Army of Evil: A History of the SS (56 page)

In the early days of the mass killings at Auschwitz–Birkenau, transports stopped at a railway platform between the two compounds and the prisoners were then led either to the old crematorium in Auschwitz or across a meadow to the bunkers in Birkenau. Once the purpose-built gas chambers had been constructed, a rail spur was laid to transport the victims much closer to them. On Birkenau’s rail platform,
members of the medical staff, including Josef Mengele and Fritz Klein, would make their casual inspections of the prisoners, directing them right, to the camp, or left, to the gas chambers.
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Then, as in the Operation Reinhard camps, efforts were made to conceal what was about to happen, primarily in order to maintain control over the victims and forestall any resistance. SS officers and NCOs told the prisoners that they were to be showered and deloused, and urged them to hurry so that the soup that was waiting for them did not become cold. Next, they were told to undress and hang their clothes on numbered pegs; they were even instructed to remember the numbers so that they could quickly retrieve their clothes after their shower. In most cases, this subterfuge was effective. Describing a transport from Salonika, Hilberg notes: “The unsuspecting Greek Jews, clutching soap and towels, rushed into the gas chambers.”
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However, when Jews from nearby Katowice, Sosnowiece and Bedzin were taken to Birkenau in the late summer of 1943, they were under no illusions about their fate. Local rumours had told them all they needed to know, and they had to be forced into the gas chambers at gunpoint by reinforced squads of tense Waffen-SS guards.
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The victims were usually led into the chambers by members of a special squad, Jewish inmates who were temporarily spared death to carry out the physical work within the killing areas. By and large, these prisoners cooperated in the fiction that the victims were not about to die, probably in the hope of prolonging their own lives. Of course, this was a forlorn hope: they were kept alive for a few months at most. During this time, their existence was probably marginally better than that endured within the main camp because they could obtain extra food from the possessions of the dead. However, sooner or later, they were killed too and a new group was selected to take their place. Very few members of the special units survived until the end of the war.

The gas chambers were lit by electric lights and were fitted out with fake showerheads. Once all the prisoners were inside, the members of
the special unit withdrew and the gas-tight doors were sealed. At this point, the lights were switched off, which always induced panic, and SS NCOs from the sanitation department, wearing gas masks, would start to dispense the Zyklon B. It was delivered in tins, about the size of paint cans, and consisted of pea-sized blue ceramic pellets impregnated with hydrocyanic acid. The SS men would remove the lids with a hammer and chisel and then immediately throw the contents into the gas chambers. In the subterranean chambers, this was done through openings in the roof; the surface chambers were equipped with hatches in the side walls. The pellets began to sublimate as soon as they were exposed to the air, at which point the prisoners would start screaming. This did not last long: depending on the weather conditions and the temperature, everyone within the chamber was normally dead within five to fifteen minutes.

After half an hour or so, ventilators were switched on to extract the gas and the doors were opened. The prisoners were generally found close to the door, having attempted to force their way out, or heaped in piles where the stronger prisoners had scrambled on top of the dead to try to reach clean air. There were usually empty areas near the hatches where the Zyklon B was introduced. According to Höss: “There was no noticeable change in the bodies and no sign of convulsions or discoloration. Only after the bodies had been left lying for some time…did the usual death stains appear in the places were they had lain. Soiling through the opening of the bowels was also rare. There were no signs of wounding of any kind. The faces showed no distortion.”
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The special squads, now wearing gas masks, would drag out the bodies and hose down the chamber, which also helped to neutralise any lingering gas. The corpses were then given a cavity search for valuable items and any gold teeth were removed. These were cleaned with hydrochloric acid before being melted down and formed into ingots in the main camp. Unlike in the Reinhard camps, it was only now that the women’s hair was shorn. This was used to make felt, which provided winter insulation for the German armed forces.

The four Birkenau crematoria were equipped with coke-fired furnaces, but these also used the victims’ own body fat to speed the combustion process, which meant, in theory, they could consume in excess of 4,500 bodies every day. However, this figure was never reached due to persistent malfunction. The victims tended to be so malnourished that as many as five bodies could be crammed into each retort, rather than the two or three they were designed to take. This overuse, combined with poor maintenance (which, for example, left the chimneys caked with human fat), led to numerous breakdowns. Thus, during the summer of 1944, when Birkenau murdered 400,000 Hungarian Jews, open-air pits had to be dug and the victims’ bodies were cremated on grids formed out of railway tracks and logs.

The minority who were spared death on arrival were registered in the camp in the normal way: stripped, shorn, showered and tattooed. Then the male prisoners were taken to Birkenau’s quarantine compound. For much of its existence, this was presided over by SS-Corporal Karl Kurpanik, a brutal ethnic German from Silesia who used the ten to fourteen days during which new prisoners were under his supervision to terrorise them, partly by selecting several for the gas chambers each day.
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Any who survived the quarantine period were allocated to work groups within Birkenau itself or were transferred to one of the sub-camps.

As in the main camp, the best places to work within Birkenau were on details that sorted through prisoners’ possessions. Members of the “ramp commando” went through the baggage of newly arrived prisoners, which was dumped on the railway siding while the selection procedure took place. They also had the task of cleaning out the freight wagons, so were probably best placed to find any food, drink and valuables that the prisoners had brought with them. The SS guards and trusties generally turned a blind eye to them eating any food they found, as long as they maintained their work-rate and handed over all the cash and valuables that turned up. The worst assignments, as ever, were on the heavy labour details, particularly the punishment company,
which dug drainage ditches and laid sewerage pipes within the compound.
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The small minority of women who survived the selection process were accommodated in a separate camp and were kept almost entirely segregated from the men. Like the male prisoners, they were sent on various work details in the surrounding industrial complexes in addition to doing manual labour in and around the camp itself.

If anything, accommodation in Birkenau was even worse than in Auschwitz. The first buildings to be constructed were single-storey brick huts with no heating or sanitation, built on bare earth, crammed with wooden triple bunks. However, the majority of prisoners in Birkenau were housed in prefabricated wooden stable blocks built to a standard military pattern. Each was designed to shelter fifty-two horses, but in Birkenau they accommodated over four hundred prisoners, crammed together on wooden bunks.

As a result of the overcrowding, poor sanitation and lack of clean water, Birkenau was infested with lice and other vermin, while typhus and similar diseases were rampant. Furthermore, the camp’s medical staff inspired fear rather than hope among the prisoners, because they were free to conduct research in any way they saw fit. This involved infecting, mutilating, murdering and dissecting any prisoners who were unfortunate enough to be selected for their experiments.

The most notorious of these scientists was SS-Captain Josef Mengele. He came from a wealthy Bavarian family who had made their money manufacturing agricultural machinery. But instead of joining the family business, Mengele studied anthropology, earning a Ph.D. in 1935 from Munich University and a doctorate in medicine three years later from Frankfurt University. He served as a medical officer with the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front in 1941–42 before being wounded and deemed unfit for frontline service. In 1943, he was transferred to the staff of Auschwitz, initially as medical officer for the “Gypsy camp” within Birkenau and subsequently as chief medical officer within the Birkenau infirmary.
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Medical provision within Auschwitz was basic, and Mengele’s role was hardly taxing from a professional point of view. He simply had to make snap diagnoses to determine which patients merited hospitalisation and which did not. The former would be given rudimentary treatment (no drugs were ever provided) and a few days to recover; the latter would be liquidated, either in the gas chambers or through an injection of phenol into the heart. However, Mengele had other interests outside his official tasks.

His Ph.D. dissertation had been on racial differences in the structure of the human lower jaw. Now he had the opportunity to continue his research on living human subjects. While making selections for the gas chambers on the rail platform, he would also pick out any prisoners he found interesting from a “scientific” point of view—particularly twins and dwarfs. Once selected, they were installed in a special barracks, where conditions were marginally better than in the rest of the camp. However, thereafter, they suffered a terrible fate. Mengele injected chemicals into their eyes to try to change their colour, conducted chemical sterilisation experiments on the women, and eventually had all of his human guinea pigs killed for dissection.
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The selections were terrifying aspects of daily life for all prisoners in Auschwitz, Birkenau and the sub-camps. They could take place at any time and none of the prisoners could be certain what their outcome would be. Some were for the gas chambers and death; others were to find new prisoners for work details. Anyone displaying weakness or illness was liable to be killed on the spot or removed from his fellow prisoners for gassing. Sometimes, selections were ordered simply to create space for new arrivals within the barracks.

The industrial complex around Auschwitz grew at a rapid rate. Oswald Pohl’s WVHA leased out prisoners to German industry at the rate of four marks a day for unskilled and six marks a day for skilled labourers. By mid-1942, 6,000 Auschwitz prisoners were working for industrial concerns; by mid-1944, the number was around 42,000.
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In addition to IG Farben’s Buna plant, prisoners worked in coal mines,
steel works, oil refineries, military equipment factories, textile mills, shoe factories and on the railways. The SS employed other prisoners in their own commercial enterprises as agricultural labourers and quarrymen, and to assemble weapons and make uniforms for the Waffen-SS.

Conditions in the sub-camps were generally no better than in Auschwitz or Birkenau. The guards were provided by the SS-Death’s Head Auschwitz Battalion, and many of the commandants became particularly notorious. For example, the commandant of the sub-camp attached to the Fürstengrübe mine at Myslowitz-Wesoła was SS-Sergeant Major Otto Moll, who had been in charge of the original extermination bunkers at Birkenau.

The only prisoners to benefit from being in the sub-camps were skilled labourers, who were generally better treated than their unskilled colleagues. For instance, those who worked hard might occasionally be granted a
Premiumschein
, a coupon that allowed them to purchase extra rations from the canteen.
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Even so, discipline remained brutal and ruthless, and conditions were appalling.

W
HILE THE
O
PERATION
Reinhard camps, Chelmno and Majdanek primarily killed Jews from the General Government, the incorporated territories and parts of the Soviet Union, the geographical reach of Auschwitz-Birkenau was much greater. As the principal extermination centre from 1943 onwards, Jews from all over Europe were brought there to be killed. This meant that Eichmann’s Jewish section within the RSHA had to be reorganised and expanded, and Eichmann himself once again moved towards centre stage in the Holocaust.

As we have seen, Eichmann’s section started within the SD as a clearinghouse for information and intelligence on the “Jewish question.” It then metamorphosed into the central administration for forced Jewish emigration from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate. When
this project came to a halt in 1940, Eichmann’s principal task became organisation of the transports for the deportation of Jews, first to the ghettoes and then to the extermination centres in Poland. However, the extension of the extermination policy across Europe saw his role widen significantly, to include high-level negotiation—at the direction of Himmler via Müller—with other government agencies, including the Foreign Office and the armed forces. Thus, Eichmann had a hand in implementing all aspects of Jewish policy. The modalities of National Socialist genocide were complex and required a great deal of detailed staff work, which is where Eichmann came in. His role was not to create Jewish policy but to see that it was carried out at the operational level. He and his team used their institutional background knowledge and experience to translate the directions he received—primarily from Müller—into an efficient system for the deportation and murder of millions of Jews.

To this end, he placed representatives of Section IV B4 in many Sipo headquarters throughout occupied Europe: for example, Theo Dannecker went to Paris, while Dieter Wisliceny acted as an adviser on Jewish affairs to the Slovak regime before being dispatched to Salonika, where he organised the deportation and murder of the entire Jewish population. These men ensured that the directives emerging from Eichmann’s office were implemented on the ground, which might mean negotiating with the local Sipo commander, with the military occupation authorities, or, as in occupied France, with the local civil regime. With the victims secured by these local representatives, Eichmann’s office could then arrange transport to Auschwitz via the railway system.
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