Army of Evil: A History of the SS (53 page)

There were approximately 850 prisoners in Treblinka at the start of the revolt. Some 350 to 400 (including many of the leaders) were killed
within the camp; about 100 did not make it outside the wire (some of these were too weak to try, while others clung to the hope that they would not be killed if they displayed “loyalty”); and about 350 managed to escape. Of these, about half were captured and killed during the next twenty-four hours. Thereafter, the German security forces combed the forests and countryside for several more days. They picked up several more escapees, while a number were reputedly caught and either murdered immediately or handed over to the National Socialists by local peasants. However, an estimated hundred or so of the prisoners were never recaptured.
¹³

The Treblinka uprising was an act of heroic defiance; and, in spite of the heavy cost, it was certainly a risk worth taking for the otherwise doomed prisoners. By the time it was launched, Operation Reinhard was nearly complete, because the overwhelming majority of the target group had already been eliminated. Two transports arrived from the Bialystock ghetto in the third week of August 1943, and their occupants were exterminated, but the greatly reduced prisoner population meant that the process took much longer than had previously been the case. Thereafter, most of the Bialystock Jews were sent to Auschwitz, Majdanek and Theresienstadt.

In many respects, the revolt at Sobibor was better organised and more successful than the Treblinka uprising. The catalyst for the revolt was the arrival of a transport of Jews from Minsk on 23 September 1943. Among the two thousand prisoners was a group of about a hundred Jewish Soviet Army prisoners of war, including Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky. About eighty men from the transport, most of them from this group, were spared the gas chambers and began to work in the camp. By the end of the month, they were formulating plans for a mass escape. Pechersky’s military bearing and obvious leadership ability attracted the attention of longer-term prisoners and their unofficial leaders, and a dialogue quickly opened up between the existing camp underground and the new arrivals.

Pechersky’s first escape scheme involved digging a thirty-five-metre tunnel.
Work began on this in early October, but after a few days of smooth excavation, heavy rain caused the tunnel to flood and it was abandoned. Pechersky decided that a more direct method was required, so he started to devise a means of eliminating the SS men within the camp, followed by a mass breakout through the gates. By this stage, the rebels had already made two discoveries that gave them hope: first, the camp commandant, Captain Franz Reichleitner, and his second-in-command, Sergeant Gustav Wagner, as well as several other members of the SS staff, would soon be going to Germany on leave; second, only those Ukrainian guards who were on duty carried ammunition for their rifles.
*

In essence, Pechersky’s plan was to kill the SS men in the camp, then assemble as if nothing had happened for evening roll-call, march towards and then rush the gates, and suppress any resistance from the guards with weapons captured from the Germans or stolen from the camp armoury. This plan was put into action on 14 October. During the afternoon, the SS staff were invited into various workshops and storerooms by prisoners, where they were killed with axe blows to the head. Among the dead were the acting commandant, Second Lieutenant Niemann, ten other SS NCOs and one Ukrainian guard. As the afternoon drew to a close, the prisoners moved on to the second phase and began to form up, as if for roll-call. It was at this stage that the plan began to unravel. A group of prisoners attacked the armoury, where they severely wounded Sergeant Werner Dubois. However, this assault, together with the discovery of a body elsewhere in the camp, caused shooting to break out, and the leaders of the revolt started to lose control as panicking prisoners began to climb the fences. Many were shot by the Ukrainian guards and two surviving SS NCOs; others died in the minefields that had been sown around the perimeter. Nevertheless,
of the six hundred or so prisoners who had been in the main part of the camp, around three hundred managed to escape.

Unlike at Treblinka, the prisoners had cut the telephone lines, so it was some time before the remaining SS men were able to call for back-up. A mounted squadron of SS and police finally arrived in Sobibor by train at around midnight, followed by a company from the Army’s 689th Security Battalion in the early hours of 15 October. These forces immediately began to sweep the local forests. Later, they were joined by more SS and Sipo units. Many of the escapees were eventually found, while others were turned in or murdered by the local population, but around fifty managed to find refuge. A small group of the Soviet POWs joined a partisan group whom they met in the forest, and several of them, including Pechersky, survived the war. All of the Jewish prisoners still in Sobibor—numbering at least 150—were executed on the afternoon of 15 October on the orders of SS-Major General Sporrenberg, who had succeeded Globocnik as Lublin’s SSPF.
*

I
N PRINCIPLE, THE
decision to bring Operation Reinhard to an end was taken in the spring of 1943, after Himmler had visited the camps. By this stage, the great majority of the Jews in the General Government had been murdered, and it was thought that any left alive could be dealt with by the extermination facilities at Majdanek and, especially, Auschwitz–Birkenau.

The first of the Reinhard camps to cease operations was Belzec, where mass murder ended in March–April 1943. From that point onwards,
all effort went into demolishing the camp and hiding the evidence of the terrible crimes that had been committed there. A small detail of surviving prisoners did the work: tearing down the buildings, levelling the mass graves and planting trees across the site. The work had been finished by July, at which point the work detail was transported to Sobibor and murdered. Belzec’s guards were redistributed around Sobibor, Treblinka and the labour camp at Poniatowa, where Belzec’s last commandant, SS-Captain Gottlieb Hering, took over as camp commander.

The SS’s attempt to conceal evidence was a complete failure. As soon as the Germans had left the area, local Poles began to dig up the mass graves in search of gold and valuables. Consequently, the ground was soon strewn with identifiable human remains.
*

The final death toll for Operation Reinhard is difficult to determine, not least because the SS’s own records did not survive. Murdered Jews were not registered on arrival at the camps. They were simply sent there as a transport of “x” number of Jews from the ghettoes and killed. Consequently, estimates can be based only on numbers who are known to have resided in the “evacuated” areas prior to the war; numbers who lived in the ghettoes; and numbers who arrived in the camps on each transport. Hilberg suggests that some 1.5 million Jews died in Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor between March 1942 and November 1943; in addition, approximately 150,000 Jews and others were murdered at Kulmhof, which, although not officially part of Operation Reinhard, killed its victims in a similar manner.
¹⁴
Arad estimates that 1.7 million died in the Reinhard camps alone.
¹⁵

The SS conducted its own statistical estimate in early 1943. Dr. Richard Korherr, chief inspector of the organisation’s statistical department, was commissioned by Himmler to present a report on Europe’s Jewish population. Korherr looked at the entire programme of
emigration, deportation and extermination, with Eichmann’s Section IV B4 his main source of information. However, his detailed figures for Operation Reinhard came from SS-Major Hermann Höfle, Globocnik’s staff officer, presumably based on numbers from each transport.

Höfle sent a telegram to the commander of the Sipo in Cracow on 11 January 1943 in which he reported the number of Jews killed in all of the Reinhard camps:

• Lublin-Majdanek 24,733

• Belzec 434,508

• Sobibor 101,370

• Treblinka 713,555
*

• Total 1,274,166
¹⁶

Based on these figures (compiled more than six months before Sobibor ceased operations), a final estimate of at least 1.5 million seems entirely plausible, if not conservative.

In addition to extracting an obscene human toll, Operation Reinhard amassed an enormous amount of loot. The SS had always sought to profit from their persecution of the Jews: those who had been forced to emigrate from pre-war Germany and Austria had been obliged to pay extortionate fees for the privilege of leaving their homes, which had left many of them virtually destitute. Those who were murdered in Operation Reinhard were stripped of everything they possessed: food, clothing, cash, jewellery, art, even their hair and their gold teeth. Administration of this booty was loose, at best: some of it was taken by corrupt SS men, acting on their own initiative; some was pilfered by the Ukrainian guards; and some found its way into the hands of local Poles through black-market trading with the SS, the guards and even the prisoners. But the great majority—amounting to hundreds of
millions of marks—was sorted by the prisoner labour force and sent to the WVHA. In a note dated September 1943, Globocnik recorded that he had sent some eighteen hundred rail cars of textiles to Germany;
¹⁷
and in a subsequent note to Himmler he boasted that the “‘decency and honesty’ of his men had guaranteed a complete delivery of assets.”
¹⁸

Operation Reinhard comprised the largest—and most efficiently run—element of the Holocaust. Almost all of the material required for the construction of the camps, including the gas chambers, was sourced locally, and the logistical support they required was minimal. In total, the three camps required only 120 SS men and no more than 400 Ukrainian auxiliaries. All of the physical labour was performed by the continually changing roster of 500 to 1,000 prisoners that each camp temporarily saved from death. The operation came to an end only because Globocnik had largely achieved his aim of annihilating the entire Jewish population of the General Government. And the industrial extermination machinery of Auschwitz could easily take care of the few who were left.

*
A few months later, in August 1939, Himmler awarded Globocnik the
Totenkopfring
—his personal honour that was supposedly not available to any SS member with a tarnished disciplinary record. Whether this indicates that Himmler did not believe the allegations or simply did not care is unclear.

*
This highlights the legal status of the Waffen-SS. The T-4 personnel of Operation Reinhard were supposedly performing military service in the camps, so they were given the same status as combat-unit members of the SS.

*
The trains usually set off with between sixty and eighty wagons, but this exceeded the capacity of the reception facilities in the camp, so they were split into groups of twenty for the final part of their journey.

*
The “(F)” denotes that Gerstein was a
Fachführer
(specialist officer).

*
By this time, Globocnik had accumulated some forty million kilos of textiles—far too much to be disinfected in existing commercial facilities. Gerstein negotiated with some commercial disinfectors, but they baulked at the scale of the task. Eventually, Globocnik and Gerstein decided simply to sprinkle disinfectant on the clothes, so that at least they smelled as if they had been disinfected.

†
Gerstein’s account has been criticised because it undeniably contains exaggerations as well as descriptions of events that he did not witness. Nevertheless, his presence at the gassing at Belzec on 17 August is corroborated by other witnesses and there is no doubt that his account of this specific event is largely accurate.

*
“Hackenholt Foundation”—the SS men’s nickname for the gas chamber at Belzec—named after Lorenz Hackenholt.

*
A large department store, equivalent to Harrods in London or Macy’s in New York.

*
What follows is derived largely from Stangl himself. His testimony is unique among those of extermination camp commanders in that it was given—in a series of interviews with Gitta Sereny in 1970—without a hint of compulsion. Sereny’s book,
Into That Darkness
, therefore gives an unsurpassed insight into the mind-set of a major perpetrator of the Holocaust. Stangl’s attitude to what he did can best be described as a kind of morose, fatalistic detachment.

*
By his own account Stangl neither liked nor had a good working relationship with Wirth.

*
Eberl subsequently served as a doctor with the army. He returned to civilian medical practice after the war, but committed suicide in custody after his arrest in 1948.

*
Berliner had been visiting relations in Warsaw with his wife and daughter when the war broke out. His Argentinian citizenship did not protect him and he and his family were deported to Treblinka a few days before his attack on Bialas. Both his wife and daughter had been murdered on arrival at the camp.

*
Anielewicz and his command group committed suicide in their bunker on 8 May.