Auschwitz (10 page)

The selected inmates were taken to the cellars of Block 11 and locked in a cell where they were left to starve to death. It was a slow and agonizing process—Roman Trojanowski learned that one person he knew was reduced to eating his own shoes after more than a week without food.

During the summer of 1941, however, the starvation cells were also the site of one of the few events in this history that offer any solace for those who believe in the redemptive possibility of human life. Maximilian Kolbe, a Roman Catholic priest from Warsaw, was forced to participate in a selection for the starvation cell after an inmate had apparently escaped from his block. A man standing near him, Francieszek Gajowniczek, was selected by Fritzsch, but he called out that he had a wife and children and wanted to live. Kolbe heard him and volunteered to take his place. Fritzsch agreed, and so Kolbe was thrown into the starvation cell as one of the ten selected. Two weeks later the four who were left alive, including Kolbe, were finally murdered by lethal injection. Kolbe was canonized by the Polish Pope John Paul II in 1981. His story has caused considerable controversy, not least because a magazine he published before his arrest carried anti-Semitic material. What remains unchallengeable, however, is Kolbe's bravery in sacrificing his own life for another.

That same month, July 1941, a series of decisions made thousands of kilometers away resulted in Auschwitz becoming an even more sinister place. Auschwitz prisoners were about to be murdered by gassing for the first time—but not in the way for which the camp was eventually to become infamous. These inmates were to be killed because they fell victim to the Nazi “adult euthanasia” program. This murderous operation had its root in a Führer decree of October 1939 which allowed doctors to select chronically mentally ill or physically disabled patients and kill them.

Initially chemical injections were used to murder the disabled, but later bottled carbon monoxide became the preferred method. Gas chambers, designed to look like shower rooms, were built in special killing centers—mostly former mental hospitals. Some months before issuing his October 1939 decree, Hitler had authorized the selection and murder of disabled children. In so doing, he was following the bleak logic of his own ultra-Darwinian view of the world. Such children forfeited their lives because they were weak and a drain on German society. Additionally, as a profound believer
in racial theory, Hitler was concerned about the possibility that these children could reproduce themselves once they grew to adulthood.

The decree that extended the euthanasia program to adults was backdated to September 1 and the start of the war—another sign that the conflict acted as a catalyst to radicalize Nazi thinking. The disabled were, to these fanatical National Socialists, another example of Ballastexistenzen, now especially burdensome to a country at war. Dr. Pfannmueller, one of the most notorious figures within the adult euthanasia program, expressed his feelings this way: “The idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower of our youth must lose its life at the front, in order that the feeble-minded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the asylum.”
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Not surprisingly, given the mentality of the perpetrators, the selection criteria included not just the severity of the mental or physical illness but also the religious or ethnic background of the patient. Thus, Jews in mental hospitals were sent to be gassed without selection and, in the East, similar draconian methods were used to clear Polish asylums of patients.

Between October 1939 and May 1940 about 10,000 mental patients were killed in West Prussia and the Warthegau, many by the use of a new technique—a gas chamber on wheels. Victims were shoved into a hermetically sealed compartment in the back of a converted van and then asphyxiated by bottled carbon monoxide. Significantly, the living space thus released was used to house the incoming ethnic Germans.

At the start of 1941 the adult euthanasia campaign was extended to concentration camps in an action known as 14f13, and the program reached Auschwitz on July 28. “During evening roll-call it was said that all the sick can leave to be healed,” says Kazimierz Smoleń,
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then a political prisoner at the camp. “Some inmates believed it. Everyone has hope. But I wasn't so convinced of the good intentions of the SS.” Neither was Wilhelm Brasse, who listened to his Kapo, a German Communist, describe what he thought the fate of the sick would be: “He told us that in Sachsenhausen camp he had heard rumors that people are taken from hospitals and that they disappear somewhere.”

About 500 sick inmates—a combination of volunteers and those selected—were marched out of the camp to a waiting train. “They were all
worn out,” says Kazimierz Smoleń. “There were no healthy people. It was a march of specters. At the end of the line were nurses carrying people on stretchers. It was macabre. No one yelled at them or laughed. The sick people were pleased, saying, ‘Let my wife and children know about me.'” Much to the joy of the remaining prisoners, two of the most notorious Kapos were included in the transport, one of them the hated Krankemann. The rumor in the camp was that he had fallen out with his protector, the Lagerführer Fritzsch. Both Kapos—in fulfillment of Himmler's prediction of the fate of Kapos once they had returned to ordinary prison life—were almost certainly murdered on the train before it reached its destination. All the other inmates who left the camp that day died in a gas chamber in a converted mental hospital at Sonnenstein near Danzig. The first Auschwitz prisoners to be gassed were therefore not killed in the camp but transported to Germany, and they were not murdered because they were Jews but because they could no longer work.

The summer of 1941 was not only a crucial time in the development of Auschwitz, it was also a decisive moment in both the course of the war against the Soviet Union and the Nazis' policy towards the Soviet Jews. Superficially, during July the war seemed to be going well with the Wehrmacht making good progress against the Red Army. As early as July 3rd, Franz Halder of the German High Command wrote in his diary, “It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.” Goebbels echoed such thoughts in his own diary on July 8th, writing, “No one doubts any more that we shall be victorious in Russia.” By mid-July, Panzer units were 600 kilometers inside the Soviet Union and by the end of the month a Soviet intelligence officer—on the orders of Beria, Goebbels' Soviet counterpart—was approaching the Bulgarian ambassador in Moscow to see if he would act as an intermediary with the Germans and sue for peace.
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But on the ground the situation was more complex. The policy of starvation which had been such a central part of the invasion strategy meant that, for example, Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, had by the start of July food supplies for only two weeks. Goering stated clear Nazi policy when he said that the only people who were entitled to be fed by the invading force were those “performing important tasks for Germany.”
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There was also
the unresolved question of the dependants of those Jewish men who had been shot by the Einsatzgruppen. These women and children, having in most cases lost their breadwinners, were liable to starve especially swiftly; they were certainly not “performing important tasks for Germany.”

Meanwhile, a crisis over food supply was predicted, not just on the Eastern Front but back in Poland in the Łódź ghetto. In July 1941, Rolf-Heinz Hoeppner of the SS wrote to Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the section dealing with Jewish affairs in the Reich Security Main Office:

It is significant that Hoeppner writes of the potential need to kill those Jews “not fit to work”—not all the Jews. Increasingly, from the spring of 1941, the Nazis were making a distinction between Jews who were useful to the Germans and those who were not—a distinction that would later become crystallized in the infamous “selections” of Auschwitz.

At the end of July Himmler issued orders that were to resolve the question of those Jews who were considered “useless eaters” by the Nazis—at least as far as the Eastern Front was concerned. He reinforced the Einsatzgruppen with units of the SS cavalry and police battalions. Eventually about 40,000 men would be involved in the killing—a ten-fold increase in the initial complement of the Einsatzgruppen. This massive increase in manpower was for a reason—the policy of killing in the East was to be extended to include Jewish women and children. The order for this action reached different Einsatzgruppe commanders at different times over the next few weeks, often given by Himmler personally as he went on a tour of the killing fields. But by mid-August all the commanders of the murder squads knew of the expansion of their task.

This moment marks a turning point in the killing process. Once women and children were to be shot, the Nazi persecution of the Jews entered an entirely different conceptual phase. Almost all the Nazi anti-Jewish policies
during the war so far had been potentially genocidal, and Jewish women and children had already died in the ghettos or during the failed Nisko emigration. But this was different. Now the Nazis had decided to gather together women and children, make them strip, line them up next to an open pit, and shoot them. There could be no pretence that a baby was an immediate threat to the German war effort, but a German soldier would now look at that little child and pull the trigger.

Many factors came together at this crucial time to cause the change in policy. One important precondition was, of course, that the Jewish women and children in the Soviet Union now presented a “problem” for the Nazis—one the Nazis had created themselves by a combination of shooting male Jews and instigating a policy of starvation in the East. But that was not the only reason the decision was taken to extend the killing. In July, Hitler had announced that he wanted a German “Garden of Eden” in the East–and, by implication, there would be no place for the Jews in this new Nazi paradise. (And it can surely be no accident that Himmler ordered the extension of the killing to include women and children after attending several secret one-on-one meetings with Hitler in July—this move could not have occurred without the Führer wishing it so.) With killing units already shooting Jewish men, it must have seemed a logical step from the Nazi ideological perspective to send extra men to the murder squads in order to “cleanse” this new “Garden of Eden” completely.

Hans Friedrich
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was a member of one of the SS infantry units that was sent to the East to reinforce the Einsatzgruppen in the summer of 1941. His SS brigade operated primarily in the Ukraine and he says they met no resistance from the Jews they came to murder. “They [the Jews] were extremely shocked, utterly frightened and petrified, and you could do what you wanted with them. They had resigned themselves to their fate.” The SS and its Ukrainian collaborators forced the Jews out of their village and made them stand by a

Friedrich admits that he himself shot Jews in these pit killings.
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He claims that he thought of “nothing” as he saw his victims standing just a few meters in front of him: “I only thought, ‘Aim carefully so that you hit.' That was my thought. When you've got to the point where you're standing there with a gun ready to shoot ... there's only one thing, a calm hand so that you hit well. Nothing else.” He says his conscience has never troubled him over the murders he committed; he has never had a bad dream about the subject or woken in the night and questioned what he did.

Documents confirm that Friedrich was a member of the SS 1st Infantry Brigade which entered the Ukraine on July 23rd. Although Friedrich—either because of the distance of time or out of a desire not to incriminate himself further—is not specific about the exact places where he carried out the killings, the records point to his brigade having participated in a number of murders of Jews in several named places.

One such action took place in the western Ukraine on August 4, 1941. More than 10,000 Jews from surrounding villages had been forced from their homes and gathered in the town of Ostrog. “Early in the morning [of 4 August] the cars and lorries came,” says Vasyl Valdeman,
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then a twelveyear-old member of a Jewish family. “They were armed and came with dogs.” Having surrounded the town, the SS forced thousands of Jews out towards a nearby hamlet where there was an area of sandy soil. “Everyone understood that we were going to be shot,” says Vasyl Valdeman,

Oleksiy Mulevych,
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a local villager, saw what happened next. He climbed on to the roof of a nearby barn and witnessed small groups of fifty
or one hundred Jews being led away from the field and ordered to strip naked. “They put the Jews on the edge of a pit,” he says, “and officers told their soldiers to choose a Jews to shoot at ... The Jews were crying and shouting. They felt they saw their death ... Then everyone shot and the Jews fell immediately. The officer then chose strong Jews to throw the bodies into the pit.”