KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (51 page)

After the body slumped to the floor, another door opened. Kapos from the crematorium commando appeared and dragged the corpse
to the makeshift morgue in the barrack’s last room. Wearing rubber gloves, they ripped out gold teeth; any prisoner who still showed signs of life was finished off by an SS block leader. Later the Kapos threw the corpses into the oven of mobile crematoria, stationed just outside the barrack. Back inside the execution chamber, the perpetrators sprayed the floors and walls with a hose to wash away all
the blood, tissue, and bone splinters. Then the next prisoner was led in. Some of them sensed that they would die. Many others were oblivious to their fate. Illness and exhaustion clouded their minds, and they were fooled by the SS theater. The SS also muffled the gunshot sounds. Not only was the killers’ booth soundproof, a gramophone played in the room where the other naked men were waiting.
Cheerful tunes flowed through the barrack, the last sound a Soviet soldier would hear before he was shot from behind.
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The Sachsenhausen SS quickly became used to these assembly-line murders. Until mid-November 1941, when the operation was suspended because of a typhus epidemic, mass shootings took place several times a week. According to a former SS block leader, such actions lasted from early
morning until late at night, with a prisoner being shot every two or three minutes, claiming around 300 to 350 lives a day.
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The Kapos worked nonstop, too, burning more than twenty-five bodies per hour at the crematoria.
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The smoke and stench soon spread outside the camp, alerting the local Oranienburg population. There was much talk behind closed doors about the murders and some bold children
even approached passing SS men to ask when the next Russians would be burned.
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One evening in mid-September 1941, after the neck-shooting apparatus had operated for around two weeks, the Sachsenhausen SS proudly demonstrated it to two dozen SS grandees.
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The visitors were led through the execution barrack and watched as several Soviet POWs were shot and then “thrown with great brutality onto
heaps,” as one of the SS officers later testified. Among the visitors were Inspector Glücks and his staff, who toasted their murderous invention with alcohol. Also present was Ernst Grawitz, the SS Reich physician, who had long been involved in Nazi mass murder. Most important, Theodor Eicke once more graced the Camp SS with his presence, just before he went back to the Eastern Front. Eicke addressed
the Sachsenhausen SS men, encouraging them to keep up their grisly work. The grateful men sent off their hero with cheers and presents, including three cakes and a card addressed to “Papa Eicke.”
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Before Eicke returned to the front, he also took leave from Heinrich Himmler, meeting him on the evening of September 15, 1941, just a few hours after Reich physician Grawitz had seen Himmler. There
can be little doubt that the Reichsführer SS was updated that day about the Sachsenhausen murders.
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After all, SS leaders knew that Himmler was actively looking for new methods of mass extermination. The daily massacres in the occupied Soviet Union, where Jews were lined up and shot into mass graves, had revealed that not all Nazi killers could stomach the pools of blood, the piercing screams
of the wounded, and the cries of those next in line.
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This had prompted Himmler to look for more humane ways of mass murder—more humane for the killers, that is. Grawitz or Eicke, or both, must have reported back to Himmler about the new Sachsenhausen method, which promised some “advantages” over conventional mass shootings. After all, the killers did not have to look at their victims when they
pulled the trigger, and most victims went to their deaths unaware, without protest or panic.

Experiments in Mass Murder

One of the SS officers invited to watch the demonstration of the Sachsenhausen neck-shooting mechanism in mid-September 1941 was the Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis. The IKL had invited him, together with other commandants, to learn “how to liquidate the Politruks and Russian
Commissars,” he later testified. Ziereis was duly impressed. Upon his return to Mauthausen, he oversaw the construction of a similar apparatus in his own camp, ready for the first execution of Soviet officers on October 21, 1941.
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He was not the only commandant inspired by his Sachsenhausen colleagues. In Buchenwald, Karl Otto Koch also set up an execution chamber that closely resembled the
Sachsenhausen prototype.
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Others went in a different direction, however. Inspector Glücks still valued local initiative and allowed his commandants to choose their own methods. As a result the KL turned into testing sites for mass execution in autumn and winter 1941.

In Dachau, the murder of Soviet “commissars” started in early September 1941, just like in Sachsenhausen. But instead of elaborate
new techniques, the Dachau SS used the very method that Nazi killers elsewhere sought to abandon—open mass shootings. At first, the Dachau SS killed outside the bunker, as it had done on previous occasions, but as the number of victims increased, it moved the executions to its shooting range in Hebertshausen, about a mile and a half away. Here, Camp SS men forced the Soviet soldiers to strip
naked and line up. Everything happened at great speed. A commando of SS men pounced on those in the first row, with five SS men grabbing one prisoner each, dragged them around a corner, and shackled them to posts. Then an SS squad opened fire, often shooting wildly at the helpless victims. The remaining POWs knew exactly what awaited them; they heard the salvos and saw the growing mountain of corpses.
Some of the doomed men were paralyzed, some cried, some struggled, some screamed, some held up crosses, some pleaded for their lives. But the shootings only stopped when every prisoner had been executed. Afterwards, the killers would clean the mud and blood from their uniforms, using fresh towels and hot water brought over from the camp.
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Twenty-eight-year-old Ignat Prochorowitsch Babitsch
was one of around 4,400 Soviet POWs murdered in Dachau between September 1941 and June 1942. A married man from a small village in northern Ukraine, Lieutenant Babitsch had served in an infantry division when he was captured in July 1941 near Berdychiv. He initially stayed in the occupied east, in Stalag 325 in Zamosc, before being moved to the Hammelburg camp in Germany. The army mug shot taken on
arrival in mid-March 1942 shows a man with delicate features, a shaven head, and a quizzical expression. Just two weeks later a Gestapo commission selected him for extermination, presumably because Babitsch, a teacher, was regarded as a member of the intelligentsia. The RSHA approved his execution on April 10, 1942. A few days after that he was deported to Dachau and executed on the shooting range.
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The corpses of Soviet POWs murdered in Hebertshausen, like Ignat Babitsch, were brought to the Dachau camp crematorium. When one of the Kapos there asked SS camp compound leader Egon Zill where to store the ashes, he was told to just dump “the dirt of these Bolshevik swine.”
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It is not clear why Dachau Camp SS leaders continued with these massacres, when they could have employed the more clinical
method practiced in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. Perhaps they felt too proud to follow the lead of another camp—Dachau, after all, had been the first model KL. Or maybe they wanted to show that they were tough enough to kill without deception, in a gruesome display of what passed for manliness within the Camp SS.

The Dachau SS was not alone in favoring mass shootings. In Flossenbürg, the SS
also mowed down Soviet “commissars” on its shooting range from early September 1941. These executions were hastily abandoned a few months later, however, apparently after blood and body parts had been swept by a nearby river into Flossenbürg village, leading to complaints from locals. In Gross-Rosen, too, rumors among the local population put an end to mass shootings of Soviet POWs, which had initially
been carried out on a field near the crematorium; the Camp SS had forced other prisoners to sing at the top of their voices, but this had not masked the sounds of the shootings.
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In both Flossenbürg and Gross-Rosen, the Camp SS replaced mass shootings with lethal injections. SS men subjected Soviet “commissars” to fake medical exams, measuring and weighing them, and then gave the deadly injection;
the murderers tried various poisonous substances, including prussic acid, carbolic acid, and petrol.
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This method of killing proved more effective, though it was hardly new; as we have seen, the Camp SS had already begun to use deadly injections during its earlier murders of
Muselmänner
. As a result, the wider significance of the killings in Flossenbürg and Gross-Rosen was limited. The same
cannot be said for the executions of Soviet POWs in another KL, farther to the east. Here, the experiments in autumn 1941 produced devastating results that would affect the very nature of Nazi mass extermination. The site of these trials was Auschwitz.

Inventing the Auschwitz Gas Chamber

One day in early September 1941—probably on September 5—a train from the Neuhammer POW camp in Lower Silesia
arrived at Auschwitz. Hundreds of prisoners spilled out of the railcars. All of them were Soviet POWs identified by the Gestapo as “commissars.”
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By the time they marched through the Auschwitz compound, it was dark. The silence was punctured by barking guard dogs and the screams of the prisoners, beaten and whipped by cursing SS men. The noise stirred some inmates who had been asleep inside
their barracks. Breaking strict SS instructions, they peered through the windows and saw the columns of POWs, illuminated by searchlights, disappear into block 11. Of all the places in Auschwitz, this was the most feared: it was the bunker, the SS center for torture and murder. Prisoners called it the “death block,” and Camp SS men associated it with death, too, which is why they had turned it into
a makeshift gas chamber for Soviet POWs.
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The Auschwitz SS was about to carry out the first mass gassing inside a concentration camp.
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Inspired by the earlier murder of prisoners in the T-4 gas chambers (during Action 14f13), Auschwitz SS officials had decided to experiment with poison gas as well.
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They chose prussic acid—more commonly known by its trade name, Zyklon B—which had been used
in the KL for some time to fumigate vermin-infested buildings. SS orderlies were trained in handling this delousing agent and knew how dangerous it was. It was also easier to deploy than the carbon monoxide used in T-4 killing centers, as there was no need to install pipes or gas cylinders—the murderers just had to drop Zyklon B pellets into a sealed chamber.
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A first lethal test had taken place
around late August 1941, when the Auschwitz SS executed a small group of Soviet prisoners. The action was supervised by camp compound leader Karl Fritzsch, a Camp SS veteran who later bragged to colleagues that he was the inventor of the Auschwitz gas chambers.
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Commandant Rudolf Höss quickly agreed to a larger trial. In preparation, the SS cleared the bunker; doors were sealed and the cellar
windows filled with cement.

It was into this cellar—a series of small cells and corridors—that the Auschwitz SS led the Soviet “commissars” that fateful night in early September 1941. As they were forced down the stairs, the POWs saw some 250 other prisoners sprawled across the floor, invalids from the infirmary who had been selected to die with them. Once the last Soviet prisoner had been crammed
into the cellar, the SS threw Zyklon B crystals inside and locked the doors. On contact with the warm air and the captives’ bodies, highly toxic prussic acid was released and desperate screaming started, carrying all the way to the adjacent barracks. The gas quickly destroyed the victims’ mucous membranes and entered their bloodstream, asphyxiating them from within. Some dying men stuffed bits
of clothing in their mouths to block the gas. But none survived.
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Commandant Rudolf Höss, who had watched outside with other SS men, took off his gas mask and congratulated himself; hundreds of prisoners had been killed without an SS man firing a single shot.
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Still, the practical-minded Höss saw room for improvements. For a start, block 11 was too far away from the Auschwitz crematorium:
the corpses had to be dragged through the whole camp for disposal. Moreover, there was no built-in ventilation in block 11. The building had to be aired for a long time before the SS could force other inmates inside to recover the bodies. By then, the corpses—swollen, entangled, and stiff—had started to decay and proved hard to dislodge. One witness, the Polish prisoner Adam Zacharski, saw everything:
“The scene was truly eerie, because one could see that these people had scratched and bitten each other in a fit of madness before they died, many had torn uniforms … Although I had already got used to some macabre scenes in the camp, I became sick when I saw these murdered people and I had to vomit violently.”
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To make mass murder more efficient, the Auschwitz SS soon relocated gassings to
the morgue of the crematorium. It lay outside the camp compound, which meant that there would be fewer unwelcome witnesses among the regular prisoners. The morgue could hold hundreds of victims and already had an effective ventilation mechanism, making its conversion into a gas chamber easy; the doors were insulated and holes were hammered into the ceiling, so that Zyklon B could be dropped in from
the flat roof above. Afterward, the corpses would be burned in the adjacent crematorium ovens. The Auschwitz SS had stumbled across the prototype of the death factory.
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Its first lethal test came in mid-September 1941, when the SS gassed some nine hundred Soviet POWs in the Auschwitz crematorium.
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As the prisoners arrived, SS men told them to undress and then forced them into the morgue,
supposedly for delousing. SS men now slammed the doors shut and threw in the gas pellets. Commandant Rudolf Höss watched once more: “After the insertion, some screamed ‘gas,’ followed by mighty howling and pushing toward the two doors. But they withstood the pressure.” It took several days, he added, to burn all the bodies.
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