History of the Jews (87 page)

Once Jews were separated, mobilized and concentrated in the General Government, what Hitler called (2 October 1940)
ein grosses polnisches Arbeitslager
, ‘a huge Polish labour-camp’, the forced-labour programme could begin in earnest. This was the first part of the Final Solution, of the Holocaust itself, because working to death was the basis on which the system operated. Fritz Saukel, the head of the Allocation of Labour Office, ordered that Jews were to be exploited ‘to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure’.
¹³⁴
The labourers were worked from dawn till dusk seven days a week, dressed in rags and fed on bread, watery soup, potatoes and sometimes meat scraps. The first major slave-labour
operation was in February 1940, the construction of a vast anti-tank ditch along the new eastern frontier.
¹³⁵
Thereafter the system spread to every area of industry. Workers could be ‘ordered’ by phone and shipped by freight-car just like raw materials. Thus
IG
Farben got 250 Dutch women Jews freighted from Ravensbrück to Dachau, the same freight-cars taking back 200 Polish women to Dachau.
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Slave workers were usually forced to move at the double, the ‘Auschwitz Trot’, even when carrying, for example, bags of concrete weighing 100 lb. At Mauthausen, near Hitler’s home town of Linz, where Himmler built a work-camp near the municipal quarry, labourers had only picks and axes, and they had to carry heavy chunks of granite up 186 steep and narrow steps from the quarry to the camp. They had a life expectancy of between six weeks and three months, and this did not include death by accident, suicide or punishment.
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There is no doubt at all that forced labour was a form of murder and regarded as such by the Nazi authorities. The words
Vernichtung durch Arbeit
, ‘destruction through work’, were used repeatedly in discussions which Dr Georg Thierack, the Minister of Justice, had with Goebbels and Himmler on 14 and 18 September 1942.
¹³⁸
Rudolf Höss, the commandant at Auschwitz May 1940-December 1943, and afterwards office chief at the Main Security Headquarters from which the entire anti-Jewish programme was directed, testified that by the end of 1944 400,000 slaves were working in the German armaments industry. ‘In enterprises with particularly severe working conditions’, he said, ‘every month one-fifth died or were, because of inability to work, sent back by the enterprises to the camps in order to be exterminated.’ So German industry was a willing participant in this aspect of the Final Solution. The labourers had no names—just numbers, tattooed on their bodies. If one died, the factory manager did not have to state the cause of death: he merely asked for a replacement. Höss testified that the initiative in securing Jewish slave labour always came from the firm: ‘The concentration camps have at no time offered labour to the industry. On the contrary, prisoners were sent to firms only after the firms had made a request for [such] prisoners.’
¹³⁹
All the companies concerned knew exactly what was happening. Nor was the knowledge confined to very senior managers and those involved in the actual slave-labour operations. There were innumerable visits to the camps. In a few cases written reactions have been preserved. Thus one
IG
Farben employee, visiting the Auschwitz slave-labour operation, 30 July 1942, wrote to a colleague in Frankfurt, using the tone of joking irony which many Germans adopted: ‘That the Jewish race is playing a special part here you can well imagine. The diet and treatment of this
sort of people is in accordance with our aim. Evidently an increase of weight is hardly ever recorded for them. That bullets start whizzing at the slightest attempt of a “change of air” is also certain, as well as the fact that many have already disappeared as a result of a “sunstroke”.’
¹⁴⁰

Yet starving and working the Jews to death was not quick enough for Hitler. He determined on mass killing too, in the spirit with which he had discussed it with Major Hell. Signed orders from Hitler of any kind are rare; and rarest of all are those dealing with the Jews. The longest letter Hitler ever wrote about Jewish policy goes back to spring 1933, in reply to a request from Hindenberg to exempt war veterans from anti-Jewish decrees.
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The absence of written orders led to the claim that the Final Solution was Himmler’s work and that Hitler not only did not order it but did not even know it was happening.
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But this argument will not stand up.
¹⁴³
The administration of the Third Reich was often chaotic but its central principle was clear enough: all key decisions emanated from Hitler. This applied particularly to Jewish policy, which was the centre of his preoccupations and the dynamic of his entire career. He was by far the most obsessively and fundamentally anti-Semitic of all the Nazi leaders. Even Streicher, in his view, was taken in by the Jews: ‘He
idealized
the Jew,’ Hitler insisted in December 1941. ‘The Jew is baser, fiercer, more diabolical than Streicher depicted him.’
¹⁴⁴
Hitler accepted anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in its most extreme form, believing that the Jew was wicked by nature, was indeed the very incarnation and symbol of evil.
¹⁴⁵
Throughout his career he saw the ‘Jewish problem’ in apocalyptic terms and the Holocaust was the logical outcome of his views. His orders to set it in motion were oral but were invariably invoked by Himmler and others as their compelling authority, according to regular formulae: ‘the Führer’s wish’, ‘the Führer’s will’, ‘with the Führer’s agreement’, ‘this is my order which is also the Führer’s wish’.

The decisive date for the Final Solution was almost certainly 1 September 1939, when hostilities began. Hitler had stated plainly, on 30 January that year, what his reaction to war would be: ‘if international-finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation [
Vernichtung
] of the Jewish race in Europe.’ He regarded the war as his licence for genocide and he set the scientific process in motion the very day war broke out. The first programme, of experimental murder, was conceived in Hitler’s
Chancellery and the original order went out on Hitler’s personal stationery on 1 September 1939: this authorized the murder of the incurably insane. The programme was code-named T-4 after the Chancellery address, Tiergartenstrasse 4, and from the start it had the characteristics of the genocide programme:
SS
involvement, euphemism, deception. It is significant that the first man appointed to head the euthanasia programme,
SS
Obergruppenführer Dr Leonard Contin, was sacked when he asked for written orders from Hitler. He was replaced by another
SS
doctor, Philip Boyhaler, who accepted oral orders.
¹⁴⁶

The
SS
experimented with various gases, including carbon monoxide and the cyanide-based pesticide trade-named Zyklon-B. The first gas chamber was set up at a killing centre in Brandenburg in late 1939, Hitler’s doctor, Karl Brandt, witnessing a test killing of four insane men. He reported back to Hitler, who ordered only carbon monoxide to be used. Five other killing centres were then equipped. The gas chamber was called a ‘shower-room’ and the victims, taken in groups of twenty or thirty, were told they were to have a shower. They were sealed in, then the doctor on duty gassed them. This was the same basic procedure later used at the mass-extermination camps. The programme murdered 80,000-100,000 people, but was stopped in August 1941 following protests by the churches—the only occasion when they prevented Hitler from killing people. But by this time it was also being used to kill Jews from concentration camps who were too sick to work. So the euthanasia programme merged into the Final Solution, and there were continuities camps who were too sick to work. So the euthanasia programme merged into the Final Solution, and there were continuities in methods, equipment and expert personnel.
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It should be emphasized that the killing of large numbers of Jews continued in Poland throughout 1940 and the spring of 1941, but the mass-extermination phase did not really begin until Hitler’s invasion of Russia, 22 June 1941. This was designed to destroy the centre of the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy and to give Hitler access to the five million Jews then under Soviet control. Killing was done by two methods: mobile killing units, and fixed centres or death camps. The mobile killing system dates back to 22 July 1940 when Hitler’s idea of total war, involving mass extermination, was first presented to the army. Indeed, the army was heavily involved in the Final Solution since the
SS
killing units came under its command for tactical purposes. An entry on 3 March 1941 in General Jodl’s War Diary records Hitler’s decision that, in the coming Russian campaign,
SS
-Police units would have to be brought right up to front-line army areas in order to ‘eliminate’ the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia’.
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This was the origin of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing battalions. They were directed from the Reich Security Main Office (
RHSA
) under Reinhard Heydrich, the chain of command going Hitler-Himmler-Heydrich. There were four such battalions,
A
,
B
,
C
and
D
, each 500-900 strong, assigned to each of the four army groups invading Russia. They had a high proportion of high-ranking officers drawn from the
SS
, Gestapo and police, and included many intellectuals and lawyers. Otto Ohlendorf, who commanded
D
, had degrees from three universities and a doctorate in jurisprudence. Ernst Biberstein, one of the commanders in
C
, was a Protestant pastor, theologian and church official.

Of the Jews in Soviet territory, four million lived in areas overrun by the German army 1941-2. Of these two and a half million fled before the Germans arrived. The rest was 90 per cent concentrated in the cities, making it easier for the Einsatzgruppen to kill them. The murder battalions moved directly behind the army units, rounding up Jews before the city populations knew what was in store. In the initial killing sweep, the four groups reported at various dates between mid-October and early December 1941 that they had killed 125,000, 45,000, 75,000 and 55,000 respectively. But many Jews were left behind in the rear areas, so killing teams were sent to catch and murder them. The army co-operated in handing them over, salving its conscience by referring to Jews as ‘partisans’ or ‘superfluous eaters’. Sometimes the army killed Jews themselves. Both they and the
SS
incited pogroms, to save themselves trouble. There was little resistance from the Jews. Russian civilians were co-operative, though there is one recorded act of a local mayor shot for trying ‘to help the Jews’.
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Quite small groups of killers disposed of enormous numbers. In Riga, one officer and twenty-one men killed 10,600 Jews. In Kiev, two small detachments of
C
killed over 30,000. A second sweep began at the end of 1941 and lasted throughout 1942. This killed over 900,000. Most Jews were murdered by shooting, outside the towns, at ditches turned into graves. During the second sweep, mass graves were dug first. The killers shot the Jews in the back of the neck, the method used by the Soviet secret police, or by the ‘sardine method’. Under this, the first layer stretched themselves at the bottom of the grave and were killed from above. The next layer lay down on top of the first bodies, heads facing the feet. There were five or six layers, then the grave was filled in.

Some Jews hid under floorboards and in cellars. They were blasted out with grenades or burned alive. Some Jewish girls offered themselves to stay alive; they were used during the night but killed all
the same the next morning. Some Jews were only wounded and lived hours, even days. There were many sadistic acts. There was reluctance too, even among these picked killers, to slaughter so many people who put up no resistance—not a single member of any of the groups died during an actual killing operation. Himmler paid only one visit to see the work, witnessing 100 Jews shot in mid-August 1941. There is a record of it. Himmler found himself unable to look as each volley rang out. The commander reproached him: ‘Reichsführer, those were only a hundred.’ Himmler: ‘What do you mean by that?’ ‘Look at the eyes of the men in this
Kommando
. How deeply shaken they are! These men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages.’ Himmler then made a speech to the men, calling on them to obey ‘the Highest Moral Law of the Party’.
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To escape from the degree of personal contact between killers and killed involved in shooting, the groups tried other methods. The use of dynamite proved disastrous. Then they introduced mobile gas vans, and soon two were sent to each battalion. Meanwhile, these mobile killing operations were being supplemented by the use of fixed centres, the death camps. Six of these were built and equipped: at Chelmno and Auschwitz in the Polish territories incorporated in the Reich; and at Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek and Belzec in the Polish General Government. In a sense, the term ‘death camp’ as a special category is misleading. There were 1,634 concentration camps and their satellites and more than 900 labour camps.
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All were death camps, in that enormous numbers of Jews died there, by starvation and overwork, or by execution for trivial offences or often for no reason at all. But these six camps were deliberately planned or extended for mass slaughter on an industrial scale.