the decontamination of ship hulls and military barracks and thus also regularly utilized in Auschwitz—could kill animals and, therefore, human beings.
¹⁴⁷
Testing on a small group of Soviet prisoners of war successfully took place in early September 1941 in the cellar of Block 11, in the main camp. According to the camp chronicler, Danuta Czech, a major test then followed: This time the victims were first selected from the camp infirmary (some were brought on stretchers) and packed into the basement of Block 11, where all windows had been filled with earth. “Then,” Czech reported, “some 600 Russian war prisoners, officers and commissars who had been selected by the special units of the Gestapo in war prisoners’ camps, are pushed in. As soon as the prisoners have been pushed into the cells and the SS men have thrown in the Zyklon B gas, the doors are closed and isolated. The action takes place during the evening roll-call in the camp; after that, curfew is imposed: it means that the inmates are forbidden to leave their barracks and to move around in the camp.”
¹⁴⁸
As some of the prisoners were still alive on the next day, the operation was repeated.
¹⁴⁹

Even when the gas vans and gas chambers were used at full capacity, the Germans never abandoned mass executions by shooting or starvation, mainly in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union but also in Poland, even close to extermination camps. Their victims were not only Jews. Three and a half million Russian POWs were starved to death by the Wehrmacht, under the expert guidance of Quartermaster General Edward Wagner.
¹⁵⁰
Hundreds of thousands of Russian civilians were executed by the Army or by the
Einsatzgruppen
for any reason whatsoever. Further west, the execution of Polish civilians did not reach the same scope but became, from the outset, a matter of routine within the context of “anti-resistance operations.” In that context the diaries of anatomist Hermann Voss, a professor at the Reich University in Posen, leave very little to the imagination. On June 15, 1941, Voss noted: “Yesterday I viewed the cellar for corpses and the cremation oven that is also located in the cellar. This oven was built to eliminate parts of bodies left over from dissection exercises. Now it serves to incinerate executed Poles. The gray car with the gray men—that is, SS men from the Gestapo—comes almost daily with material for the oven.”
¹⁵¹
On September 30 Voss had good news: “Today I had a very interesting discussion with the chief prosecutor, Dr. Heise, about obtaining corpses for the anatomical institute. Königsberg and Breslau also get corpses from here. So many people are executed here that there are enough for all three institutes.”
¹⁵²

VIII

While technical improvements in the murder methods were progressing apace, alongside common mass executions, at the top of the Nazi hierarchy hesitation between several possible “solutions” of the Jewish question did persist throughout the summer of 1941. On occupied Soviet territory, as we saw, the extermination was first aimed at Jews as carriers of the Soviet system, then at Jews as potential partisans and finally as hostile elements living in territories ultimately destined for German colonization: The three categories merged of course into one but did not apply, at least during the summer and the fall of 1941, to the entire European continent. In terms of mass murder the first phase of what was to become the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe” had started on Soviet territory, but it was probably not yet seen as part of an overall extermination plan of all European Jews. How, then, should we interpret the letter addressed by Göring to Heydrich on July 31, 1941?

“In completion of the task which was entrusted to you in the edict dated January 24, 1939, of solving the Jewish question by means of emigration or evacuation in the most convenient way possible, given the present conditions,” Göring wrote, “I herewith charge you with making all the necessary preparations with regard to the organizational, practical and financial aspects for an overall solution [
Gesamtlösung
] of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.” The letter went on: “Insofar as the competencies of other central organizations are affected, they are to cooperate with you. I further charge you with submitting to me promptly an overall plan of the preliminary organizational, practical and financial measures for the execution of the intended final solution (
Endlösung
) of the Jewish question.”
¹⁵³

Göring’s letter had been drafted by Heydrich and submitted to the Reichsmarschall for his signature; this much we know from Eichmann’s deposition at his 1961 trial in Jerusalem.
¹⁵⁴
Manifestly the document was meant to ensure Himmler’s (and thus Heydrich’s) authority on all matters pertaining to the fate of the Jews, either in regard to all ongoing operations on Russian territory or in regard to the expected deportations after victory in the East. It seems probable that, contrary to what had happened in March 1941 (as we saw in the previous chapter), this time Göring did not demand the inclusion of Rosenberg’s name,
precisely in order to limit the new minister’s ambitions
. The letter was meant to inform all those concerned that, in practical terms, the solution of the Jewish question was Himmler’s domain (subject, of course, to Hitler’s instructions.)