Auschwitz (13 page)

Despite this level of knowledge among the general population, there were few protests at the deportation of the German Jews—and none of any kind in Hamburg in October 1941 at the start of the whole process. So, having walked through the streets, the three Eichengreen women together boarded a third-class train with wooden seats. As the train pulled away, Lucille realized that this “was a train ride without a destination. It was a train ride into nowhere and we didn't know what to expect.”

They would eventually arrive at Auschwitz, where plans were under way for a massive expansion of the camp complex. An entirely new camp was to be built three kilometers away from the existing one, on a patch of swampy ground that the Poles called Brzezinka and the Germans called Birkenau. But even though Auschwitz–Birkenau was eventually to become the site of the mass murder of Jews, this was not the reason why it was being built; for Birkenau was a camp intended not for Jews, but for prisoners of war.

The current accepted history of the development of Birkenau is that when Himmler visited Auschwitz main camp in March 1941 he ordered Höss to build a new giant prisoner of war camp, one capable of holding 100,000 men. This information is based solely on Höss's memoirs which, as shown earlier, can sometimes be unreliable regarding dating. If the construction of the POW camp was indeed ordered by Himmler in March 1941, it has always been a mystery why the first plans for the site were not initiated until October that year.

As a result of research in Russian archives, new evidence has been uncovered which solves the mystery. A document from the Auschwitz construction office dated September 12, 1941, and titled “Explanatory Report regarding the Preliminary Draft for the Construction and Expansion of
Auschwitz Concentration Camp”
⁶
contains a detailed description of both the present state and future expansion of Auschwitz 1—the main camp—to a capacity of 30,000 prisoners. But there is no mention anywhere in the document, or in the various attachments, of any planned prisoner of war camp to be built at Birkenau. The strong presumption must therefore be that on September 12, 1941, no detailed plans yet existed for Birkenau.

Another recently uncovered source of archival evidence supports the view that, as late as the second week of September, the decision still had not been made to build the new camp. The discovery of missing sections of Himmler's desk diary in a Russian archive in the 1990s
⁷
has facilitated a detailed study of his movements and phone calls during this crucial period. It shows that on September 15th Himmler discussed the issue of “Kriegsgefangene” (prisoners of war) with Reinhard Heydrich and Oswald Pohl, the head of the SS Economic and Administrative Department. This was followed by a telephone conversation with Pohl the next day which, according to a note in Himmler's diary, concerned “100,000 Russians” who were to be “taken over” by the KZ (concentration camp) system. On September 25, the POW department of the OKW (Supreme Command of the German army) ordered that up to “100,000 POWs be transferred to the Reichsführer SS.” On the 26th, Hans Kammler, head of the Central SS Buildings Office, ordered the construction of a new POW camp at Auschwitz.

All of this new evidence therefore points to the final decision to construct Birkenau being made in September 1941, not March. It remains possible, of course, that Himmler first saw the possibilities of the site when he visited Auschwitz in the spring of that year and may even have mentioned to Höss that it might one day be a suitable location for expansion. The houses of the small village of Birkenau were cleared by SS men in July 1941 and the inhabitants transported elsewhere, which does suggest that the Auschwitz authorities recognized the potential of the site (though they were also clearing other areas near by as part of the creation of the “Auschwitz Zone of Interest”). As the new evidence reveals, however, it is highly probable that no concrete decision about Birkenau was made until September.

The task of designing and building the new camp fell to SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Karl Bischoff, newly appointed chief of the Auschwitz construction office, and the architect, SS Rottenführer (Corporal) Fritz
Ertl. A study of their plans reveals that, from the onset, they intended the accommodation to be unable to sustain human life. Their initial plan was for one barrack block to contain 550 prisoners, which meant that each inmate would have only one-third of the total space allocated to a prisoner in “Old Reich” concentration camps like Dachau. But the plans show that even that level of density turned out to be too low for the needs of the SS planners: in a handwritten alteration, the number 550 was crossed out and replaced with a final figure of 744. Each prisoner at Birkenau would therefore now be expected to exist in a quarter of the total space allocated per inmate in a German concentration camp. Such callousness was perfectly acceptable to the SS because they knew that this was to be a special kind of prisoner of war camp, one designed to hold not captured British or French combatants, but an enemy the Nazis considered subhuman: Soviet POWs.

In the first seven months of the war against the Soviet Union, the Germans took 3 million Red Army prisoners. In the course of the war as a whole they took 5.7 million, of whom a staggering 3.3 million lost their lives in captivity. After the war, an attempt was made to claim that these appalling losses had occurred because the Germans had never anticipated taking so many prisoners so quickly, and had therefore not made adequate plans to take care of them. But this excuse merely masks a darker truth. As the minutes of the economic planning meetings examined in Chapter 1 demonstrate, mass starvation in the Soviet Union was anticipated as a consequence of the German army feeding itself “at the expense” of the Soviet population during the war. And the plans for the new camp extension at Auschwitz–Birkenau fit into this pattern of a deliberate attempt to place the Soviet POWs in an environment where it was inevitable that large numbers of them would die.

Following the example of the original Auschwitz camp, it was the inmates themselves who were forced to build Birkenau. To that end, 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war were sent to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1941. Polish prisoner Kazimierz Smoleń
⁸
witnessed their arrival.

Once at the main camp, the Soviet prisoners became the first inmates to have their prison number tattooed on their bodies. This was another “improving” measure initiated at Auschwitz, the only camp in the Nazi state ever to identify prisoners in this manner. It seems to have been introduced because of the high mortality rate—it was easier to identify a corpse from a tattoo than from a disc hanging around the neck (which also could easily become detached). Initially the tattoos were not placed on the prisoner's arm but punched on to the chest with long needles; the resulting wound was then filled in with ink. As Kazimierz Smole witnessed, many of the Soviet prisoners simply could not cope with this brutal admittance procedure, “They had problems moving, and when they were hit with the tattoo seal they would fall down. They had to be put against the wall so they wouldn't fall over.”

Of the 10,000 Soviet prisoners who began building Birkenau that autumn, only a few hundred were still alive the following spring. One of the survivors who beat the terrible odds was a Red Army soldier named Pavel Stenkin.
⁹
He was captured by the Germans less than two hours after the war began on June 22, 1941, and was taken first to a giant prisoner of war camp behind the German lines where he and thousands of other Soviet POWs were kept corralled like animals and fed only thin soup. His comrades started to die of starvation, but he maintains that he survived because he was accustomed to it—he was “hungry from childhood” as a result of being brought up on a Soviet collective farm in the 1930s. Stenkin arrived at Auschwitz on one of the first transports in October 1941, and was immediately set to work building brick barracks at the new site.

Because these Soviet POWs had been registered into the camp and given a prison number this presented the Auschwitz authorities with a problem—how to explain in the
Totenbuch
(Death Book) the thousands upon thousands of deaths. Their solution was to dream up a variety of diseases from which the Soviet POWs could have perished—for example, 600 alone are recorded as dying of “heart attacks.”
¹⁰
(This was a problem that they were to tackle later, with the arrival of the Jews, through the simple expedient of not registering into the camp the vast majority who were selected for immediate death.)

“They were seen as the lowest category of human beings,” says Kazimierz Smole, who worked alongside the Soviet prisoners of war at Birkenau. “They were beaten more by the SS [men] and given a harder time. They had to be exterminated. They died like flies.”

So appalling were the conditions for the Soviet prisoners, that Rudolf Höss witnessed evidence of cannibalism among them: “I myself came across a Russian lying between piles of bricks, whose body had been torn open and the liver removed. They would beat each other to death for food.”
¹¹

Höss documents many examples of such suffering in his memoirs, but nowhere does he address the reason why the Soviet POWs were reduced to this state. The fact that over a six-month period he and his SS comrades were to blame for the death of more than 9,000 of the 10,000 Soviet POWs seems to have escaped him. And it is clear why Höss feels no guilt, because by behaving like “animals” the Soviet POWs were simply acting as Nazi propaganda had predicted they would. Once again, the Nazis had created a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Pavel Stenkin had one hope while he was laboring at Birkenau, sick and starving, watching his comrades die around him. He knew he was going to die, but to “die free, that was my dream—let them shoot me dead, but as a free man.” So he and a handful of his comrades planned to escape, in the full knowledge that their chances of success were small. Their plan could scarcely have been simpler. One day in spring 1942 they were sent to fetch the corpse of another Soviet POW that lay just outside the camp perimeter.
As they passed the wire that enclosed the camp they shouted, “Hurrah!” and ran off in different directions. The guards in the watchtowers were momentarily confused and so did not turn their machine guns on the Russians until the men had reached the safety of the nearby forest. After a series of adventures over many months Pavel Stenkin finally reached Soviet-occupied territory where, as is shown in Chapter 6, his suffering did not end.

In October 1941, in addition to planning a new POW camp at Birkenau the architects at Auschwitz also designed a new crematorium to replace the existing one at the main camp. Recent research
¹²
suggests that the addition in the plans of a ventilation system that forced out old air and pushed in fresh air, and the recessing of the ventilation ducts, meant that the new crematorium was also designed with the potential to be a gas chamber. This notion is disputed by other scholars, who point out that there is still no facility shown on the plans to allow the delivery of Zyklon B into the building. Even if the SS planners were thinking that the new crematorium should be capable of performing the same function as the old one—which had just a few weeks before been the site of some limited Zyklon B gassing experiments along similar lines to those conducted in Block 11—there is no suggestion that at this stage Auschwitz was preparing any major new extermination capacity.

That October, as the SS architects worked on their plans and the Soviet prisoners began building Birkenau, Lucille Eichengreen and the other Hamburg Jews arrived at Łódź in central Poland, the first stop on their long journey to Auschwitz. What they witnessed that first day in the ghetto shocked them. “We saw sewage run along the gutters,” says Lucille.

By the time Lucille arrived, the Łódź ghetto had been shut off from the outside world for eighteen months. Disease and hunger had already ravaged the population—in the course of the ghetto's existence, more than 20 percent
would die within its walls. Conditions were appalling, with around 164,000 Jews forced into an area of four square kilometers.
¹³
Initially, the Nazis had imprisoned the Łódź Jews in the ghetto and given them no means of earning money to pay for food. Arthur Greiser, in command of the region, wanted the Jews to be forced to give up their valuables under threat of starvation.

To survive in such circumstances demanded ingenuity. Jacob Zylberstein,
¹⁴
one of the first Łódź Jews to be imprisoned, bargained with Poles who lived just outside the wire fence which enclosed the ghetto. He struck a deal with a man who agreed to throw him a parcel of bread over the wire. Jacob ate half the bread, sold the rest and gave the money he earned back through the wire to the Pole, who thus made a handsome profit. “He helped us for two months.... He got caught and he got killed for it. But two months was a very long time.”