Auschwitz (20 page)

From Höss's perspective, that summer it was clear that his energy and focus should chiefly be directed on this second camp and killing operation. The gas chambers inside the two converted cottages and the burning of bodies in the open air still represented only interim solutions to the murderous task the Nazis had created for themselves, and the killing operation at Auschwitz remained inefficient and improvised.

As a center for mass murder, Auschwitz was still in its infancy and its capacity severely limited. Contrary to the evidence they gave after the war, Höss and his colleagues had already used their own initiative to help devise temporary methods by which to kill large numbers of people. But they knew their greatest task—the one for which they would become infamous—lay ahead of them: the creation of a killing factory.

A
t the start of 1942, the only specialized death camp in operation in the Nazi empire was Chełmno. Despite this, the Nazis still embarked on their orgy of destruction. For, unlike those who work in a less radical system, who first plan in detail and only then act, the Nazis launched into the deportation of the Jews before any of the systems they had devised for their destruction were tested or properly in place. It was out of the ensuing disorder that they built their genocide, and the story of how they organized this murderous task—and in the process made 1942 the year of the greatest killing during the “Final Solution”—reveals much about the mentality of the murderers.

Auschwitz was not to play the most prominent part in the mass killings of 1942, but this was to be the year that the camp began for the first time to have an impact on western Europe. Only days after the Slovakian authorities negotiated with the Germans to send their Jews to Auschwitz, another European country sent its first transport to the camp. The circumstances that led to this and subsequent transports were even more complex and surprising than events in Slovakia, not least because the train that left on March 23, came from a country conquered by the Germans that was permitted great freedom in its own administration—France.

After the swift defeat of June 1940, France was divided into two zones, occupied and unoccupied. Marshal Pétain, a hero from World War I, became head of state, based in Vichy in the unoccupied zone. He was a popular figure
in those early years of the war (much more popular than many French people would admit after the war was over), and acted as the focal point of the countrywide desire to restore the dignity of France. As for the Germans, they had apparently contradictory goals—they wanted control of France, yet desired to have as small a physical presence as possible; fewer than 1,500 German officers and officials were based in the whole of the country, occupied and unoccupied. German rule depended to a large degree on the cooperation of the French bureaucrats and on their administrative systems.

For the first year or so of the occupation, there was little conflict between the French and Germans. The German military commander, General Otto von Stuelpnagel, operated from the Hotel Majestic in Paris, more like a Roman governor presiding over a semi-autonomous province of the Empire than a Nazi trying to reduce the area he ruled to a nation of slaves. Nonetheless, the Jews of France remained vulnerable. There were about 350,000 Jews residing in France in 1940, and nearly half of that number did not hold French passports—many had arrived in the 1920s from Eastern Europe while others had fled to France more recently—in a fruitless bid to escape the Nazis. It was these foreign Jews who bore the brunt of the early persecution. In October 1940 the new French government proclaimed in the “Jewish statute” that all Jews were forbidden to work in certain professions, but it was the foreign Jews in the unoccupied zone who were singled out for the additional torment of imprisonment in internment camps.

During this early period of the occupation of France, the Nazis' persecution of the Jews proceeded in their standard way. First the Jews were identified and then registered. Further legislation called for the registration of Jewish property prior to its seizure and the eventual deportation of all Jews from the occupied zone. The Vichy government collaborated placidly throughout this process.

The relative calm of the occupation was to be disturbed in the summer of 1941, however, by events thousands of kilometers to the east—the invasion of the Soviet Union. On August 21, 1941, two Germans were shot in Paris—one was killed, the other badly wounded. It was quickly established that French Communists were behind the violence. Another killing on September 3 only served to heighten the Germans' concern that their hitherto untroubled life in France was over.

The German authorities reacted to the killings by imprisoning Communists and conducting reprisal shootings—three hostages were shot immediately after the September incident. But this response was considered inadequate by Hitler, who was busy directing the bloodbath that was the War in the East from his headquarters in the forests of East Prussia. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel sent word to Paris of Hitler's displeasure:

Hitler would have wanted his representative in France to act as decisively—and brutally—as his commander-in-chief in the Ukraine did in December 1941 when faced with a similar threat: “The fight against the partisans succeeds only if the population realizes that the partisans and their sympathizers sooner or later are killed,” he wrote. “Death by strangulation inspires fear more particularly,”
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Hitler himself later remarked. “Only where the struggle against the partisan nuisance was begun and carried out with ruthless brutality have successes been achieved.”
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The German authorities in Paris were in a quandary. If they proceeded with the policy recommended by Hitler, they risked losing the cooperation of the French population—a prediction that seemed to be borne out when there was outrage at the killing of ninety-eight hostages after the shooting of a German officer in Nantes in October. It was obvious to General von Stuelpnagel that such “Polish methods”
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simply did not work in France. But he was enough of a political realist to grasp that Hitler would not just change his mind and allow the Germans in France to proceed with discretion on such a subject. The Führer's mind was made up—“draconian retribution” was called for.

In a typical example of the way those in senior positions sought solutions in the Nazi state, the German authorities in France attempted to work around Hitler's dogmatic view by devising alternative forms of “draconian
retribution” that would damage their relationship with the French far less. Two such alternatives were quickly suggested—fines on whole sections of the population, and deportation. And, because the supposed “link” between Communists and Jews was engraved in the mind of every Nazi, nothing came more naturally to the German authorities in Paris than the idea of fining and deporting Jews in retaliation for the murder of Germans by Communists. The reprisal killings would continue, but at a reduced level and only as a small part of the overall policy of “draconian retribution.”

Despite this partial solution to his problem, Stuelpnagel still felt he had to protest once more to his superiors, concluding in January 1942 that he could “no longer reconcile mass shootings with my conscience, nor answer for them before the bar of history.”
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Unsurprisingly, shortly after this communication Stuelpnagel left his post, but the principle he had established remained—Jews and Communists would be deported as part of a series of reprisals for any resistance by the French. The first of these transports left France in March 1942 for Auschwitz. German army officers, motivated by a desire not to have to answer “before the bar of history” for reprisal shootings, had still put these people in the greatest possible danger. A combination of starvation, abuse, and disease ravaged them. Of the 1,112 men who boarded the train at Compiegne 1,008 were dead within five months.
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Only about twenty of them are thought to have survived the war—which means that more than 98 percent of this first transport died in Auschwitz.

By this time the deportation of French Jews as a reprisal measure also clearly fitted into another, much larger, vision—the Nazis' “Final Solution” of their “Jewish problem” in France. With the long-term strategic vision already spelled out at Wannsee in January 1942, day-to-day responsibility for implementing the policy in France fell to SS Hauptsturmführer (captain) Theodor Dannecker, who reported to Adolf Eichmann, who in turn reported to Reinhard Heydrich. On May 6, Heydrich himself visited Paris and revealed to a small group that “just as with the Russian Jews in Kiev, the death sentence has been pronounced on all the Jews of Europe. Even of the Jews of France whose deportations begin in these very weeks.”
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The Nazis faced one massive obstacle in obtaining their desired aim of a “Jew-free” France—the French authorities themselves. There simply was not the German manpower in France to identify, collect, and deport the
French Jews without the active participation of the French administration and police, especially when the Nazis initially demanded that more Jews be deported from France than from any other country in western Europe. At a meeting in Berlin on June 11, 1942, chaired by Adolf Eichmann, a schedule was announced whereby 10,000 Belgian Jews, 15,000 Dutch Jews, and 100,000 French Jews were to be deported to Auschwitz. They were to be between the ages of sixteen and forty, and only 10 percent were permitted to be “unable to work.” The exact thinking behind these figures and restrictions has never been uncovered, but it is likely that the decision not yet to accept large numbers of children and old people reflects knowledge of the still limited extermination capacity of Auschwitz. Theodor Dannecker, anxious to please, committed himself to delivering every French Jew who fell within the age range decreed. Shortly after the Berlin meeting, Dannecker drew up a plan to send 40,000 French Jews to the East within three months.

It was one thing to formulate such an ambitious plan, of course, but quite another to be able to carry it out in a country that still largely administered itself. At a meeting on July 2, between the chief of the Vichy police, René Bousquet, and Nazi officials, the Germans experienced first-hand the difference between theory and application. Bousquet stated Vichy's position—in the occupied zone only foreign Jews could be deported, and in the unoccupied zone the French police would not take part in any round-up. Bousquet stated: “On the French side we have nothing against the arrests themselves—it is only their execution by French police in Paris that would be embarrassing. This was the personal wish of the Marshal [Pétain].”
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Helmut Knochen, the head of the German security police, who knew that without the collaboration of the French the deportations would be impossible, immediately protested, reminding Bousquet that Hitler would not understand the position of the French on a subject that was so important to him. After this implied threat, Bousquet altered the French position. The French police would carry out arrests in both the occupied and unoccupied zones, but only of foreign—not French—Jews. The French authorities had made a clear political judgment—to protect their own citizens, they would cooperate in handing over foreigners to the Germans.

At a meeting two days later between the French Premier, Pierre Laval,
and Dannecker, Laval offered (according to Dannecker) “that, during the evacuation of Jewish families from the unoccupied zone, children under sixteen [can] also be taken away. As for the Jewish children in the occupied zone, the question did not interest him.”
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Historians have described Laval's proposal about the children as meriting his “everlasting shame”
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and declared that this moment should “forever be written in the history of France.”
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It is impossible to disagree with them, especially given the appalling suffering that was about to follow for these children, much of it inflicted on them by French people on French soil as a result of an offer made by a French politician.

The arrests of foreign Jews by the French police began in Paris on the night of July 16, 1942. At home that night in her family's apartment in the tenth arrondissement was Annette Muller, her younger brother Michel, her two elder brothers, and their mother. Their father—originally from Poland—had heard rumors that something was in the air and had left the apartment to hide nearby. The rest of the family had remained—the idea that whole families were at risk was inconceivable to them. Annette,
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nine years old at the time, has a clear memory of what happened that night:

Annette's mother hurriedly threw a sheet on the floor and started filling it with clothes and dried food. Minutes later they were out on the stairs on the way down to the street. Annette, finding that she had left her comb behind, was told by the police that she could go and get it as long as she “came right back.” She returned to the apartment and found the police still there: