22: Genocide

"One believes but can never fully comprehend." -- David Max Eichorn.

On January 20, 1943, Himmler wrote to the Reich Minister of Transport about "the removal of Jews" from every area to which German rule or authority then extended. To complete this task, Himmler explained, "I need your help and support. If I am to wind things up quickly, I must have more trains for transport."

Himmler's wish was the Transport Minister's command. Not that there had been any relaxation of deportations that winter. On the day after Himmler wrote his letter, a deportation train left Holland carrying all 1,100 adults from the Jewish mental home at Apeldoorn, and 74 boys and 24 girls from the nearby home for seriously physically and mentally handicapped children. There destination was Auschwitz; their fate was to be sent to the gas chambers on arrival. Fifty nurses accompanied the patients. They were put in a separate carriage at one end of the train and offered the choice of returning to Holland after delivering their patients, or working in a "really modern" mental home in the east. All of them were murdered at Auschwitz.

As Himmler had requested, extra trains were found. "Action Tiger", the seizure of 4,000 Jews in Marseilles, and their deportation, first to Paris and then to Auschwitz, was carried two days after Himmler's letter.

In February 1943, Josef Goebbels was determined to rid Berlin of its Jews, and on the night of the 27th, he ordered a raid on the city's munitions factories. The factories were surrounded by SS troops who kept 7,000 Jewish slave laborers inside the factories until trucks arrived to take them away to the Grunewald railway station, in the suburbs. There the deportation trains were waiting.

Goebbels was not satisfied, writing in his diary: "The better circles, particularly the intellectuals, do not understand our Jewish policy and partly side with the Jews. As a result, our operation was revealed prematurely, so that quite a few Jews slipped through our hands. But we'll catch them yet. At any rate I won't rest until at least the capital has become completely Jew-free."

In the summer of 1943, Mussolini's fascist regime was overthrown. To prevent the Allies from advancing through Italy to the Austrian Alps, German troops entered Rome. On October 16, 1943, there was a round-up of Jews in Rome. Two days later, 1,015 Italian Jewish men, women and children -- 244 under the age of fourteen -- were deported to Auschwitz. Within eight months, 6,746 Italian Jews had been deported. Only 830 survived the war.

The range of Himmler's use of trains was formidable. Jews were deported to Auschwitz even from the tiny principality of Luxembourg; from as far north as the Finnish capital of Helsinki, and the Estonian town of Narva; from as far south as Athens, and -- through Athens -- from the Italian ruled islands of Kos and Rhodes, which were occupied by Germany when Italy surrendered. Jews were also deported from the island of Corfu, in the Ionian Sea.

Remote locations did not escape the search and round-up. From Kastoria in Greece, and from Nea Orastea on the Greek-Turkish border, Jews were deported to Auschwitz in March 1943. That March -- as Himmler request for trains was being answered with great efficiency -- 1,814 Jews were deported from the Pyrenees, the border with neutral Spain. The deportees were mostly German Jews who had been driven from their homes and deported to Gurs two and a half years earlier.

--

Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin in 1917, during the First World War. Her father, Professor Albert Salomon was a surgeon and had served in the German Army as a doctor at the front during that war. In 1933, he lost his professorship, and soon afterwards, in common with all Jewish doctors, was deprived of the right to practice medicine. In 1935, Charlotte was admitted as a student to the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, which allowed in a small number of Jewish students whose fathers had served the Army in World War I. Her first professor there, Ernst Boehm, a commercial artist, was later dismissed because his wife was Jewish.

After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Professor Salomon was held briefly in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In January 1939, he and Charlotte were given permission to emigrate and they decided to make their home at Villefranche, in the South of France, a thousand miles from Berlin. After the fall of France, Charlotte was briefly interned at Gurs, in the Pyranees, but then allowed to go back to Villefranche. In May 1943, she married Alexander Nagler, an Austrian Jewish refugee.

On September 8, 1943, after Italy signed an armistice with the Allies, German troops occupied the South of France. At Villefranche, as well as throughout the coastal region, both the police headquarters and the town hall were taken over by the Gestapo. On the evening of September 21, a Gestapo truck stopped at the house where Charlotte and her husband were living. They were dragged out of the house and thrown into the truck. At the time, Charlotte was four months pregnant.

On October 7, Charlotte and her husband were deported to Auschwitz. They went to the gas chamber upon their arrival on October 12.

Charlotte's father survived the war. In 1971, he gave the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam more than 1,300 paintings that his daughter had done, constituting a dramatized autobiography that she had called Life? or Theater? She had painted them in the South of France in the three years before her deportation to Auschwitz.

--

"On October 23, 1943, a group of 1,750 Polish Jews who had been held at Belsen, ostensibly to be exchanged for German citizens held by the Allies, were deported to Birkenau. Driven towards the undressing section of the gas chamber by SS Sergeant Major Josef Schillinger, they were ordered to undress. As they did so the SS guards seized rings from their fingers and watches from their wrists: a final act of looting.

"When Schillinger ordered one of the women to undress completely, she threw her shoe in his face, seized his revolver, and shot him in the stomach. She also wounded SS Sergeant Emmerich. According to some reports she was a dancer from Warsaw, named Horowitz.

"After her act of defiance, other women began to strike the SS men, at the very entrance to the gas chamber, severely injuring two of them. The SS men fled. Shortly afterwards they returned, armed with grenades and machine guns, with the camp commandant, Rudolf Hoess. One by one the women were removed from the gas chamber building, and shot."

-- Report of Jerzy Tabau, a non-Jewish Polish prisoner at Auschwitz who escaped shortly after this episode, and who included it in his report -- which reached the Allied governments in the summer of 1944, and was published in Washington and London.

--

"'On the side, you dirty Jew!': words forever seared in my brain by SS Sergeant Heinrich Kuhnemann as he tore my father from me with the crook of his cane in a 'selection' of those to be immediately gassed and burned. When I last saw him -- beside the dark and fetid freight car that had transported us into a surreal world of searchlights, high-voltage fences, snarling German wolfhounds, and their blackshirted masters -- Chaim Mielnicki was but forty-seven years of age. And I have never recovered from his loss.

"Nor have I ever been able to reconcile myself to the obscene and mocking death inflicted on him by the forces of Hitlerian malevolence. Such a vital, decent, intelligent devoted, hardworking man, my father -- that he'd always seemed to me, his youngest child, the very essence of Chaim, his given name -- as in L'Chaim, the traditional Jewish toast 'to life.'"

-- Michel Mielnicki, born at Wasilkow, near Bialystok, in 1927. Deported to Auschwitz in December 1942, living in Vancouver since 1966.

--

"The next day I watched a long column of trucks driving down the main road toward a red brick building about a thousand feet away. They were carrying Jews from Holland, someone told me. Young and old were standing up in canvas-covered trucks. I particularly remember a girl with long blond hair who was wearing a green loden coat. 'Soon you will see the smoke; they are done for.' said the man next to me. And sure enough, the chimney started up as if for a command performance.

"It was chilling moments like these, in the very first days of Auschwitz, that prompted me to find a way to sketch again. Only now I felt obsessed, driven in fact by the overwhelming desire to put down every detail of this unfathomable place. I began to observe everything with an eye towards capturing it on paper: the shapes of the buildings, the insulators on the barbed-wire poles, the battalions of workers at labor sites, the searching for lice, the women carrying soup in heavy barrels, the incredibly eerie feeling of Auschwitz at night with its strange lights and with glows of flames from the crematorium. At first I began to memorize scenes of the day's activity and then drawing them at night in the barracks when no one was looking."

-- Alfred Kantor, born in Czechoslovakia, deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz.

--

"I recall a Dutch Jew asking angrily, 'Where is my wife? Where are my children?' The Jews in the barracks said to him, 'Look at the chimney. They are there. Up there.' But the Dutch Jew cursed them. 'There are so many camps around,' he said. 'They promised me we would be kept together.' This is the greatest strength of the whole crime, its unbelievability. When we came to Auschwitz, we smelled the sweet smell. They said to us: 'There the people are gassed, three kilometers over there.' We didn't believe it."

-- Lilli Kopecky, deported from Slovakia to Auschwitz.

--

The German war machine used Jewish and non-Jewish forced labor as one of its principle means of producing armaments, and -- in the absence of so many able-bodied German men at the front -- to maintain agricultural production. Five million five hundred thousand non-Jewish forced laborers were brought to Germany from every occupied country. A further 2,500,000 prisoners of war were put to forced labor. Conditions of labor varied: they could be harsh in the extreme. One quarter of all munitions -- rifles, artillery pieces, grenades -- sent to the war fronts was produced in German-owned factories by Russian, Polish, French and other deportees.

Jewish slave laborers were among those force to make munitions, and a vast range of other goods, including German army uniforms. Many of these Jews were treated as if they were totally expendable. Their lives were less important than the work they did. Most were subjected to repeated beatings, and given less food and less medical attention, if any, than the foreign laborers. Many of them were worked to exhaustion, or beaten to death as they worked.

In the period after the mass deportations of Jews from the ghettos to the death camps and slaughter pits, almost all those still in the ghettos were used as slave laborers -- both inside the ghetto walls and outside them -- until the deportations and killings were renewed in the spring and summer of 1944. Slave labor camps were also set up inside Germany, as the badly bombed war industries were forced to move underground.

In some ghettos -- principally Lodz and Kovno -- the slave labor system kept tens of thousands of Jews alive for more than two years after the first deportations and killings. Work seemed the way to survive. In the Bialystok and Vilna ghettos, work permits, and the rations that they ensured, were regarded as "the road to life" for tens of thousands of people.

In some slave labor camps, the chance of survival was small. At the explosives factory at Skarzysko-Kamienna, in one section, Work C, where the explosives were made, almost none of the laborers survived. Of 20,000 Jews taken to Skarzysko-Kemienna from the surrounding ghettos, 14,000 (70%) were killed: when the became too weak to work, they were taken to the camp's firing range, and shot.

Skarzysko-Kemienna was one of 1,750 labor camps (Arbeitslager) in the Generalgouvernement, of which 437 were for Jews (Judenlager). In the rest, more than five million Poles toiled for their captors. The owners and operators of Skarzysko-Kemienna were the Hasag (Hugo Schneider Stock Company) industries: in 1943, 80% of the stock was held by three leading German banks. Hasag had other factories in the Generalgouvernement, including one in Czestochowa.

The largest slave labor camp region was set up around Auschwitz. Jews not selected for the gas chambers were sent to arms factories, coal mines, and the synthetic rubber and oil production plant of Buna -- located in Monowitz, a few miles from the gas chambers of Birkenau. This plant, known as Auschwitz III, was specially set up by the German industrial giant, I. G. Farben, in order to make use of slave labor. The Nuremberg war crimes trials concluded that Buna was "financed and owned by Farben" and that what took place there was "a crime against humanity."

German industry's use of concentration camp labor was central to its manpower needs. On October 20, 1942, SS Lieutenant General Pohl, Chief of the SS Economic and Administrative Department, informed Himmler that the German industrial firm of Siemens was building new barracks at Ravensbrueck concentration camp to house 2,500 women who would work on telecommunications equipment for the Army. The commandant of Auschwitz, Hoess, provided 1,200 women workers to Siemens in 1943 and about 1,500 in 1944. They each bore a tattoo number and worked in a factory manufacturing electrical switches for aircraft. The factory was located at Bobrek, five miles from Auschwitz. When Hermann Goering complained to Himmler that not enough concentration camp inmates were being used for aircraft production, the SS chief referred in his reply to the Siemens factory at Auschwitz.

Siemens also used concentration camp labor elsewhere: 550 Jewish women, bearing tattoo numbers 55,740 to 56,290, were sent to the Siemens factory in Nuremberg; 1,200 women were taken from Sachsenhausen to Siemens-Berlin. When those works were bombed, Siemens moved operations to Buchenwald. Inmates from Buchenwald also worked for Siemens in Bavaria; inmates from Gross Rosen worked for Siemens in Brandenburg.

Freddie Knoller, born in Vienna, a slave laborer at Buna, later recalled: "I had to carry twenty-five kilograms of cement bags on my back, day-in, day-out. . . . People dropped like flies."

Prisoners who weakened or sickened to the point where they could no longer work were swiftly sent to the gas chamber. The meager fare fed to the prisoners guaranteed that they would not have the strength to work for more than a few months. Accidents and brutality by SS guards reduced the prisoners' life expectancy still further.

In desperation, sick and crippled prisoners somehow managed to work on and on. One prisoner at a Mauthhausen satellite camp, building an airplane-assembly plant, was beaten by his overseer with a shovel, "until he broke both the shovel and my arm." But the man stayed on the job without medical attention. "If they took my to the infirmary," he said, "I'd lose the work and my life.

--

"Of medium height, blond, with steel-cold colorless eyes and the glossy gaze of one accustomed to heavy drinking, Feix appeared restless. His expression was one of undisguised rancor, cruelty his strongest facial characteristic. Standing erect with legs apart, wearing polished boots, a pistol in an open holster, and a Mauser hanging from his neck, he seemed ready to make the welcoming address.

"'You are fortunate to have come here. This is a good camp. Here you will work and get fed. Of course, if you expect to eat, you will have to work for it and as long as you work, you will get along fine. Now, it is prohibited to possess any silver, gold, money or jewelry -- therefore, if you turn it in now, you will not be punished.' Just at this moment, someone moved in the ranks. Feix whipped out his gun and shot him on the spot, then resumed without a pause: 'Now, when I finish speaking, I want you to turn in your valuables, such as gold, silver, diamonds, and currency.'"

-- George Topas, recalling SS Sergeant Reinhold Feix, camp commandant at Budzyn slave labor camp.