Auschwitz (11 page)

The shootings continued all day. Several thousand Jews—men, women, and children—were murdered, but there were simply too many Jews for the SS to kill everyone in this single action. So, at nightfall, the remainder, including Vasyl Valdeman and his family, were moved back to Ostrog. In this and subsequent actions Vasyl lost his father, grandmother, grandfather, two brothers, and two uncles, but together with his mother he managed to escape from the ghetto and was hidden by local villagers for the next three years until the Red Army liberated the Ukraine. “I don't know about other villages,” he says, “but people in our village helped Jews very much.”

A few days later, Oleksiy Mulevych went out to visit the killing fields and saw a gruesome sight: “The sand was moving. I think there were wounded people who were moving under the sand. I felt sorry. I wanted to help, but then I understood that even if I took someone from the pit I could not cure them.”

“We had dogs at our house,” says Vasyl Valdeman, “but we never were as cruel to them as the fascists were to us ... I was thinking all the time, ‘What makes these people so cruel?'” Hans Friedrich has one answer to Vasyl Valdeman's question—hatred. “If I'm honest I have no empathy [for the Jews]. For the Jews harmed me and my parents so much that I cannot forget.” As a result, Friedrich is “not sorry” for murdering all the Jews he shot. “My hatred towards the Jews is too great.” When pressed, he admits that he felt—and still feels—justified in killing the Jews out of “revenge.”

An understanding of Friedrich's past is crucial to any attempt at comprehending both why he felt able to take part in the killing and why he feels able to defend his actions today. He was born in 1921 in a part of Romania dominated by ethnic Germans. As he grew up he learned to hate the Jews he and his family encountered. His father was a farmer and the Jews in the locality acted as traders, buying produce and then selling it at market. Friedrich was told by his parents that the Jews earned too much profit from their business
dealings and that he and his family were regularly cheated by them. “I would like to have seen you,” Friedrich adds, “if you had experienced what we experienced—if you were a farmer and wanted to sell, say, pigs and you couldn't do it. You could only do it via a Jewish trader. Try to put yourself in our position. You were no longer master of your own life.”

As adolescents during the 1930s, Friedrich and his friends painted posters that proclaimed, “Don't buy from Jews” and “The Jews are our misfortune,” and hung them over the entrance to a Jewish shop. He felt “proud” as he did this because he had “warned against the Jew.” He read the propaganda of the Nazi state—particularly the violently anti-Semitic
Der Stürmer
—and found that it fitted perfectly with his own developing worldview.

In 1940 he joined the SS “because the German Reich was at war” and he “wanted to be there.” He believes that “there were connections between Jews and Bolshevism—there was sufficient evidence to prove this.” When, as a member of the SS, Friedrich advanced into the Ukraine in the summer of 1941 he believed he wasn't entering a “civilized” country “like France,” but instead somewhere that was at best “half civilized” and “far behind Europe.” Then, when asked to kill Jews, he did it willingly, all the time thinking he was taking revenge for the Jewish traders who had allegedly cheated his family. That these were different Jews altogether—Jews, indeed, from another country—mattered not at all. As he puts it, “They're all Jews.”

Far from being sorry for having participated in the extermination of the Jews, Hans Friedrich has no regrets of any kind. Although he never said so in these terms, he gives every impression of being proud of what he and his comrades did. The justification for his actions is, in his mind, clear and absolute: The Jews did him and his family harm, and the world is a better place without them. In an unguarded moment, Adolf Eichmann remarked that the knowledge of having participated in the murder of millions of Jews gave him such satisfaction that he would “jump laughingly into his grave.” It is easy to see how Hans Friedrich might feel exactly the same emotion.

While this expansion in the killing was being implemented on the Eastern Front during the summer of 1941, however, it is less clear that this was the moment at which the whole of the Nazis' “Final Solution”—encompassing millions more Jews, including those in Germany, Poland, and western
Europe—was decided upon. One document does perhaps suggest a connection between the two. On July 31, Heydrich obtained Goering's signature on a paper which stated:

The timing of this document—on the face of it—is crucial: Goering signs Heydrich's general authorization for the “Final Solution” of all the Jews under German control at exactly the moment the killing squads are to be used to shoot Jewish women and children in the East.

However, a recent discovery in the Moscow Special Archive casts doubt on the special significance of the July 31st authorization. This document contains a note from Heydrich dated March 26, 1941, which states: “With respect to the Jewish question I reported briefly to the Reich Marshal [Goering] and submitted to him my new blueprint, which he authorized with one modification concerning Rosenberg's jurisdiction, and then ordered for resubmission.”
⁶⁵
Heydrich's “new blueprint” was most likely a response to the change in the Nazis' anti-Jewish policy caused by the forthcoming invasion of the Soviet Union. The idea of transporting the Jews to Africa had been abandoned and, early in 1941, Hitler had ordered Heydrich to prepare a scheme to deport the Jews somewhere within German control. The war with the Soviet Union was expected to last only a few weeks and be over before the onset of the Russian winter, so it was reasonable, Heydrich and Hitler must have felt, to plan for the Jews to be pushed further east that autumn in an internal solution to their self-created Jewish problem. In the wasteland of eastern Russia the Jews would suffer intensely.

As the July 31 authorization makes clear, Heydrich was first assigned the task of planning the “solution of the Jewish problem by emigration and evacuation” at the start of 1939, and so discussions about his jurisdiction and room for maneuver within the Nazi state on this issue must have been
ongoing since then. Alfred Rosenberg (mentioned in the March 26 document), who was formally appointed Minister of the Occupied Eastern Territories by Hitler on July 17, 1941, was a potential threat to Heydrich's own power in the East, and the July 31 authorization may well have been issued to help Heydrich clarify his own position.

So, on balance, the new evidence does not support the once prevalent view that there was some conclusive decision taken by Hitler in the spring or summer of 1941 to order the destruction of all the Jews of Europe, and the July 31 authorization is an important part. The more likely scenario is that as all the leading Nazis focused their attention on the war against the Soviet Union, the decision to kill the women and children in the East was seen as the practical way of solving an immediate and specific problem.

Nonetheless, this particular “solution” would, in turn, create further problems and, as a result, new killing methods would be devised which would enable Jews and others to be murdered on an even greater scale. A vital moment in that process of transformation occurred on August 15th when Heinrich Himmler visited Minsk and saw at first hand the work of his killing squads. One of those who attended the execution with him was Walter Frentz,
⁶⁶
an officer in the Luftwaffe who was working as a cameraman at Hitler's headquarters. Not only was Frentz shaken by the killings, it was clear to him that so were some members of the execution squad. Says Frentz,

It was not just this particular officer who felt traumatized after the Minsk shootings. SS Obergruppenführer (lieutenant-general) von dem Bach-Zelewski, who witnessed the same killings, said to Himmler, “Reichsführer, those were only a hundred.... Look at the eyes of the men in this Kommando, how deeply shaken they are! These men are finished for the rest of
their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages!”
⁶⁷
Subsequently, Bach-Zelewski himself became psychologically ill as a result of the murders, experiencing “visions” of the killings in which he had participated.

As a result of these protests and what he had personally witnessed, Himmler ordered a search for a method of killing that caused fewer psychological problems for his men. Accordingly, a few weeks later Dr. Albert Widmann, an SS Untersturmführer (2nd lieutenant) from the Technical Institute of the Criminal Police, traveled East to meet Artur Nebe, the commander of Einsatzgruppe B, at his headquarters in Minsk. Previously Widmann had been instrumental in devising the gassing technique used to murder mentally ill patients. Now he would bring his expertise east.

Incredibly, one of the first methods Widmann tried in an attempt to “improve” the killing process in the Soviet Union was to blow his victims up. Several mentally ill patients were put in a bunker along with packets of explosives. Wilhelm Jaschke, a captain in Einsatzkommando 8, witnessed what happened next:

Widmann learned from this gruesome experiment that murdering by explosion was clearly not the way forward Himmler desired, so he sought another method. The adult euthanasia program had successfully used bottled carbon monoxide as a killing method, but it was impractical to transport large numbers of such canisters thousands of kilometers. Maybe, Widmann and his colleagues thought, there was another way of using carbon monoxide to kill. Some weeks earlier Widmann and his boss, Dr. Walter Hess, had been sitting in a carriage on the Berlin underground chatting about the fate that had nearly befallen Artur Nebe. He had returned in his car from a party having had too much to drink, parked in his garage without
turning off the engine, and fallen asleep; as a result he had nearly died of carbon monoxide poisoning from the exhaust fumes.

It seems that the memory of the drunken Nebe emboldened Widmann to attempt a gassing experiment using a car exhaust connected by a pipe to the brick basement of a mental hospital in Mogilev, east of Minsk. A number of hospital patients were locked in the room and the car engine started. Initially the trial was not successful from the Nazis' point of view: Not enough carbon monoxide flowed from the car to kill the patients. This was rectified when a truck replaced the car. The experiment—again from the Nazis' perspective—was a success. Widmann had discovered a cheap, effective way of killing people that minimized the psychological impact of the crime on the killers.

So in the autumn of 1941, in the East, Widmann initiated a significant change in the Nazi killing process—that much is certain. But how and when the decision was taken that Auschwitz should become an integral part of the mass extermination of the Jews is still a matter of controversy. Part of the difficulty lies in the testimony given by Höss. Not only does he tend to present himself as a victim of both Himmler's demands and his incompetent staff, but also the precision of his dating is often unreliable. Höss states: “In the summer of 1941, Himmler called for me and explained: ‘The Führer has ordered the Final Solution of the Jewish question—and we have to carry out this task. For reasons of transport and isolation, I have picked out Auschwitz for this.'”
⁷⁰

Höss did indeed visit Himmler in June 1941 to show the Reichsführer SS how the plans for Auschwitz were developing in the light of the I.G. Farben–initiated expansion, but it is not credible that at this same moment he would have been told that Auschwitz was to be a part of the “Final Solution.” In the first place, there is no other evidence that a “Final Solution”—in the sense of the mechanized extermination of the Jews in death camps—had even been planned at this stage. The meeting predates both the initial killings of Jewish men by the Einsatzgruppen in the East and the subsequent expansion of the killing which began at the end of July. Secondly, Höss contradicts his own dating by adding that “at that time there were already in the General Government three other extermination camps: Bełźec, Treblinka and Wolzek [Sobibór].” But none of these camps was in
existence in the summer of 1941, and all three were not functioning until well into 1942.

Some scholars argue that, despite this internal contradiction in his statement, Höss may possibly have been ordered in June 1941 to establish some extermination facilities at Auschwitz. But the evidence of the development of the killing capacity at the camp over the summer and early autumn of 1941 scarcely confirms that this was initiated by a June meeting with Himmler. The most likely explanation for Höss's statement is that he simply misremembered the date. Conversations like the one he described with Himmler could well have happened, but in the following year, not in 1941.