The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (82 page)

From mid-1942 on, most of the victims’ belongings piled up in the major killing centers of “Aktion Reinhardt” and in Auschwitz-Birkenau, as the exterminations reached a high point. In early August 1942 negotiations among WVHA and all central Reich finance and economic agencies led to an agreement according to which Pohl’s main office would centralize and itemize the booty. Himmler informed the HSSPFs of the decision and officially appointed Pohl to his new function. Within a few weeks, on September 26, Pohl’s deputy, SS Brigadeführer August Frank, issued a first set of guidelines, regulating all use and distribution of Jewish spoils from the camps, from precious stones to “blankets, umbrellas, baby carriages,” to “glasses with gold frames,” to “women’s underwear,” to “shaving utensils, pocket knives, scissors,” and the like. Prices were set by the WVHA: “a pair of used pants—3 marks; a woolen blanket—6 marks.” The final admonition was essential: “Check that all Jewish stars have been removed from all clothing before transfer. Carefully check whether all hidden and sewn-in valuables have been removed from all articles to be transferred.”
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Regarding any items to be transfered to the Reichsbank, Pohl appointed SS Hauptsturmführer Bruno Melmer to be directly in charge of the operation. While the first deliveries of valuables from the camps were deposited in the “Melmer account” on August 26, all precious metals, foreign currency, jewelry, and so on, were further turned over to Albert Thoms’s precious metals section of the Reichsbank for further use.
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Throughout the Continent Jewish furniture and household goods were, as we saw, the domain of Rosenberg’s agency. An undated note from Rosenberg’s office, probably written in the late fall of 1942 or in early 1943, gave a succinct overview of the distribution process. While part of the furniture was allocated to Rosenberg ministry’s offices in the eastern territories, most of the spoils were handed out or auctioned off to the Reich population. “On 31 October 1942, the Führer agreed with the proposal of Reich Minister Alfred Rosenberg to give primary consideration to persons suffering from bomb damage in the Reich and ordered that, in the execution of the project, all assistance be given to Office-West and that transports are to be dispatched as Wehrmacht goods.

“Up to now, by using free freight space, 144,809 cubic meters of household goods have been removed from occupied Western Territories…Parts of the material were delivered to the following German cities: Oberhausen, Bottrop, Recklinghausen, Münster, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Osnabrück, Hamburg, Lübeck, Rostock, and Karlsruhe.
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Vast amounts of goods, coming mainly from the camps (Pohl’s, Globocnik’s and Greiser’s territories), had to be mended before being shipped on to German agencies or markets; clothing was processed with particular care: Stars had to be taken off, as we saw; blood and other bodily stains washed away; and the usual wear and tear dealt with as thoroughly as possible in SS clothing workshops. Who decided what items could or could not be repaired or who had the authority to assess degrees of damage remains unclear. One could not send tens of thousands of torn socks to the outlets in the Reich. The issue arose—but received no answer—in an incident described by Filip Müller, sometime in the late spring of 1942, in one of the Auschwitz crematoriums.

Müller, himself a Slovak Jew, arrived in Auschwitz in April 1942. He had just been transferred to the
Sonderkommando
(which will be discussed further on): This was his initiation, so to speak, under the supervision of SS Unterscharführer Stark. As was still common during these months, a group of Slovak Jews had been gassed with their clothes on. “Strip the stiffs!” Stark yelled and gave Müller a blow. “Before me,” Müller remembered, “lay the corpse of a woman. With trembling hands and shaking all over I began to remove her stockings. It was the first time in my life that I touched a dead body. She was not yet quite cold. As I pulled the stocking down her leg, it tore. Stark, who had been watching, struck me again, bellowing: ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing? Mind out, and get a move on! These things are to be used again!’ To show us the correct way he began to remove the stockings from another female corpse. But he, too, did not manage to take them off without at least a small tear.”
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Hamburg has been thoroughly studied. In 1942, in Hamburg alone forty-five shiploads of goods looted from Dutch Jews arrived; they represented a net weight of 27,227 tons. Approximately 100,000 inhabitants acquired some of the stolen belongings at harbor auctions. According to a female witness, “Simple housewives…were suddenly wearing fur coats, dealt in coffee and jewelry, had antique furniture and carpets from the harbor, from Holland, from France.”
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Throughout 1943 assessments and inventories of looted Jewish property became frequent at all levels of the system. The total value of “Jewish belongings” secured during “Aktion Reinhardt” up to December 15, 1943, was estimated at the operation’s headquarters in Lublin as amounting to 178,745,960.59 reichsmarks. This official estimate, signed by SS Sturmbannführer Georg Wippern, was forwarded to the WVHA on January 5, 1944, from Trieste, the headquarters of Globocnik’s new assignment.
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It seems to have been the late sequel to a January 15, 1943, message from Himmler to both Krüger and Pohl: “On my visit to Warsaw,” the Reichsführer’s admonition ran, “I also inspected the warehouses containing the material and the goods taken over from the Jews, that is, at the emigration of the Jews.

“I again request SS Obergruppenführer Pohl to arrange a written agreement with the Minister of Economics,” Himmler went on, “regarding each individual category; whether it is a question of watch crystals, of which hundreds of thousands—perhaps even millions—are lying there, and which, for practical purposes could be distributed to the German watchmakers; or whether it is a question of turning lathes.” After adding some further examples, Himmler warned: “I believe, on the whole, we cannot be too precise.” And, following more instructions, he added: “I request SS Obergruppenführer Pohl to clear up and arrange these matters to the last detail, as the strictest accuracy now will spare us much vexation later.” Three weeks later Pohl sent in a detailed account of the textile items collected from Lublin and Auschwitz: They filled 825 railway freight cars.
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There can be no precise overview of the plunder and expropriation of Europe’s Jewish victims. Orchestrated and implemented throughout the Continent first and foremost by the Germans, it spread to local officials, police, neighbors, or just any passerby in Amsterdam or Kovno, in Warsaw or Paris. It included “feeding” extortionists, distributing bribes, or paying “fines,” individually but mainly on a huge collective scale. It comprised the grabbing of homes, the looting of household objects, furniture, art collections, libraries, clothes, underclothes, bedding; it meant the impounding of bank accounts and of insurance policies, the stealing of stores, or of industrial or commercial enterprises, the plundering of corpses (women’s hair, gold teeth, earrings, wedding rings, watches, artificial limbs, fountain pens, glasses), in short pouncing on anything usable, exchangeable, or salable. It comprised slave labor, deadly medical experiments, enforced prostitution, loss of salaries, pensions, any imaginable income—and, for millions—loss of life. And of socks torn in stripping the corpses.

On July 1, 1943, the Thirteenth Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law was signed by the ministers of the interior, finance, and of justice. Article 2, paragraph 1 read: “The property of a Jew shall be confiscated by the Reich after his death.”
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VI

From the early summer of 1942, Auschwitz II–Birkenau gradually changed from a slave labor camp where sporadic exterminations had taken place to an extermination center where the regular flow of deportees allowed for the selection of constantly expendable slave laborers. Throughout 1943 the Auschwitz complex of main and satellite camps grew vastly: The number of inmates rose from 30,000 to about 80,000 in early 1944, and simultaneously tens of satellite camps (about fifty in 1944) were established next to plants and mines, even on the site of agricultural stations. In Birkenau a women’s camp, a Gypsies’ “family camp” and a “family camp” for Jews from Theresienstadt were set up in 1943 (the inmates of both “family camps” were later exterminated). On September 15, 1942, Speer authorized the allocation of 13.7 million reichsmarks for the rapid development of buildings and killing facilities.
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As we saw, the first gassing had taken place at Auschwitz Main Camp (Auschwitz I), in the reconverted morgue. Then provisional gas chambers were set up in Birkenau, first at the “red house” (Bunker I), then at the “white house” (Bunker II). After some delay a technically much improved Crematorium II, which had initially been ordered for the main camp, was set up in Birkenau. Crematoriums III, IV, and V followed. After the shutting down of the gas chamber in the main camp, the installations were renumbered I to IV, all in Birkenau.
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These gas chambers became operational in the course of 1943.
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Crematoriums VI and VII were apparently planned but never built. They would certainly have been of help in the late spring of 1944, as hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were gassed within a few weeks and the murdering capacity of the system was stretched to its utmost limits, even after Bunker II had been reactivated as an auxiliary killing installation.

The man who, more than anyone else, orchestrated the transformation of Auschwitz into
the
central extermination camp of the Nazi system by overseeing the building of the new gassing installations in Birkenau was Pohl’s construction chief, Hans Kammler. “In Kammler,” historian Michael Thad Allen wrote, “technological competence and extreme Nazi fanaticism coexisted…. For his intensity, his mastery of engineering, his organizational genius, and his passion for National Socialism, SS men esteemed Kammler as a paragon.”
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In Speer’s words, “nobody would have dreamed that some day he would be one of Himmler’s most brutal and most ruthless henchmen.”
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The Kammlers of the Third Reich were the technological managers of the “Final Solution” during its mid-and late phases. As previously emphasized, their ideological fanaticism was essential to keep the system working in spite of increasing difficulties.

On January 29, 1943, Max Bischoff, the head of Auschwitz Zentrale Bauleitung (Central Building Management) reported to Kammler: “Crematorium II has been completed—save for some minor construction work—using all the forces available, in spite of unspeakable difficulties and severe cold, in twenty-four-hour shifts. The fires were started in the ovens in the presence of Oberingenieur Kurt Prüfer, representative of the contractors of the firm Topf and Sons, Erfurt, and they are working most satisfactorily. The planks from the concrete ceiling of the cellar used as a mortuary have not yet been removed, on account of the frost. This is not very important, however, as the gassing cellar can be used for that purpose. The firm Topf and Sons was not able to start deliveries of the aeration and ventilation equipment according to the timetable requested by Central Building Management because of restrictions in the use of railroad cars. As soon as the aeration and ventilation equipment arrives, the installing will start.”
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Crematorium II was activated in March 1943. The gas chamber was built mainly underground and accessed by way of the underground disrobing hall. But its roof was slightly elevated above ground level to allow the pouring in of the Zyklon B pellets from the canisters, through four openings protected by small brick chimneys built around and over them. In the gas chambers of Crematoriums II and III, the Zyklon pellets were not thrown from the vents to the floor of the chamber but lowered in containers that descended into “wire mesh introduction devices [
Drahtnetzeinschiebvorrichtungen
],” or wire mesh columns. The columns allowed for the full release of the gas into the chamber—once the adequate temperature was reached—and the retrieval of the pellets at the end of the operation to avoid further release of gas while the corpses were being pulled from the chamber (which had no other openings but the single access door.)
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Apart from the hall for disrobing and the gas chamber (or gas chambers), the basements of crematoriums built on two levels included a hall for the handling of the corpses (for the pulling out of gold teeth, cutting women’s hair, detaching prosthetic limbs, collecting any valuables such as wedding rings, glasses, and the like) by the Jewish
Sonderkommando
members after they had dragged the bodies out of the gas chamber. Then elevators carried the corpses to the ground floor, where several ovens reduced them to ashes. After the grinding of bones in special mills, the ashes were used as fertilizer in the nearby fields, dumped in local forests, or tossed into the river, nearby. As for the members of the
Sonderkommandos,
they were periodically killed and replaced by a new batch.

Prüfer was so proud of his installation that he had it patented.
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Besides Topf, a dozen other firms were involved in the construction of the four crematoriums.
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Despite the slow process of setting up the new units, their frequent malfunctioning, and the insufficient burning capacity of the ovens during peak activity (which compelled the camp authorities to revert to open-pit burning), the Auschwitz murder machinery did fulfill its task.

Primo Levi, whose journey to Auschwitz we described, was a twenty-four-year-old chemist from Turin who had joined a small group of Jews hiding in the mountains above the city, within the loose framework of the Resistance organization Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty). On December 13, 1943, Levi and his companions were arrested by the Fascist militia and, a few weeks later, transported to the Fossoli assembly camp. By the end of February 1944 the Germans took over. On February 22 the 650 Jews of the camp were deported northward.