Auschwitz was destined, indeed, to become the largest mass killing centre in the history of the world, larger even than the killing centres at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Summoning Ḧss to see him, according to the latter’s subsequent recollection, some time in the summer of 1941, but most probably several months later, at the very end of the year or the beginning of 1942, Himmler informed the camp commandant that, since the existing extermination facilities in the east were not extensive enough to carry out the final solution of the Jewish question, he was designating Auschwitz as an additional centre, most notably because of its combination of good communications and relative remoteness from major centres of population. Shortly after this, Eichmann arrived at the camp and discussed the plans in more detail. Whereas the Reinhard Action camps had been set up to kill the Jews of Poland, the eventual function of Auschwitz was to kill the Jews brought from the rest of occupied Europe, including not only neighbouring parts of the former Poland but also, once these Jews had been killed, from Germany, the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and western countries like France, Belgium and Holland. From the outset, the methods used in Auschwitz differed from those employed in the other camps. Initially, this was a matter of a chance discovery; but soon it became systematic.
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In July 1941 a team of prisoners and their SS guards was disinfecting some clothes and bedding with the chemical pesticide known as Zyklon-B, the main constituent of which was sulphuric acid, when they noticed that a cat that strayed into the room was rapidly killed by the gas. One of the guards speculated that the chemical might be useful for killing people too. The idea, which had been briefly considered by the T-4 team in 1939 but rejected as impractical, was taken up by the camp management. Early in September 1941 it was tried out on some 600 Soviet prisoners of war who had been classified by a Gestapo commission the previous month as ‘fanatical Communists’, along with 250 sick inmates of the camp. They were taken into a cellar in Block 11, in the main camp, and gassed. The experiment was then repeated later the same month with 900 healthy Red Army prisoners in the camp morgue.
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Ḧss later remembered observing the gassing. The men were herded into the room, the doors were sealed, then powdered Zyklon-B was shaken down through holes in the roof. The warmth generated by the bodies packed into the chamber below quickly turned it into a deadly gas. ‘For a little while,’ he recalled, ‘a humming sound could be heard. When the powder was thrown in, there were cries of “Gas!”, then a great bellowing, and the trapped prisoners hurled themselves against both the doors. But the doors held.’ All the prisoners died.
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On Eichmann’s next visit to the camp, it was agreed to use the gas in a systematic way. But the camp morgue was so close to the main administration building that when the Soviet prisoners were killed, their screams in the gas chamber could be heard by the personnel. So Ḧss decided that the killings would have to be carried out away from the main camp, at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Soon there were two provisional gas chambers ready for operation there, in buildings known as Bunker I and Bunker II, or the ‘red house’ and the ‘white house’. They killed their first victims on 20 March 1942.
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On arriving at the camp, the surviving deportees were roughly bundled out of the trains by SS guards and auxiliaries with dogs and whips, yelling at them: ‘Out! Out! Fast! Fast!’ They were made to line up - in the early months by an open field 2.5 kilometres from the camp, at the end of a goods siding, and in the later stages of the camp’s existence, on the infamous ‘ramp’ leading from the railway siding to the camp - and undergo a ‘selection’. ‘The process of selection,’ Ḧss later remembered without a trace of self-consciousness, ‘. . . was in itself rich in incident.’
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Selections were carried out by SS doctors, who asked the arrivals a few questions and gave them a cursory medical examination. Those under the age of sixteen, mothers with children, the sick, the old and the weak were moved to the left, loaded on to lorries and taken straight to the gas chambers, after being told they were to be ‘disinfected’ there. Families, recalled Ḧss, tried to stick together, and rushed back from one line to rejoin one another. ‘It was often necessary to use force to restore order.’ Able-bodied men and women were taken to the camp, tattooed with a serial number on the left arm, and registered. In many transports they were in a minority. In the main camp and the labour camps, periodic ‘selections’ were carried out, to eliminate those deemed no longer fit to work. Unlike many of the new arrivals, these victims knew what lay in store for many of them; terrible scenes often followed, as they wept, begged for mercy, or tried to resist attempts to push them into the gas chamber.
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Those selected for killing were marched over to the gas chamber from the selection area. The two bunkers had a capacity of 800 and 1,200 people respectively. Over the course of 1942-3, the gassing facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau were extended and refined. A purpose-designed gas chamber already ordered for the main camp in October 1941 was delivered to Birkenau instead, and three more crematoria were also built. All four were redesignated Crematoria I, II, III and IV when the two gas chambers in the main camp were closed down in July 1943 (one was destroyed, the other mothballed). More were planned but never built. All the new crematoria were located some distance from the prisoners’ barracks. They were disguised by trees and shrubs. Two of them were known by the SS as the ‘forest crematoria’. The new gas chambers were completed between March and June 1943. Small transports of fewer than 200 people were taken into a washroom in Crematorium II or III after ‘selection’ and shot in the back of the neck. Larger groups were gassed. In each facility, the gas chamber was mostly below surface level, disguised in the usual fashion as a shower and sealed by an airtight door with a peephole. The Jews selected for killing were taken to a disrobing room, told they would go into a disinfecting shower, and made to undress. ‘It was most important that the whole business of arriving and undressing should take place in an atmosphere of the greatest possible calm,’ Ḧss wrote later. Members of the Special Detachments of Jewish prisoners detailed to deal with the bodies after the gassing chatted to the victims and did their best to reassure them. Those who were reluctant to undress were ‘helped’, and the refractory were ‘calmed down’, or, if they began to shout and scream, taken out and shot in the back of the neck. Many were not deceived. Mothers sometimes tried to hide their babies in the piles of clothes. Children often cried, but most ‘entered the gas chambers, playing or joking with one another and carrying their toys’, Ḧss noted. Occasionally Jews would address him as he stood supervising the procedure. ‘One woman approached me as she walked past,’ he recalled later, ‘and, pointing to her four children who were manfully helping the smallest ones over the rough ground, whispered: “How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?” ’
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Once the victims had been herded into the gas chamber, SS men standing on the reinforced concrete roof lowered canisters of Zyklon-B pellets through four openings into wire-mesh columns, which allowed the pellets to dissolve into deadly gas as soon as the body-heat of the victims had warmed up the air. After twenty minutes or so, the canisters were pulled up again, to remove the possibility of any more gas escaping, while the chamber was ventilated and a Special Detachment of Jewish prisoners dragged the corpses out into another room, pulled out gold teeth and fillings, cut the women’s hair off, removed gold rings, spectacles, prosthetic limbs and other encumbrances, and put the bodies into elevators that took them up to the crematorium room on the ground floor, where they were put into the incinerating ovens and reduced to ashes. Any remaining bones were ground up and the ashes used as fertilizer or thrown away in nearby woods and streams. These facilities, designed and supplied by the firm Topf and Sons of Erfurt, were patented for future use by their inventor, the engineer Kurt Pr̈fer, who came to Auschwitz on numerous occasions to supervise their construction, testing and initial operation. He introduced numerous small technical innovations, including, for example, the installation of heating in Crematorium II to speed up the dissolution of the Zyklon B on cold winter days. His plans have survived and have provided historians with important documentary evidence for the Crematorium’s modus operandi.
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Yet Pr̈fer’s designs did not withstand the test of constant use. Very soon, the numbers of corpses proved too great for the crematorium ovens to deal with. The brickwork began to crack, and the ovens were damaged by overheating. Before the construction of the new facilities, most corpses had been buried in the ground, but from September 1942 onwards the SS, under the command of Paul Blobel, who was in charge of similar operations at other camps, began to have them dug up by the Special Detachments of prisoners and burned on metal grilles laid over ditches, in the manner followed in the Reinhard Action camps shortly afterwards. By the end of the year, he had disposed of 100,000 bodies in this way, in an attempt to conceal the traces of the murder from posterity. This method also had to be used whenever the crematorium ovens proved unable to cope with the numbers of corpses arriving.
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In Auschwitz, as in the Reinhardt Action camps, the Special Detachments were killed at regular intervals and replaced by other young, able-bodied prisoners. Some of these, including former members of the French resistance and the Polish Communist underground, formed a clandestine prisoners’ organization that managed to make contact with a larger secret resistance movement among the regular prisoners some time during the late summer of 1943. A rebellion aimed at opening the way for a mass breakout was frustrated by the drafting-in of SS reinforcements. However, in 1944, after the SS camp guards had killed 200 members of the Special Detachments following an unsuccessful escape attempt, a further 300 who were selected for gassing on 7 October 1944 attacked the SS men as they approached Crematorium IV, using whatever they could lay their hands on, including stones and iron bars. They set the building alight and destroyed it. The smoke alerted other members of the camp resistance, and some managed to break through the barbed wire surrounding Crematorium II, though none succeeded in reaching freedom; they were all killed, including a group who had sought shelter in a barn and were burned alive by the SS. Meanwhile, the SS had set up machine-gun positions in the camp and started firing indiscriminately; altogether some 425 Special Detachment prisoners were murdered over the next three days.
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IV
The first transports to arrive at Auschwitz, in March 1942, were from Slovakia and from France. Initially they were registered and admitted, in the belief that they might be used for labour purposes; but before long, in May 1942, systematic extermination began, killing not only the French and Slovakian Jews but also other Jews from Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands. It was a transport from Holland that Himmler watched being selected and murdered during his visit on 17 and 18 July 1942. ‘He had no criticisms to make,’ recorded Ḧss; indeed, the visit ended with the Reich Leader of the SS awarding the camp commandant a promotion. At an evening reception, Ḧss noted that Himmler ‘was in the best of spirits, took a leading part in the conversation and was extremely amiable, especially towards the ladies’. The next day Himmler went to the women’s camp, ‘attended the whipping of a female criminal’ and ‘talked with some female Jehovah’s Witnesses and discussed with them their fanatical beliefs’. In his final address before departing, Himmler ordered an intensification of the killing and urged Ḧss to complete the construction of the new camp at Birkenau as quickly as possible.
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From July onwards, German Jews began to arrive, first from Vienna and then, in November and December, from Berlin. Trains began to deliver Jews from Romania, Croatia, Finland, Norway, then Bulgaria, Italy and Hungary, Serbia, Denmark, Greece and southern France.
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Most of the Jews were transported directly to Auschwitz from their country of origin, but some came from a special camp set up in the northern Czech town of Terezin, known to the Germans as Theresienstadt, where the central prison of the Gestapo in the Protectorate had been established. Work began on this new camp in November 1941, and the first 10,000 Jews arrived at the beginning of January 1942. Its initial purpose was to act as a collection centre for Czech Jews, and it was organized on the lines of a ghetto, with a Jewish Council led by an Elder, the Zionist Jakob Edelstein, who was well known to Adolf Eichmann as a leading figure among Czech Jews. Under Edelstein’s leadership, the camp developed a wide range of cultural and sporting activities, established a welfare system, and received sufficient money from the German authorities to function as a kind of model ghetto, to be filmed for international newsreels and displayed to visiting delegations of organizations like the Red Cross. One movie completed towards the end of November 1944 showed parks, swimming pools, sporting activities, schools, concerts and happy faces everywhere. Entitled
The Leader Gives the Jews a Camp
, it was never actually shown. Its director was the German-Jewish actor Kurt Gerron, who had achieved fame towards the end of the Weimar Republic by singing the part of Mack the Knife in the first recording of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s
Threepenny Opera
and starring with Emil Jannings opposite Marlene Dietrich in the film
The Blue Angel
. In 1933 he had fled first to Paris and then to Holland, where he continued making films; but following the Nazi invasion he was interned along with other Jews and sent to Theresienstadt. Gerron organized a cabaret show in the camp, entitled
The Carousel
, an enterprise so successful that he seemed a natural choice to direct the film, which he did under duress. After it was completed, Gerron was taken to Auschwitz on the last transport to leave the camp, on 18 October 1944, and gassed.
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