Read Army of Evil: A History of the SS Online
Authors: Adrian Weale
Army of Evil: A History of the SS (50 page)
The Wannsee Conference was probably not as significant as it is often portrayed. It did not initiate any new measures, and it did not include substantive discussions about the practicalities or logistics of the mass execution of the Jewish people. Rather, by and large, it was simply a briefing by Heydrich that was designed to demonstrate his (and the RSHA’s) authority and pre-eminence in policy relating to the “Jewish question” over all other agencies and departments that might have some objections to it. It was felt that this needed to be established particularly with respect to the Foreign Ministry—which had concerns on diplomatic grounds—and the Office of the Four-Year Plan—which was worried on economic grounds. Once this had been achieved, the meeting could conclude.
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In the aftermath of the meeting, Heydrich instructed Eichmann that his minutes must not be a verbatim record of what had been said: Eichmann was told to “clean them up,” to eliminate such words as “extermination” and “liquidation.”
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Theresienstadt had been established as a Jewish ghetto towards the end of 1941. It was used by the SS to reassure the outside world about the fate of the Jews, but conditions there were still harsh. Between 1941 and 1945, some 144,000 Jews were sent there, and approximately 33,000 of them died within the ghetto, mainly of hunger or disease. Around 88,000 were ultimately deported to Auschwitz and other death camps. There were just 17,272 survivors when the ghetto was liberated by the Soviet Army.
B
ühler’s plea at the Wannsee Conference for the General Government to be the first area to be cleared of Jews was already well in hand. On the evening of Monday, 13 October 1941, Himmler had held a meeting with SS-General Krüger, his representative in the General Government, and SS-Brigadier Odilo Globocnik, the Lublin SSPF. He had ordered Globocnik to build a camp at Belzec in order to begin the extermination of the General Government’s Jews under the official code name
“Aktion Reinhard”
(Operation Reinhard).
Globocnik was an ideal choice for the job. He was born in 1904 in Trieste, where his father, a reserve officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, was a postal official. Globocnik was of half-Slovene, half-German ancestry, but he seems to have considered himself German and to have felt a strong contempt for the Slavs. He was originally enrolled to study at a military school, but the First World War intervened. His father was called up for military service, so Globocnik went to live with the rest of the family in Klagenfurt, where he completed his education at the local civilian high school in 1923.
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For the next few years, he worked in the building trade while developing
contacts and friendships in right-wing circles. In March 1931, he joined the Austrian National Socialist Party and rose steadily through its ranks; he also served several brief prison sentences for his political activities. He joined the SS on 1 September 1934, achieving officer rank as an
Untersturmführer
(second lieutenant) in 1937. In the wake of the
Anschluss
, he was appointed Regional Leader of Vienna in May 1938, an indication that he was considered one of the rising stars of Austrian National Socialism. Unfortunately for Globocnik, though, this high reputation was short-lived. His new role gave him control over large amounts of money, including party funds, public funds and cash expropriated from the Jews or raised by the sale of their seized assets. Questions were raised about Globocnik’s handling of this money and, amid allegations of corruption and embezzlement, he was dismissed as Regional Leader on 30 January 1939. It seems that Himmler—who was a close personal friend—protected Globocnik from prosecution, but was unable to halt the investigation entirely.
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For most of the next eight months, Globocnik—who by now held the General-SS rank of SS-senior leader—participated in military training with the Special Purpose Troops, with the lowly rank of SS-
Rottenführer
(lance corporal). He then took part in the invasion of Poland as a member of the 1st Battalion of the
Germania
Regiment.
On 3 November 1939, Globocnik made the considerable jump from Waffen-SS lance corporal back to SS-senior colonel as the SSPF for Lublin. Six days later he became an SS-brigadier (with an equivalent rank in the police). Of course, this meant he now owed a huge debt to Himmler for resurrecting his career. Thereafter, just as Himmler must have hoped, Globocnik demonstrated enormous zeal in executing—and even anticipating—the National Leader’s orders.
During his tenure as Lublin’s SSPF, he presided over a network of
imprisonment and death that eventually comprised 57 Jewish ghettoes, including the massive Lublin ghetto itself; 143 work camps; 27 prison camps; 3 POW camps; 2 extermination camps (with a third nearby); the enormous Majdanek concentration camp, which had its own gassing and cremation facilities (it was also known as the Lublin concentration camp); 6 “sub-camps” of Majdanek; 17 transit camps; 9 prisons; and 29 detention centres.
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Additionally, his district was a centre for SS economic enterprises that utilised Polish and Jewish slave labour. It was also earmarked by Globocnik as a base for future German colonisation of the East. Himmler was so impressed by Globocnik’s efforts in this area that he appointed him “Plenipotentiary for the Construction of SS and Police Bases in the Former Russian Areas.”
According to Yitzhak Arad, Globocnik had responsibility for:
• The overall planning of the deportations and extermination activities of the entire operation.
• Building the death camps.
• Coordinating the deportations of the Jews to the death camps.
• Killing the Jews in the death camps.
• Seizing the assets and valuables of the victims and handing them over to the appropriate authorities.
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Globocnik assembled a team of specialists to carry out these tasks. His chief of staff was SS-Captain Hermann Höfle, who had spent the previous year overseeing the digging of a network of vast antitank ditches by Jewish slave labour in the Lublin district. Höfle’s office was in the Julius Schreck Kaserne at Pieradzkiego 11, Lublin, separate from Globocnik’s headquarters for security reasons. From there, he personally led a team of some 350 SS and police personnel, who were involved in various aspects of the extermination programme.
Another group, eventually numbering ninety-two, was attached to Globocnik’s staff from the Führer Chancellery. These were members of the operational staff of the T-4 killing centres and thus, at the time,
were among the most experienced mass murderers in the world. The first to arrive in Lublin, in September 1941, was Christian Wirth, who was apparently sent there to set up a euthanasia facility. When this plan was abandoned, he turned his attention towards the Jews.
By all accounts, Wirth was a brutal and sadistic man, fitting the stereotype of the SS mass killer better than most of his colleagues. A Swabian, born in 1885, he had worked as a carpenter and a policeman before the First World War. He served as a soldier on the Western Front, then worked in the building trade before becoming a member of Stuttgart Police’s murder squad in the 1930s. As we have seen, he was present at the first gassing experiments in Brandenburg in 1939, and his participation in the euthanasia programme gave him indisputable expertise in mass killing.
In October 1941, he returned to Lublin with a small group of former T-4 employees, all of whom had been inducted into the Waffen-SS,
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with orders to establish and operate a camp to kill Jews. The extermination facility was to be constructed on a railway spur near the small town of Belzec, in the south-east of Lublin district, out of sight of prying eyes but close to the railway and other transport links. Construction began on 1 November, supervised by SS-Sergeant Josef Oberhauser but carried out by local Polish tradesmen:
We built barracks close to the side-track of the railway. One barrack, which was close to the railway, was 50 m long and 12.5 m wide. The second barrack, 25 m long and 12.5 m wide, was for the Jews destined for “the baths.” Not far from this barrack we built a third barrack, 12 m long and 8 m wide. This barrack was divided into three chambers by a wooden wall, so that each chamber was 4 m wide and 8 m long. It was 2 m high. The inside walls of this barrack were of double boards with a vacant space between them
filled with sand. The walls were covered with pasteboard. In addition, the floor and walls (to a height of 1.10 m) were covered with sheets of zinc. From the second to the third barrack led a closed passageway, 2 m wide, 2 m high, and 10 m long. This passageway led to a corridor in the third barrack where the doors to the three chambers were located. Each chamber of this barrack had on its northern side a double door 1.80 m high and 1.10 m wide. These doors, like those in the corridor, were sealed with rubber gaskets round the edges. All the doors in this barrack could only be opened from the outside. These doors were built with strong planks 7.5 centimetres thick, and were secured from the outside with a wooden locking bar held by two iron hooks on either side. In each of the three chambers of this barrack a water pipe was installed 0.10 m above the floor. In addition, in the corner of the western wall of each chamber, was a water pipe 1 m above the ground with an open joint, turned toward the centre of the room. These pipes with the joint were connected through the wall to a pipe that ran under the floor. In each of the three chambers of this barrack a stove weighing 250 kg was installed. It was expected that the pipe joint would later be connected to the stove. The stove was 1.10 m high, 0.55 m wide and 0.55 m long.
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The camp was divided into two sectors. Camp 1, the western half, was the reception area, with the railway platform, a few garages, storerooms, accommodation for the guard force and so on. It also included the “undressing barracks,” where the victims’ clothes were taken from them, and a hut in which the female victims’ hair was cut off. There was a “chute” or “sluice” into Camp 2, separated from Camp 1 by a high fence, where the extermination facilities were located. These were the wooden “barracks” built by the Polish labour force—in reality the gas chambers—the burial pits (and, later in the camp’s existence, the incinerators) and accommodation for the few “work Jews” who were kept alive to remove bodies from the gas chambers, sort through
the victims’ clothing and possessions and perform menial tasks for the guards and the SS men. The camp offices and accommodation for the SS NCOs were in the town of Belzec itself.
The guards were not members of the SS but mainly Ukrainians, trained as military auxiliary
Hilfswillige
(or “Hiwis”) at the Trawniki training camp, which was also located in Lublin district. Many accounts of the Holocaust focus on the brutality of these men, as if they were somehow a lower, less cultured order of humanity than the Germans, and that this explained their behaviour. In addition to being racist, this ignores the fact that the majority of these men were prisoners of war, captured during the first months of Operation Barbarossa. They behaved brutally and participated in unforgivable crimes but equally they had been, for the most part, treated appallingly while in captivity, and many assumed that they were left with little option but to “volunteer” for German service in order to survive. Once they took up their new roles, they were all too aware that they would suffer if they did not perform them to the Germans’ satisfaction. Undoubtedly, there were anti-Semites and sadists among their number, but the majority were simply doing whatever was necessary to give themselves a chance of surviving the war. They were given some basic training and issued with black uniforms—often requisitioned from former General-SS stocks—and a rifle. The guard force at Belzec consisted of about eighty men, formed into two platoons, commanded by Ukrainian German-speakers. They were under the overall supervision of an SS NCO, SS-Sergeant Feiks.
Belzec’s task was simple: to kill as many Jews as quickly as possible. Once the camp’s basic facilities had been constructed in February 1942, Wirth began experiments in how to achieve this. Eventually, he settled on gassing with carbon monoxide, just as it had been used during the T-4 programme. However, it would have been logistically difficult to transport the relatively “clean” bottled form of the gas, and this might also have raised security questions. So, instead, SS-Sergeant Lorenz Hackenholt, a former driver and “disinfector” for T-4, connected
what might have been either a Soviet tank or an armoured-car engine to the gas chambers. Whichever type of engine it was, it proved amply efficient.