11. Extermination Camps, 1941-5
Shortly afterwards, 2,500 Jews were taken from Zamość; several hundred were shot on the streets. The Jewish inhabitants of Szczebrzeszyn were in a state of complete panic, sending their children to live with Poles in Warsaw, and bribing Poles to keep them in hiding. Crowds were gathering in order to loot their homes when they were deported.
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On 8 May 1942, reported Klukowski, a German police unit arrived in Szczebrzeszyn and started shooting Jews ‘like ducks, killing them not only on the streets but also in their own houses - men, women, and children, indiscriminately’. Klukowski began to organize help for the wounded, but then he was told he was not allowed to give help to Jews, so, reluctantly, he posted people outside the hospital to turn them away. ‘I was lucky that I did so,’ he noted later: soon afterwards the police arrived at the hospital, carrying machine-guns, and went through the wards looking for Jews: had there been any, Klukowski and probably some of his staff would almost certainly have been shot. The whole massacre left him deeply upset, as he recorded in his diary:
I am saddened that I had to refuse to give any help at all. I did this only because of strict orders by the Germans. This was against my own feeling and against a physician’s duties. With my eyes I can still see the wagons filled with the dead, one Jewish woman walking along with her dead child in her arms, and many wounded lying on the sidewalks across from my hospital, where I was forbidden to give them any help.
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He was appalled by the behaviour of some Poles, who looted the houses of the victims, and even laughed as they saw them being shot. Later, too, the German police ordered the local Jewish council to pay for the ammunition used in the massacre.
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Wirth tried to design the camp at Belzec in such a way as to allay the suspicions of the Jews arriving there. They were told it was a transit centre and that they would be disinfected before receiving clean clothes and getting their valuables returned to them. The gas chambers themselves were designed to look like showers. All this followed the original pattern devised for the euthanasia gassings, though on a much larger scale. But the ruses were little more than gestures. The very brutality with which they were rounded up must have left the Jews with few illusions as to the fate in store for them. Another Austrian SS officer, Franz Stangl, described what he saw at Belzec in the spring of 1942:
I went there by car. As one arrived, one first reached Belzec railway station, on the left side of the road. The camp was on the same side, but up a hill. The commandant’s office was 200 metres away, on the other side of the road. It was a one-storey building. The smell . . . Oh God, the smell. It was everywhere. Wirth wasn’t in his office. I remember, they took me to him . . . He was standing on a hill, next to the pits . . . the pits . . . full, they were full. I can’t tell you; not hundreds, thousands, thousands of corpses . . . One of the pits had overflowed. They had put too many corpses in it and putrefaction had progressed too fast, so that the liquid underneath had pushed the bodies on top up and over and the corpses had rolled down the hill. I saw some of them . . . oh God, it was awful.
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Stangl himself was subsequently to play a central role in the Reinhard Action. Born in 1908, the son of a brutal ex-soldier, he had grown up in small-town poverty, and trained as a weaver. In 1931 he had joined the police, undergoing a tough training before being involved in pursuing and arresting members of the illegal socialist opposition during the Schuschnigg dictatorship. At some point he had become an active, secret member of the Nazi Party, and after the absorption of Austria into the Reich in 1938 he was promoted, before being transferred to work in the central administration of the ‘euthanasia’ murder programme in Berlin in 1940. Here he had got to know Christian Wirth, who summoned him to Belzec to get him acquainted with the Reinhard Action on the ground.
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Stangl thought the programme was operating with lamentable inefficiency. The gas chambers at Belzec were crude constructions. They were constantly breaking down, leaving deportees waiting for days without food or water; many died. Eventually this was too much even for Wirth. In June 1942, he temporarily halted the transports and dismantled the wooden gas chambers, replacing them with a concrete construction containing six gas chambers with a total capacity at any one time of 2,000 people. They came into operation in mid-July; transports continued arriving until mid-December. By the end of 1942 some 414,000 Jews from occupied Poland had been killed in the camp, and more from other parts of Central Europe who had been taken to the ghettos in the Lublin district; the total may have been as high as 600,000.
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The second of the Reinhard Action camps was constructed near the village of Sobibor, where up to this point there was nothing but a small labour camp for Jewish women. Construction began in March 1942, but fell behind schedule, so Wirth appointed Franz Stangl camp commandant with the initial brief of finishing the building on time. By the middle of May 1942 the gas chambers were ready. They were housed in a brick building and could each hold 100 people, who were killed by engine exhaust fumes piped in from outside. The camp was built in imitation of Belzec, with administration and reception areas near the railway spur and the extermination area some distance away, out of sight and reached through a narrow passage 150 metres long known as the ‘tube’. Behind the gas chamber building were burial pits. A narrow-gauge tramway went from the railway to the pits with the bodies of people who had died on the journey. The usual gestures were made to reassure the arriving victims, but, as in Belzec, they were often ineffective, since the SS and particularly the Ukrainian guards shouted at the victims and beat them as they ran through the ‘tube’. Some SS men trained a dog to bite the naked Jews, increasing their panic. Stangl ran the camp efficiently according to his lights, and it was not overwhelmed by vast numbers of transports as Belzec had been. Nevertheless, within the first three months of the camp’s operation, nearly 100,000 Jews from Lublin, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the Old Reich had been killed there.
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Work on the main railway line brought the transports to a temporary halt in the summer of 1942. At the same time, the hot weather caused the tightly packed layers of bodies buried in the pits behind the extermination area to swell up and rise above the ground, as had been the case in Belzec, causing a terrible stench and attracting large numbers of rats and other scavenging animals. The SS men also began to notice a rancid taste in the water. The camp water supply was taken from wells and they were clearly becoming contaminated. So the camp administration constructed a large pit which they filled with wood and ignited; a mechanical excavator was brought in to dig up the corpses, which were placed on grilles above the pit and cremated by a Jewish Special Detachment whose members were afterwards put to death themselves. Meanwhile, the transports resumed in October 1942 and continued until the beginning of May 1943. One transport of 5,000 arrived from Majdanek, with prisoners in striped uniforms already weakened by hunger and maltreatment. On this occasion, the gas chambers had broken down, so the prisoners were kept in the open through the night. 200 of them died from exhaustion or from beatings and shootings administered by the SS during the hours of darkness. The remainder were herded into the gas chambers the next day. Another transport arrived in June 1943 with the prisoners already naked because the SS in Lvov thought this would make it more difficult for them to escape: the journey had been a long one, and twenty-five out of the fifty freight cars contained nothing but corpses. They had died of hunger and thirst, and as an eyewitness later recalled, some of them had been dead for as long as a fortnight by the time they arrived.
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Jews still had some personal effects with them. These, along with their clothing and the contents of their suitcases, were taken from them. Valuables were impounded by the camp authorities. Many of them found their way into the pockets of individual SS men and their auxiliaries. The most valuable jewellery was sent together with the gold extracted from the tooth fillings of the dead to a central sorting office in Berlin, where the precious metals were melted down into bars for the Reichsbank and the jewellery exchanged in occupied or neutral countries for industrial diamonds needed for German arms factories.
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From August 1942 the collection and delivery of these objects was organized by Pohl’s Economy and Administration Head Office. The confiscation of the furniture and other effects the Jews had left behind, including clothing, crockery, carpets and much else besides, was carried out by Rosenberg’s office and the confiscated items auctioned off in Germany.
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A report to Pohl’s office estimated the total value of Jewish possessions confiscated in the Reinhard Action up to 15 December 1943 at not far short of 180 million Reichsmarks.
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By this time, almost 250,000 victims had been killed at Sobibor. When Himmler visited the camp early in 1943, the operation was already winding down. Although no new regular transports were scheduled to arrive, the camp administration arranged a special transport from a labour camp in the district in order for him to observe a gassing in action. Pleased with what he saw, he gave promotions to twenty-eight SS and police officers including Wirth, Stangl and other senior functionaries. He also ordered preparations to be made for the closure of the camps and the removal of all traces of their activity once the final batches of victims had been killed. Sobibor was to be transformed into a storage depot for ammunition captured from the Red Army. Jewish labourers were put to work constructing the new facilities. In the meantime the cremation of the victims’ corpses continued apace. It became clear to the Jewish construction workers, many of them battle-hardened Soviet prisoners of war who arrived on 23 September 1943 and formed a cohesive, well-disciplined group, that they were doomed. They began to organize an escape. On 14 October 1943 they managed to entice most of the camp’s SS personnel and a number of the Ukrainian auxiliaries into the camp workshops on a variety of pretexts and kill them with daggers and axes without attracting the attention of the guards on the watch-towers. The resisters cut the camp’s telephone wires and electicity supply. As they made a break for the main gate, the Ukrainian guards opened fire with automatic weapons, killing many; others broke out through the perimeter fence. Some were killed in the minefield outside the fence but more than 300 out of a total of 600 inmates succeeded in breaking out of the camp (all those who did not succeed were shot the following day). 100 of the escapees were caught and killed almost immediately as the SS and police mobilized a large search operation including spotter planes. But the rest eluded capture, and a number of them eventually found their way to partisan units. Shortly afterwards, a fresh detachment of Jewish prisoners arrived to dismantle the camp. The buildings were razed, trees planted, a farm constructed, and when the work was completed, the Jews were forced to lie down on the roasting grilles and were shot one by one. After December 1943 there was no one left at the camp, and all obvious traces of it had disappeared.
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II
The third of the Reinhard Action camps was located at Treblinka, north-east of Warsaw, in a remote wooded area at the end of a single-track branch line running to an old quarry from the railway station at Malkinia, a station on the main railway line from Warsaw to Bialystok. In the spring of 1941 the German occupiers opened a labour camp near the quarry, to excavate materials for use in fortifications on the Soviet- German border in Poland. A year later, the SS selected it as the site of a new death camp. Construction began at the beginning of June 1942, overseen by Richard Thomalla, the SS officer who had built Sobibor. By the time it was begun, the death camps at Belzec and Sobibor were already in operation, so Thomalla tried to improve on them. Jewish workers were brought in to build the new camp; many of them were randomly shot by the SS as they worked, or made to stand in the line of trees as they were felled to clear the ground, so progress was often interrupted. They built a railway spur and station, from which arriving Jews were taken to an undressing room near the ‘ghetto’ where the longer-term prisoners lived. Once they got there, the naked Jews were quickly herded through a narrow fenced-in alleyway (called by the SS the ‘Road to Heaven’) to a large, carefully concealed brick building in the upper camp. This housed three gas chambers, into which the victims were driven with shouts and curses, to be killed by fumes pumped in from diesel engines through a system of pipes. Behind the building was a set of ditches, each 50 metres long, 25 metres wide and 10 metres deep, dug out by a mechanical excavator. Special Detachments of prisoners pushed the bodies in small wagons from the processing area along a narrow-gauge railway and dumped them in the ditches, which were earthed over when they were full.
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As in Sobibor, arriving Jews were told they had come to a transit camp and that they would receive clean clothes and their safeguarded valuables after going through a disinfection shower. Initially, around 5,000 Jews or more arrived each day, but in mid-August 1942 the tempo of killing increased, and by the end of August 1942, 312,000 Jews, not only from Warsaw but also from Radom and Lublin, had been gassed at Treblinka. Less than two months had passed since the first gassings in the camp on 23 July 1942. The first commandant of the camp, Irmfried Eberl, an Austrian doctor who had worked on the ‘euthanasia’ action, had declared his ambition of exceeding the number of killings in any other camp. The transport trains were unventilated and, without water or sanitation, thousands died en route in the hot weather. The pressure of numbers was such that all pretence was abandoned. Oskar Berger, who arrived on a transport on 22 August 1942, noted ‘hundreds of bodies lying all around’ on the platform, ‘piles of bundles, clothes, suitcases, everything mixed together. SS soldiers, Germans and Ukrainians were standing on the roofs of barracks and firing indiscriminately into the crowd. Men, women and children fell bleeding. The air was filled with screaming and weeping.’ The survivors were driven up to the gas chambers by SS men who beat them with whips and iron bars. In case their screams were heard by those waiting below, the SS set up a small orchestra playing Central European hit songs, to drown out the noise. So many victims arrived that the gas chambers were unable to cope, and, as in the case of the transport that arrived on 22 August 1942, the SS guards shot large numbers of the Jews in the reception area instead. Even this did not work, and newly arrived trains were left standing for hours, even days, in the summer heat. Many of those inside died of thirst, heatstroke or asphyxiation. The gas chambers frequently broke down, sometimes when the victims were already inside, where they would be forced to wait for hours until repairs were completed. The ditches were rapidly filled, and new ones could not be excavated quickly enough, so that soon there were unburied bodies everywhere.
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