Auschwitz (12 page)

This is not to say, of course, that Auschwitz was uninvolved in the killing process that summer. Indeed, with the expulsion of the sick inmates as part of the 14f13 program and the shooting of the Soviet commissars in the gravel pits, the authorities at Auschwitz faced a problem not unlike the one the Einsatzgruppen were encountering in the East—the need to find a more effective method of murder. The decisive moment of discovery at Auschwitz appears to have occurred when Höss was away from the camp, some time in late August or early September. Fritzsch, his deputy, saw a new use for a chemical used to remove the infestations of insects around the camp—crystallized prussic acid (cyanide), sold in tins and marketed under the name Zyklon (for cyclone) Blausäure (for prussic acid), popularly known as Zyklon B. Fritzsch now made the same kind of logical leap at Auschwitz that Widmann was making in the East. If Zyklon B could be used to kill lice, why could it not be used to kill human pests? And because Block 11 was already the place of execution within the camp and its basement could be sealed, was this not the most natural place to conduct an experiment?

Auschwitz at this time was not a camp where such an action could be carried out secretly. There were only a few meters between each block, and gossip was the currency of the place. So Fritzsch's experiments were common knowledge from the first. “I could see that they were bringing in soil in wheelbarrows to insulate the windows,” says Wilhelm Brasse. “And one day I saw them take the severely sick out on stretchers from the hospital and they were taken to Block 11.”

It was not just the sick who were taken to Block 11. Predictably, so were members of the other target group the Auschwitz authorities had previously
demonstrated they wanted to kill—Soviet commissars. “They gathered Soviet prisoners of war in the basement,” says August Kowalczyk. “But it turned out the gas didn't work that well and many of the inmates were still alive the next day. So they strengthened the dose. More crystals were poured in.”

On Höss's return, Fritzsch reported the news of the experiments. Höss attended the next gassings in Block 11: “Protected by a gas mask, I watched the killing myself. In the crowded cells death came instantaneously the moment the Zyklon B was thrown in. A short, almost smothered cry and it was all over.” While the evidence is that death in Block 11 could be far from “instantaneous,” it was certainly the case that for the Nazis at Auschwitz the use of Zyklon B alleviated the process of murder. No longer would the killers have to look into the eyes of their victims as they murdered them. Höss wrote that he was “relieved” that this new method of killing had been found as he would be “spared” a bloodbath.” He was wrong. The real bloodbath was about to begin.

O
n April 7, 1946, Rudolf Höss was questioned during the Nuremberg trials by the American psychologist Dr. Gustave Gilbert. “And it never occurred to you,” Gilbert asked Höss, “to refuse the orders that Himmler gave to you regarding the so-called ‘Final Solution'?”
¹
“No,” replied Höss, “from our entire training the thought of refusing an order just didn't enter one's head, regardless of what kind of order it was ... I guess you cannot understand our world. I naturally had to obey orders.”

Höss thus placed himself squarely in the phalanx of German soldiers who, after the war was lost, wanted the world to think that they had been robots, blindly following whatever commands were given to them regardless of their own personal feelings. But the truth is that Höss was far from an automaton. During the last six months of 1941 and the first six months of 1942 Höss was at his most innovative, not just following orders but using his own initiative to help increase the killing capacity of Auschwitz. And it was not just Höss who was thinking and acting in this way during this crucial period—many other Nazis also played their parts. For an important factor in the development of the extermination process was the way different initiatives from lower down the hierarchy contributed to the increasingly radical way forward. Once the war was over Höss, in common with hundreds of other Nazis, tried to convince the world that only one man had truly made the decisions: Adolf Hitler. But the “Final Solution” became the collective will of many—something that can be demonstrated most clearly
by unraveling the decision-making process that led to the deportation of the German Jews in the autumn of 1941.

The war against the Soviet Union, begun in June of that year, precipitated the most radical solution yet seen to the Nazis' self-created “Jewish problem”: the destruction of Soviet Jewry by the shooting of men, women, and children. But, to begin with, the Jews of western Europe and the German Reich remained relatively untouched by this slaughter. The Nazi assumption was still that they would be “transported east” once the war was over and, in the optimistic minds of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, that meant some time in the autumn of 1941. What was to happen to these Jews once they went east “after the war” is unclear—there were, as yet, no death camps waiting to receive them. Most likely they would have been sent to labor camps in the most inhospitable parts of Nazi-controlled Russia, where genocide would still have taken place—albeit a longer and more protracted one than the swift killing that was to happen in the gas chambers of Poland.

But that August, some leading Nazis grew impatient with this plan. They knew that, in the East, Soviet Jews were already being “dealt with” in the most brutal ways imaginable. They began to suggest such questions as: Why should German Jews not be sent into the epicenter of this killing operation immediately? Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister and Gauleiter of Berlin, was one of those who took the lead that summer in pushing for the Jews of Berlin to be forcibly deported East. At a meeting on August 15, Goebbels' state secretary, Leopold Gutterer, pointed out that of the 70,000 Jews in Berlin only 19,000 were working (a situation, of course, that the Nazis had created themselves by enforcing a series of restrictive regulations against German Jews). The rest, argued Gutterer, ought to be “carted off to Russia ... best of all actually would be to kill them.”
²
And when Goebbels himself met Hitler on August 19, he made a similar case for the swift deportation of the Berlin Jews.

Dominant in Goebbels' mind was the Nazi fantasy of the role that German Jews had played during World War I. While German soldiers had suffered at the front line, the Jews had supposedly been profiting from the bloodshed back in the safety of the big cities (in reality, of course, German Jews had been dying at the front in proportionately the same numbers as their fellow countrymen).

In the summer of 1941, however, it was obvious that Jews remained in Berlin while the Wehrmacht were engaged in their brutal struggle in the East. What else could they do, when the Nazis had forbidden German Jews to join the armed forces? As was so often the case, the Nazis had created for themselves the exact circumstances that best fitted their prejudice. But, despite Goebbels' entreaties, Hitler was still not willing to allow the Berlin Jews to be deported. He maintained that the war was still the priority and the Jewish question would have to wait.

Hitler, however, did grant one of Goebbels' requests. In a significant escalation of Nazi anti-Semitic measures, he agreed that the Jews of Germany should be marked with the yellow star. In the ghettos of Poland the Jews had been marked in similar ways from the first months of the war, but their counterparts in Germany had up to now escaped such humiliation.

During that summer and early autumn, Goebbels was not the only senior Nazi figure to lobby Hitler to permit the deportation of the German Jews. In the immediate aftermath of the British bombing raid on Hamburg on September 15, the Gauleiter of Hamburg, Karl Kaufmann, decided to write to Hitler, asking him to authorize the deportation of the Jews of Hamburg to release housing for non-Jewish citizens who had just lost their homes. Hitler was now in receipt of proposals to send the Jews east from a whole variety of sources, including a suggestion from Alfred Rosenberg that Jews from central Europe be deported in retaliation for Stalin's recent action in sending the Volga Germans to Siberia. Now, suddenly, just a few weeks after saying the Reich Jews could not be deported, Hitler changed his mind. That September Hitler decided that the expulsions east could begin after all.

It is important, however, not to see in this reversal of policy a picture of an indecisive Hitler somehow bending to the will of his subordinates. He was influenced at least as much by the latest developments in the external military situation as by the pleas of his underlings. Hitler had always said that the Jews could be deported at the end of the war, and in September 1941 it seemed to the Nazi leader that there might only be a matter of a few weeks' difference between deporting the German Jews “after the war was over” and doing so now. Kiev was about to fall and Moscow seemed wide open to German assault, so Hitler still hoped that the Soviet Union would be defeated before the winter.

There remained, of course, the question of where to send the Jews. Himmler immediately had one answer—Why should the Reich Jews not join the Polish Jews in ghettos? On September 18, Himmler wrote to Arthur Greiser, Nazi Gauleiter of the Warthegau in Poland, and asked him to prepare the Łódź ghetto for the arrival of 60,000 Jews from the “Old Reich.” Himmler knew that, at best, this could only be a short-term solution, however, because, as the ghetto authorities were swift to point out, the Łódź ghetto was already badly overcrowded.

Seventeen-year-old Lucille Eichengreen
³
was one of the first German Jews to be deported as a consequence of Hitler's change in policy. And at this moment in October 1941, as her mother received a registered letter ordering the family to be ready to leave Hamburg within twenty-four hours, no one—not even the Nazis who wanted to be rid of her—could have predicted the lengthy and tortuous form her journey to Auschwitz would take. The Eichengreen family was already suffering. Lucille's father, a Polish national, had been arrested and taken to Dachau at the start of the war. Eighteen months later, in February 1941, they heard news of him at last, says Lucille:

So now, eight months after learning of the death of her father at the hands of the Nazis, Lucille, her sister, and her mother left their home for the last time and walked to the railway station past the citizens of Hamburg. On the streets they found no sympathy for their plight. “They [the non-Jewish population] were just stony-faced,” says Lucille. “It was either an ugly word or they looked away. It didn't make me feel cross. It made me feel afraid.”

Uwe Storjohann,
⁴
then sixteen years old, was one of the residents of Hamburg who stood and watched the Jews walk by.

One of Uwe Storjohann's friends was partly Jewish, and he had to say goodbye to a favorite aunt and grandmother “in a heartrending way.” His friend was only a quarter Jewish and therefore allowed to stay—his aunt and grandmother were full Jews and had to leave. As he watched these desperate scenes, one feeling “obsessed” Uwe Storjohann:

The question of what “ordinary” Germans knew about the fate of the Jews is one that has generated huge controversy. But Uwe Storjohann's admission that he knew the German Jews were being sent into a “terrible” world is probably close to the state of mind of most Germans at the time. They knew the Jews were not coming back—street markets were held in Hamburg to sell the household equipment left behind by Jewish families. And equally many “ordinary Germans” knew that “bad things” were happening to Jews in the East.

A Nazi report by the SD (the intelligence branch of the SS, run by Reinhard Heydrich) from Franconia in southern Germany, dated December 1942, demonstrates that the Nazis themselves were concerned about the effect on the German population of knowledge of the killings in the East: