15: The Camps
Sometime in 1941, after witnessing executions at Minsk, Heinrich Himmler summoned Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the largest concentration camp in Poland, and gave him secret oral instructions.
"He told me," testified Hoess, "something to the effect -- I do not remember the exact words -- that the Fuehrer had given the order for a final solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, must carry out that order. If it is not carried out now the Jews will later on destroy the German people."
Himmler said he had chosen Hoess's camp since Auschwitz, strategically located near the border of Germany, afforded space for measures requiring isolation. Hoess was warned that this operation was to be treated as a secret Reich matter, and he was forbidden to discuss the matter with his immediate superior.
Hoess returned to Poland and, behind the back of the inspector of concentration camps, quietly began to expand his grounds with the intent of turning them into the greatest killing center in man's history. He did not even tell his wife what he was doing.
With the conclusion of the Wansee conference of January 20, 1942, a new phase of the mass murder of Jews was about to begin. To mass slaughter and starvation was to be added a third method of killing: murder by poison gas.
Two months before Wansee, 1,200 German political prisoners had been taken from Buchenwald concentration camp to the town of Bernberg, just south of Berlin. There, at a euthanasia institute where thousands of Germans had already been murdered, the new arrivals were put to death by gas.
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Starting in December 1941, with the deportations to the Chelmno death camp, and reaching a crescendo in the summer and autumn of 1942, no day passed in German-occupied Poland without one or more communities being deported. Sometimes a whole community was taken on a single day. At other times, five or six deportations were needed to clear ("liquidate") the whole ghetto. Very few people, mostly young able-bodied men and some women, were kept back as slave laborers.
Each deportation saw scenes of barbarity, episodes that have remained seared in the minds of those who saw them. In Piotrkow, during eight days in October, 22,000 Jews were deported from the ghetto and killed at Treblinka. Two thousand managed to hide and escape deportation. Repeated searches were made for them, and those caught were taken outside the town, to the Rakow forest, and shot.
On November 25, 1942, those still in hiding were offered a chance of staying in the ghetto "legally" if they surrendered. Many did so and they were taken to the synagogue and locked in. The building was then surrounded by uniformed Ukrainian volunteers, who shot into the building at random. Those who survived the shooting were taken to the Rakow forest and killed.
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The deportation of Polish Jewry that began in December 1941, was to four death camps: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. In each of these camps almost every deportee was murdered. A fragment, a few hundred people in each death camp, was kept alive as slave labor, to sort the clothes of the victims, and to service the SS facilities. The rest, including all the able-bodied deportees -- men and women -- were sent from the railway sidings to their deaths in the gas chambers.
At Chelmno, betwen December 8, 1941, and the late summer of 1942, 360,000 Jews, many of them from the Lodz ghetto, were murdered, as were several thousand gypsies. The ghettos around Chelmno were sytematically emptied, and their inhabitants sent, by truck and by train, to the brick mill at the hamlet of Zawadki. At the mill they were forced in groups of up to sixty at a time, into a large van (there were two vans in the camp).
By the time each van reached the death camp site, all those inside it were dead -- killed by carbon monoxide. A small group of deportees, a dozen at a time, were saved from this final journey, and forced to pull the dead bodies out of the vans. Those Jews were then shot: several hundred in all. Only two managed to escape: one of them, Yakov Grojanowski, brought the details of the whole terrible process to the Jews of Warsaw.
At Belzec, starting on March 17, 1942, and continuing for almost a year, 600,000 Jews from throughout Galicia were killed. Many thousands of Jews from Lublin and Lvov, vibrant centers of pre-war Jewish creativity, were among those murdered at Belzec.
Also sent to Belzec, and killed on reaching the camp, were several thousand Jews brought by train almost a thousand miles from Germany. They included 320 from Wuerzburg and 224 from Fuerth on March 24; 650 from Nuremberg on April 24; 2,100 from Dortmund on May 1; and 260 from Duesseldorf on July 22. They were first kept at a camp sixty miles from Belzec, at Izbica Lubelska -- in a camp where hundreds were killed by sadistic guards -- and the remainder taken on by train to Belzec. Many died on the trains; the rest were murdered on reaching the camp.
At Sobibor, starting in early April 1942, and continuing for a year, more than 250,000 Jews were killed, mostly from central Poland. Several deportation trains of Dutch Jews were also brought from Westerbork to Sobibor; all the deportees were killed on arrival.
At Treblinka, in less than a year, an estimated 750,000 Jews, half a million of them from Warsaw, were killed by gas. The first deportation took place on July 22, 1942. Treblinka was set up in a secluded wood, just over forty miles from Warsaw. A spur railway line was built from the village station into the wood. In the first month, 66,701 Warsaw Jews were deported to Treblinka and killed.
There was a fifth camp where everyone was murdered on arrival: Maly Trostinets, near Minsk, in German-occupied Belorussia. Jews were deported there across Europe by train, then murdered in gas vans during the drive from a wayside railway station to the camp. The first deportation train reached the camp on May 10, 1942. Most trains came from the Theresienstadt ghetto. At least 26,000 Jews, mostly from Theresienstadt but also from Holland, were murdered at Maly Trostinets, as well as 39,000 Jews brought from the Minsk ghetto.
More than a third of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust were murdered in the five death camps: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Maly Trostinets.
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Starting in the summer of 1942, the concentration camp at Auschwitz, which had until that time been a place where Poles had been held, was turned into a killing place for Jews. Across the railway from the main camp, at Birkenau, a vast area of barracks was created, and four gas chambers built. Experiments in murder by gas had been carried out on Soviet prisoners of war during the spring.
The first Jews to reach the barracks at Birkenau were 2,000 slovak Jews deported from Bratislava on March 26, 1942, and 1,112 mostly Polish-born Jews deported from France on the following day. On that first -- of more than seventy -- deportation trains from Paris, there were Jews who had been born in London, Marrakech, Haifa, Istanbul and Copenhagen. They had been living in France when the war began. After the fall of France, police rounded them up for deportation.
The first Jews to be "selected" at Birkenau to be murdered by gas were taken from the sick bay by an SS medical officer on May 4, 1942. They were loaded onto a truck and taken to the gas chamber -- known also as Bunker I or Crematorium I -- at Auschwitz main camp. More than a thousand exhausted, sick Jews -- condemned to death because they were "incapable of working" -- were killed by gas that May.
Between May 5 and May 11, 1942, more than 10,000 Polish Jews were brought by train from the nearby ghettos of Dabrowa Gornicza, Bedzin, Zawierce and Gliwice, in German-annexed Poland. Of these deportees, 5,200 were gassed on arrival. This set the pattern for the coming two and a half years.
From May 1942, deportation trains began to arrive at Auschwitz with increasing regularity. All old people, women with children, babies, young people, and children with or without mothers, were taken from the railway siding, mostly in trucks, direct to the gas chambers. Most of the able-bodied men and women among the deportees were tattooed with a number on their forearm, and sent to the barracks at Birkenau. There they formed a vast force of slave labor, numbering by late 1944, more than 30,000 in Birkenau and the nearby slave labor camps.
On May 27, 1942, 3,000 Jews from Theresienstadt and 2,000 from Prague were brought to Auschwitz by train and gassed. A second deportation from Paris to Auschwitz took place on June 5, followed by three more from Paris before the end of the month. That June, 3,831 Jews from France were gassed on arrival. By the end of June, 52,000 Slovak Jews had been killed by gas. They had been brought from more than twenty towns in Slovakia.
Henceforth, deportees to Auschwitz were brought from two main areas: from Western Europe, and from the Silesian and Zaglemba regions of German-annexed southwest Poland. Methodically, ghettos in southwest Poland were combed for deportees. In June they were brought from Krzepice, Chrzanow, Olkusz, Sosnowiec, and Bielsko-Biala. From these five ghettos, 16,000 people were gassed on arrival.
In July 1942, the first deportations from Holland reached Auschwitz: seven trains, from which 5,978 Dutch Jews were taken straight to the gas chambers. That month, on July 10, the first hundred Jewish women, then in the barracks in Birkenau, were taken by the SS for medical experiments, including sterilization.
Those carrying out the experiments were German doctors, trained in medical schools in Germany, who had decided to cast in their lot with the SS -- the much feared Dr. Mengele joined them, as an SS captain, in May 1943. Standing at the head of the line of deportees, Mengele, immaculately dressed in SS uniform, with white gloves, would indicate with the flick of his finger where the person in front of him must go, to the left of to the right. One way was to the gas chambers, the other to the barracks.
The killings at Auschwitz-Birkenau took place between the summer of 1942 and the last months of 1944, more than a million Jews were murdered.
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The man put in charge of supplying Auschwitz and a few other small camps with Zyklon B was SS First Lieutenant Kurt Gerstein, a technical genius who, as it turned out, led a strange and contrdictory life. His mentally ill sister-in-law had been one of the first victims of the T-4 program, and upon learning of her death the bitter Gerstein joined the SS in order "to see clearly into its workings and proclaim them to the world."
Throughout the war, he dutifully kept Auschwitz supplied with Zylkon B, but he destroyed some of his own shipments and claimed that they had spoiled or were lost. He also passed forbidden information on the gas extermination program to the Catholic Archbishop of Berlin, the Swedish embassy and the Dutch Resistance. It was in vain. The Church apparently ignored him, the Swedes did not pass his report on to the Allies until after the war, and the Dutch Resistance kept the information secret for fear that it would not be believed.
In the end, all that Gerstein accomplished was to have the gas formula modified slightly, removing a chemical that made deaths particularly agonizing. At the end of the war, he turned himself into the French, handed them his autobiography and then hanged himself in his cell in a military prison in Paris.
While Zyklon B was the chosen gas at Auschwitz, carbon monoxide was employed at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and, for the most part, at Majdanek. That five of the six new death camps chose the less efficient gas apparently was due to Christian Wirth, the overseer of Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. He was partial to carbon monoxide because he had helped perfect the carbon monoxide gas chamber during the T-4 program.
As first, it seemed that Wirth would change his mind; under pressure from Eichmann and others who favored the use of Zyklon B, he reluctantly agreed to convert his gas chambers. To see to the conversion, Lieutenant Gerstein and Eichmann's deputy, Rolf Guenther, arrived at Belzec bearing 200 pounds of Zyklon B. But before the work began, Wirth asked the visitors to watch a carbon monoxide operation in four gas chambers, each packed with 750 people. Gerstein pulled out a stopwatch and timed the operation. Because of difficulties with the diesel engine that produced the gas, the procedure went on for three hours before the last Jew died.
Wirth was mortified and begged the men not to report the incident. Out of sympathy for Wirth, the quixotic Gerstein and the obliging Guenther agreed. Thereafter, sheer stubbornness kept Wirth using the inferior gas in his camps.
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