Hitler and the Holocaust (32 page)

In each of the death camps there were between twenty and thirty-five SS men in charge (a high percentage were German Austrians), assisted by a number of Ukrainian auxiliaries. At Treblinka, the Germans succeeded in their ruse of presenting it as a transit camp (
Durchgangslager
) where Jews were supposedly to be “disinfected” before proceeding on to a labor camp (
Arbeitslager).
Abraham Goldfarb arrived at the camp on 25 August 1942. He relates: “When we reached Treblinka and the Germans opened the freight-car doors, the scene was ghastly. The cars were full of corpses. The bodies had been partially consumed by chlorine. The stench from the cars caused those still alive to choke.”
⁴³
The death and destruction had begun when the Jews were still in the freight cars, deprived of air, water, and sanitary facilities, as they rolled toward the extermination camps; purposely overcrowded by the SS personnel, these transports were in fact death traps. Oskar Berger, who had arrived three days earlier, witnessed “hundreds of bodies lying all around” as he disembarked from the train. “Piles of bundles, clothes, valises, everything mixed together. SS soldiers, Germans, and Ukrainians were standing on the roofs of barracks and firing indiscriminately into the crowd. Men, women, and children fell bleeding. The air was filled with screaming and weeping.”
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From eyewitness testimonies, it is evident that sadism and torture knew no bounds at Treblinka, Sobibór, or Belzec, where the cruelty of security guards—Germans, Latvians,
Lithuanians, and Ukrainians—was notorious.
⁴⁵
As in other camps, they carried out their duties without question but showed considerable initiative when it came to torturing their victims. A good example was the deputy commandant of Sobibór (where 250,000 Jews died), the Viennese-born Gustav Wagner. Like many of the SS personnel in the camps, he was a veteran of the Schloss Hartheim Euthanasia Institute near Linz, a center for killing off the mentally sick and handicapped. Master Sergeant Wagner was in charge of “selections” and better known to his victims as the “Human Beast.” One survivor recalled: “Wagner didn’t eat his lunch if he didn’t kill daily. With an axe, shovel or even his hands. He had to have blood.”
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Another victim remembered him as an angel of Death, for whom “torturing and killing was a pleasure”—he would snatch babies from their mothers’ arms and tear them to pieces in his hands.

Another prize torturer and sadist was Christian Wirth, inspector of the death camps in Poland, who had also previously worked in euthanasia institutions and in 1939 had carried out the first known gassing experiments on German “incurables.” At the end of 1941, he had been assigned to begin the extermination of Jews in Chelmno, the first of the Nazi death camps to become operational. During the next eighteen months, he oversaw, together with Odilo Globocnik (former Gauleiter of Vienna), the murder of nearly two mil lion Jews in the death camps of Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. A survivor from Belzec (where at least six hundred thousand Jews were murdered) recalled Wirth as “a tall broad-shouldered man in his middle fifties, with a vulgar face—he was a born criminal. The extreme beast.… Although he seldom appeared, the SS men were terrified of him.”
⁴⁷
Franz Suchamel, who served under him, testified that he could not be surpassed in brutality, meanness, and ruthlessness. “We therefore called him ‘Christian the Terrible’ or ‘The Wild Christian.’ The Ukrainian guardsmen called him ‘Stuka’ [a type of dive-bomber].”
⁴⁸
At Belzec, in August 1942,
Kurt Gerstein personally witnessed how Wirth and his assistants supervised the journey of the Jews to their destruction:

They drew nearer to where Wirth and I were standing in front of the death chambers. Men, women, young girls, children, babies, cripples, all stark naked, filed by. At the corner stood a burly SS man, with a loud, priestlike voice. “Nothing terrible is going to happen to you!” he told the poor wretches. “All you have to do is to breathe in deeply. That strengthens the lungs. Inhaling is a means of preventing infectious diseases. It’s a good method of disinfection.” … One Jewess of about forty, her eyes flaming like torches, cursed her murderers. Urged on by some whiplashes from Captain Wirth in person, she disappeared in the gas chambers. Many were praying, while others asked: “Who will give us water to wash the dead?”
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The Austrian commandant of Treblinka and Sobibór, Franz Stangl, was like Wirth a former policeman and had been superintendent at Schloss Hartheim. He was a highly efficient and dedicated organizer of mass murder, even receiving an official commendation as the “best camp commander in Poland.” Unlike Wirth, the soft-voiced Stangl was not a sadist but polite and always impeccably dressed (he attended the unloading of transports at Treblinka dressed in white riding clothes); he took pride and pleasure in his “work,” running the camp like clockwork. Stangl never looked at his victims as individuals or even as human beings but rather as “cargo.” Regarding the Jews, he told the journalist Gitta Sereny: “They were so weak; they allowed everything to happen, to be done to them. They were people with whom there was no common ground, no possibility of communication—that is how contempt is born. I could never understand how they could just give in as they did.”
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He further recalled:

I think it started the day I first saw the
Totenlager
[extermination area] in Treblinka. I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity—it could not have. It was a mass—a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, “What shall we do with this garbage?” I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo … It was always a huge mass. I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the “tube”—they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips.
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Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1 May 1940 until 1 December 1943, appeared outwardly, like Stangl, to be a kindly, unselfish family man who loved his wife. He, too, took a perfectionist pride in his “work” at what he called the “greatest human extermination centre of all time.” In 1944, he was commended by his superiors as a “true pioneer in this field, thanks to new ideas and new methods of education.”
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In his autobiography, Höss emphasized the “strong awareness of duty” that had been inculcated in him by his pious Catholic parents: “Every task had to be exactly and conscientiously carried out.” He considered his own compulsion to obey orders and to surrender all personal independence as a hallmark of his own morality and petty-bourgeois decency. “I am completely normal,” he observed in his book. “Even while I was carrying out the task of extermination I lived a normal life.”
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Unlike the “willing executioners” among the Order Police or on the eastern front, Höss embodied the ideal type of the passionless, self-disciplined, disinterested “desk murderer” who never personally attended mass executions or selections for the gas chambers but treated his job as purely administrative. What concerned Höss was the practical and technical questions involving timetables, the size of transports, the types of oven, and the methods of gassing. He took pride in being the first to successfully utilize Zyklon B—like Himmler, the squeamish Höss, who could not bear shootings and bloodshed, found poison gas to be more rational, hygienic, and “humane.” Naturally, the totally depersonalized commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau (for whom obedience and duty were the
highest virtues) did not have a moment’s hesitation in executing Himmler’s orders concerning the “Final Solution.”

Like Adolf Eichmann, Höss emphasized in his memoirs that he had no personal hatred of Jews, though he evidently never had any doubts about Hitler’s objectives either. Having spent three years in the vast laboratory called Auschwitz-Birkenau, gathering “indelible impressions and ample food for thought,” he still could not resolve the thorny question of why “members of the Jewish race go to their deaths so easily.”
⁵⁴
Like Stangl, it never occurred to him that the whole apparatus of torture and death over which he personally presided had been carefully designed to achieve precisely that outcome. No wonder that Höss was so delighted by the grotesque Auschwitz-Birkenau motto
Arbeit macht frei
(Work makes you free) and totally uninterested in its macabre meaning for the victims.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, there were also other technical perfectionists, like the gifted thirty-two-year-old chief doctor, Josef Mengele, who knew exactly why they were there and how killing Jews could advance their careers. Mengele used Auschwitz-Birkenau inmates as guinea pigs for what he believed was pioneering scientific research into presumed racial differences and physical abnormalities. People afflicted with any sort of deformity were killed on his orders, upon their arrival in the camp, to provide new material for his studies. He also conducted medical experiments on living Jews, especially twins, hoping to find a method of creating a race of blue-eyed Aryans to realize the megalomaniac dreams of Nazi racial science. In a conversation at Auschwitz-Birkenau with an Austrian Christian woman doctor, Dr. Ella Lingens, Mengele said that “there were only two gifted nations in the world—the Germans and the Jews.” The question, he told Frau Dr. Lingens, is “which one will dominate?”
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Mengele’s contribution to the millennial struggle for “domination,” like that of other SS doctors, was considerable.
He personally killed many prisoners by injecting them with phenol, gasoline, chloroform, or air; he participated in countless “selections” at the Auschwitz-Birkenau railway junction, sending all those “unfit for work” to the gas chambers with a flick of the hand or the wave of a stick. Children, old people, sick, crippled, or physically weak Jews, as well as pregnant women, were instantly sentenced to death. Yet even Mengele, a music lover and a scientific mind, also had his “compassionate” moments when he gave individual patients the best of care, between “selections.”
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Such discontinuities and “schizophrenic” attitudes characterized many levels of Nazi behavior, testifying to a high degree of personal fragmentation, an extreme compartmentalization of the private and public spheres, and a constant effort to repress awareness of the genocidal reality that they themselves had created. A good example can be found in the diary of Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, a member of the Auschwitz-Birkenau medical corps. On 5 September 1942, he witnessed a “special action” in the women’s camp that he called “the most horrible of all horrors,” agreeing with a colleague’s description of Auschwitz-Birkenau as the
“anus mundi”-
—the asshole of the world. Yet the following day, Kremer followed up his record of a dreadful execution with details of a splendid meal: “Today an excellent Sunday dinner: tomato soup, one half of chicken with potatoes and red cabbage (20 grammes of fat), dessert and magnificent vanilla-cream.”
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In the inverted logic of the SS world, such seeming anomalies became normal. It was a world where to torture and destroy became a certificate of maturity and the total negation of a fellow person, the royal road to absolute sovereignty over life and death. As Jean Améry, a survivor, once put it: National Socialism was the only political system of the twentieth century that “not only practised the rule of the antiman, as had other Red and White terror regimes also, but had established it as a principle.”
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The camps were the ultimate
manifestation of this system, reproducing its structures on a miniature scale but in an amplified way. Freedom, choice, and human solidarity had been virtually abolished, replaced by a Hobbesian war of all against all, with survival against the odds as the sole object. Through hunger, beatings, slave labor, exposure to cold, and endless tortures, the aim was to destroy individual autonomy and reduce human beings to purely animal reactions.
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Women, who in general were treated less severely by the guards, usually survived the ordeal better than men, proving often to be more practical, psychologically stronger, and more willing to help one another.
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Although the crimes committed were appallingly inhuman, the criminals themselves were, as Primo Levi has reminded us, human beings like ourselves—ordinary people who committed extraordinary acts: “They were made of the same cloth as we, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces.”
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Franz Stangl was by all accounts a very good husband and father, just as Rudolf Höss exemplified the German bourgeois virtues of discipline, obedience, and work. Their sleep was never disturbed since they rarely saw any suffering faces, concentrating as they did solely on the organizational task at hand. No doubt their impeccable private lives and the watertight compartmentalizing of their existence blunted any sense of the monstrous evil they were perpetrating.

Adolf Eichmann exemplified to perfection the same modern bureaucratic mentality that focused on technical matters without any concern for ultimate ends—a sphere that belonged solely to the Führer, the party, and the state. Like other “desk murderers,” Eichmann was congenitally incapable of accepting any personal responsibility: “I never killed a single one.… I never killed anyone and I never gave the order to kill anyone.”
⁶²
Of course, such disclaimers were self-serving falsehoods that permeated the whole of German society from the Nazi leadership, the bureaucracy, the army,
and the industrialists down to the smallest cogs in the killing machine. The decision makers and the lower-level perpetrators were undoubtedly aware of the enormity of their crimes, otherwise they would not have sought to obliterate all traces of the gas chambers, crematoriums, and mass executions. The SS was determined that no witnesses should survive to tell the terrible secret of what they had done: hence the insane death marches of 1944–1945 with which the history of the Nazi camps came to an end.