Heinrich Himmler : A Life (98 page)

The central passage in Heydrich’s address ran as follows: ‘As previously authorized by the Führer, emigration has now been replaced by the evacuation of the Jews to the east as a further solution.’ These ‘actions’ (in other words, the deportations that had already started) were merely ‘provisional options’; they would, however, provide ‘the practical experience’, which, ‘in view of the impending final solution (
Endlösung
) of the Jewish question’, was of vital importance. The ‘final solution’ would involve a total of 11 million Jews; a statistical appendix attached to the minutes broke the numbers down according to countries, including not only Jews from neutral states but even those living in Great Britain. It was clear from this that the ‘final solution’ that was being sought could be fully achieved only after victory had been won.

According to Heydrich, ‘during the course of the final solution the Jews are to be suitably assigned to labour in the east under appropriate direction. Jews capable of work will be brought to these territories and will be put to
work building roads in large labour columns with the sexes separated. In the course of this work a large proportion will undoubtedly disappear through natural diminution.’ ‘The remaining remnant, which will undoubtedly constitute the segment most capable of resistance, will have to be appropriately dealt with’, to prevent it from becoming a ‘germ cell of a Jewish reconstruction’. Heydrich left open the question of the fate awaiting those Jews who were not ‘capable of work’, in particular the women and children, though it is clear from the context that these people would have to be killed in order to avoid creating a ‘germ cell of a Jewish reconstruction’.

The Jews were to be initially brought to ‘transit ghettos’, ‘from there to be transported further east’. Jews over 65 years of age, according to Heydrich, would be accommodated in a ‘ghetto for the aged’ in order to avoid ‘frequent interventions’,
⁵
and presumably also to give added plausibility to the alleged ‘labour deployment in the east’.

Thus, at this point in time, as at the beginning of 1941, the Reich Security Main Office assumed that the ‘Jewish question’ would be solved in the occupied eastern territories; it would be solved only after the end of the war and through a combination of forced labour and mass murder.
⁶
However, the Wannsee conference also conceived of the possibility of murdering the Jews in the General Government and in the occupied Soviet territories at that time and irrespective of the overall plan. In mid-December 1941, on his return from the conference of Reich leaders and Gauleiters on 12 December, Governor-General Frank had told his colleagues that, as far as dealing with the Jewish question was concerned, he had been tersely advised: ‘Liquidate them yourselves.’
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While at the time Frank had been asking himself how that could be done,
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his state secretary, Josef Bühler, now suggested to the conference that they should ‘begin solving this question in the General Government’, ‘because here the transport problem would not play a significant role and issues of labour deployment would not get in the way of this action being carried out’; in any case, the majority of Jews there were ‘incapable of work’. ‘In conclusion,’ according to the minutes, ‘the various possible solutions were discussed, Gauleiter Dr Meyer and state secretary Dr Bühler both advocating carrying out certain preparatory measures connected with the final solution themselves at once, although the population must not be alarmed in the process.’
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By ‘preparatory measures’ they can have been referring only to the establishment of extermination camps along the lines of Belzec, which was already in the process of being built.

Thus Bühler had put forward an alternative solution that rendered the deportation programme to the east just proposed by Heydrich largely superfluous. During the following months Himmler and the Reich Security Main Office were to adopt this proposal and develop it further. As a result, the main focus of the European ‘final solution’ shifted from the occupied eastern territories to occupied Poland.

The fact that the mass murder that was in progress during the spring and early summer of 1942 expanded into a comprehensive programme of extermination had much to do with the development of labour deployment within the SS empire. It was the concept of ‘extermination through work’ that led to the systematic distinction being made between ‘those capable of work’ and ‘those incapable of work’, and, as a result, to the organization of forced-labour camps and extermination centres on a vast scale, with the aid of which the European Jews were to be eliminated.

In the summer of 1941 Himmler had already begun contemplating how best to exploit the labour of the concentration camp inmates—initially for the SS’s major building projects in eastern Europe.
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However, when in September the Wehrmacht agreed to assign him a large number of Soviet POWs he no longer pursued these ideas, and instead ordered the expansion of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Lublin-Majdanek concentration camps to operate as forced-labour camps for POWs.
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In fact, these plans came to nothing; the majority of the Soviet soldiers, who were already exhausted at the time they were taken prisoner, did not survive the catastrophic conditions in the Wehrmacht POW camps during the autumn and winter of 1941. By the end of 1941 Himmler had received only 30,000 prisoners from the Wehrmacht, and after that he did not receive any more.
¹²

However, the SS’s need for prisoners was continually growing. For a long time it had been trying to reach deals with armaments concerns for the labour deployment of KZ inmates.
¹³
In January 1941, as already mentioned, IG Farben had decided to set up a Buna plant near Auschwitz for the industrial production of synthetic rubber. It is clear that access to the Auschwitz prisoners played an important part in this decision. Himmler had approved the deployment of prisoners for this purpose in his order of 26 February, in which he had ordered the ‘evacuation’ of the Jewish
population of the town of Auschwitz. The building work began in April and cost the lives of around 25,000 prisoners. In fact the plant never produced significant amounts of Buna.
¹⁴

The SS also deployed thousands of prisoners for a project proposed by Ferdinand Porsche, the managing director of the Volkswagen Company. Porsche persuaded Himmler to use prisoners to build a light-metals foundry in the VW plant. In return he promised to provide the Waffen-SS with modern amphibious jeeps. Hitler, who was brought in on the affair, signed an order on 11 January 1942 in which he assigned to Himmler the task of ‘constructing, equipping, and operating’ the foundry, expressly stating that it should be done with the aid of KZ inmates. The use of the word ‘operating’ implied for the SS the expectation that at last they were going beyond simply supplying labour and were now actually becoming involved in armaments production.
¹⁵

Ill. 25.
In July 1942 Himmler visited Auschwitz-Monowitz and presumably also met representatives of IG Farben. Among the inmates employed in the Buna works was the Jewish resistance fighter Primo Levi, who later recorded his experiences in the book
Is This a Man?

Far more workers, however, were required for the SS’s so-called building programme for peacetime (
Friedensbauprogramm
), which involved in particular plans for the reorganization of the occupied eastern territories. In December 1941 Pohl had submitted to Himmler the first construction programme, which had a budget of 13 billion Reich marks and had been drafted by Hans Kammler, the head of the SS Main Office Budgets and Building.
¹⁶
When it finally became clear, at the beginning of 1942, that he could no longer count on receiving Soviet prisoners, Himmler revived his plans of the previous summer to deploy KZ inmates as forced labour for his own building projects. But for this to happen the camps had to be filled up first. On 26 January 1942 he informed the Inspector of Concentration Camps, Richard Glücks, that ‘in view of the fact that we cannot anticipate receiving Russian prisoners in the immediate future, I shall consign a large number of Jews and Jewesses who will be emigrated [
sic
] from Germany to the camps. In the course of the next four weeks, therefore, you must prepare to receive 100,000 male and up to 50,000 female Jews in the concentration camps. During the coming weeks the concentration camps will be expected to carry out major economic tasks.’
¹⁷
In fact, during the following months tens of thousands of Jews were deported to the district of Lublin, where those who were designated ‘capable of work’ were forced to work in Majdanek and other camps. In Auschwitz Jews from Slovakia were deployed as forced labour.
¹⁸

Himmler not only filled his camps with new prisoners, however, but also concentrated on exploiting more effectively those who were already there. On 19 January, the day before the Wannsee conference, he ordered the amalgamation of Pohl’s Main Offices—Budgets and Building and Administration and Business—with the Administration Office in the SS Leadership Main Office, that was also controlled by Pohl, to form the SS’s Business and Administration Main Office (Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt = WVHA). In March 1942 he also incorporated the Concentration Camp Inspectorate into the new Main Office, which, on the one hand, emphasized the economic importance of the camps, but was also intended to provide a barrier to any future encroachment on the part of Fritz Sauckel. For Sauckel’s appointment as General Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization threatened to generate disagreements over who was in charge of the concentration camp inmates.
¹⁹

Meanwhile, Kammler revised his draft of the peacetime building programme. Himmler had been dissatisfied with the first draft and specifically
demanded that Kammler should be more ambitious. The latter responded by proposing to spend the incredible-sounding sum of 20 to 30 billion Reich marks—among other things, for building extensive settlements in ‘the east’—involving the deployment of 175,000 forced labourers: ‘Prisoners, POWs, Jews, etc.’
²⁰
At the end of March 1942 Himmler gave his views on Kammler’s plans. Among other things, he criticized his assumption that a prisoner’s productivity would be only half that of a German worker. Himmler instructed Pohl that the ‘biggest reserve of labour power was contained’ in the prospect of increasing the productivity of the individual prisoner. ‘By being given responsibility for the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, the head of the Business and Administration Main Office has been provided with the opportunity of achieving that.’
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The message was clear: with the aid of terror to get the maximum productivity out of the prisoners with the minimum expenditure. The prisoners, who in a short time would be worked to death, were to be replaced by new slave labour.
²²

Oswald Pohl, the head of the WVHA, hurried to prove to Himmler that he had understood what was expected of him. In a report of 30 April he emphasized that ‘keeping prisoners on the grounds of security, reeducation, or prevention was no longer the priority’; the ‘main emphasis’ had ‘shifted towards economics’.
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In an order from the same day Pohl made KZ commandants ‘responsible for labour deployment. In order to achieve maximum performance this deployment must be exhausting in the truest sense of the word.’
²⁴

Thus, as part of the preparations for the ‘final solution’ that were already under way, Himmler geared his organization to combine mass murder and mass production in the form of ‘extermination through labour’. This move not only enabled him to expand the concentration camp system but also to demonstrate its compatibility with the conditions created by the war. Himmler hoped above all to counter the accusation that was being increasingly levelled, given the deteriorating war situation, that the SS was pointlessly eliminating labour that was urgently needed. The new plan explained the extermination of people who were ‘incapable of work’ as a ‘practical’ necessity.

This maxim had already been applied in the occupied Soviet territories from the late summer of 1941 onwards. The Einsatzgruppen allowed only those Jews to live who were ‘capable of work’. They then died in the camps, debilitated from forced labour and as a result of the catastrophic living conditions. In the forced-labour camps in Upper Silesia under the direction
of the Breslau police chief Albrecht Schmelt, from November 1941 onwards selections were being carried out among the Jewish forced labourers, initially sporadically but soon systematically. Those no longer capable of work were deported to Auschwitz and murdered.
²⁵

In the autumn of 1941 the SS had initiated a huge forced-labour project in the district of Galicia in the General Government, in which, apart from Ukrainians and Soviet POWs, large numbers of Jews were deployed. This was the road linking Lemberg (Lvov) and the Donets basin, the so-called Transit Road IV, and can be described as a pilot project for the new policy.
²⁶
In the camps set up for the forced labourers living conditions were terrible and a brutal regime was enforced. There were continual selections of those incapable of work, particularly among the Jewish forced workers, who were then murdered. Here the scenario which Heydrich had outlined at the Wannsee conference of Jewish labour columns ‘building roads’ had long been reality.