KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (56 page)

The visit of the Reichsführer SS to Auschwitz coincided with major developments in the Third Reich. Since spring 1942, Himmler had been pushing for forced labor in the KL to redouble, reflecting the new Nazi priorities. Following the failure of the rapid offensive against the Soviet Union and the United States’ entry into the war, the regime faced a lengthy battle and had to
urgently boost war production. For his part, Himmler had decided in early March 1942 that the entire KL system—previously only loosely integrated into the wider SS organizational chart—would become part of the SS Business and Administration Main Office (WVHA), with the Camp Inspectorate forming Office Group D. The WVHA was the newly created organizational and economic hub of the SS, led by the single-minded
Oswald Pohl, who had now reached the top echelon of the SS.
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But when Heinrich Himmler traveled to Auschwitz in July 1942, it was the Nazi Final Solution, not the SS economy, that was foremost in his mind. Himmler, the master of the KL, also oversaw the annihilation of European Jewry, which escalated in summer 1942. Just days before his trip to Auschwitz, he had met with Hitler and afterward
pushed to speed up the genocide. And immediately following his inspection of Auschwitz, Himmler flew to Lublin to plot the extermination of Polish Jews in three new death camps in the General Government—Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. He visited Sobibor on July 19 and later that evening issued an order from Lublin for the rapid “resettlement of the entire Jewish population in the General Government”;
except for selected forced laborers in the few remaining ghettos and camps, all local Jews had to be exterminated by the end of the year.
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So Himmler’s trip to Auschwitz in July 1942 came at a crucial moment. Productive labor was becoming more important than ever, at the same time as the program of deportations and mass killings of Jews from across Europe got under way. Himmler’s visit touched
on both aspects, as Auschwitz was a focal point for SS economic ambitions
and
a center of the Nazi Final Solution. Before he left the camp on July 18, 1942, Himmler told Höss to push ahead with the economic exploitation of prisoners and the mass gassings, with deportations set to increase month by month. At the end of their meeting, Himmler spontaneously promoted Höss to Obersturmbannführer, in
recognition of Auschwitz’s significance for Nazi plans.
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But how had the camp become part of these plans in the first place? And what function did it and the rest of the KL system have in the Holocaust?

AUSCHWITZ AND THE NAZI FINAL SOLUTION

Auschwitz has long been
the
symbol of the Holocaust. The Nazis murdered almost one million Jews here, more than in any other single place. And only in Auschwitz
did they systematically kill Jews from all across the continent, deported to their deaths from Hungary, Poland, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Croatia, Italy, and Norway. In part, Auschwitz was so lethal because it operated so much longer than other killing sites. In late spring 1944, when the three death camps in the General Government had long
closed down again, Auschwitz was only just beginning to reach its murderous peak. And after Soviet troops finally liberated the camp in January 1945, much of the infrastructure of murder remained on-site, in contrast to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where the traces of genocide had been carefully concealed. This is one reason why we know so much more about Auschwitz than about the other death
camps. Another is the abundance of testimony. Several tens of thousands of Auschwitz prisoners survived the war and many of them told their story. By contrast, hardly anyone left the other death camps alive, since they functioned purely as extermination sites; only three survivors ever gave testimony about Belzec.
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In view of Auschwitz’s preeminence in Holocaust memory, it is worth recalling
once more that the camp was not created for the annihilation of the Jews. Nor was this ever its sole rationale. Unlike the single-purpose death camps in the General Government, Auschwitz was always a site with multiple missions.
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What is more, it was incorporated late into genocide. Contrary to some suggestions, it did not become a death camp for European Jews as early as 1941.
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This function
gradually emerged during 1942, and only from summer of that year did the camp play a more prominent role.

Death Camps in the General Government

The genesis of the Holocaust was lengthy and complex. The days are long gone when historians believed that it could be reduced to a single decision taken on a single day by Hitler. Instead, the Holocaust was the culmination of a dynamic murderous process,
propelled by increasingly radical initiatives from above and below. During World War II, the Nazi pursuit of a Final Solution moved from increasingly lethal plans for Jewish “reservations” to immediate extermination. There were several key periods of radicalization. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked one such moment, as mass shootings of Jewish men of military age soon
grew into widespread ethnic cleansing, with daily bloodbaths of women, children, and the elderly. At the end of 1941, some six hundred thousand Jews had been murdered across the newly conquered eastern territory.

By then, the Nazi regime was already moving toward the extermination of European Jewry as a whole. Autumn 1941 saw the first systematic mass deportations from Germany to the east, following
Hitler’s decision to remove all Jews from the Reich. Even though most of these victims were not yet murdered on arrival, it was clear that they would not live for long. At the same time, the slaughter of Jews expanded beyond the Soviet Union to Serbia and parts of Poland. Meanwhile, plans were made for several regional gassing facilities on occupied Polish and Soviet soil, targeting eastern
European Jews, especially those judged “unfit for work.” Chelmno, in the Warthegau (the western Polish territory incorporated into the Reich), was the first such death camp to start up, on December 8, 1941. Within four months, more than fifty thousand people, mostly Polish Jews from the Lodz ghetto (some forty miles away), were murdered here in gas vans. Farther east, in the General Government,
construction of the first stationary extermination camp in Belzec (Lublin district) began in early November 1941, followed by the establishment of a second death camp in Sobibor (also Lublin district) from February 1942.

It was around this time that the genocidal program was being finalized. From late March 1942, deportations from western and central Europe slowly expanded, with the first transports
of selected Slovakian and French Jews to occupied Poland. SS managers started to prepare a comprehensive plan for Europe-wide deportations, which was launched from July 1942. Meanwhile, the killing in eastern Europe intensified, too. In the occupied Soviet Union, ghetto clearances and massacres were stepped up, and in occupied Poland, too, more and more regions were pulled into the inferno.
The perpetrators moved with great speed, emptying one ghetto after another. According to Nazi figures, of the two million Jews who had once lived in the General Government, just three hundred thousand were still alive at the end of 1942.
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Most Jews murdered in the General Government in 1942 died in the three new death camps. Mass extermination in Belzec started in March, followed by Sobibor
in early May; around the same time, construction began on a third camp, Treblinka (Warsaw district), in the north of the General Government, which was set up primarily for the murder of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto and operated from late July.
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In the historical literature, the mass extermination of Jews in the General Government is commonly referred to as “Operation Reinhard,” and these three
death camps as “Reinhard camps,” after a Nazi code word chosen in memory of Reinhard Heydrich (assassinated in summer 1942).
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However, this terminology is misleading. The Nazi authorities did not restrict the code name “Operation Reinhard” to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, but also applied it to the extermination of Jews and the plunder of their property at the SS concentration camps Auschwitz
and Majdanek (the two KL operating simultaneously as death camps).
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Despite their shared history, however, the three new death camps in the General Government did exist independently from Auschwitz and Majdanek (and the rest of the KL system), and to signify this distinctiveness, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka will be referred to here as the “Globocnik death camps,” after the SS and police leader
in Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik.

Perhaps Himmler’s most obsequious follower and ferocious executioner, Odilo Globocnik had cut his teeth as a violent young fanatic in the illegal Austrian Nazi movement. His brief reign as Vienna Gauleiter after the Anschluss ended ignominiously, mired in suspicions of corruption. But as he did with many “old fighters,” Himmler gave him another chance, and
Globocnik grasped it eagerly. In late 1939, after he was posted to Lublin, he quickly made his name as a champion of radical anti-Jewish policy. Since autumn 1941, he coordinated the mass extermination of Jews in his district, a task later extended to the entire General Government. “Globus” (globe)—as Himmler jokingly called him—was delighted when his master ordered him in July 1942, after his trip
to Auschwitz, to oversee the immediate annihilation of Jews in the General Government. “The Reichsführer SS was just here and has given us so much new work,” he gushed. “I am so very grateful to him, that he can be certain that these things that he wishes will come true in no time.” As Rudolf Höss recalled, Globocnik’s hunger for deportations to his death camps became insatiable: “He could never
get enough.”
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In the second half of 1942, the Holocaust unfolded with unremitting force inside the General Government. Train after train carried hundreds of thousands of Jews to Globocnik’s death camps. Few survived for more than a few hours; once they were crammed into the gas chambers, powerful engines started up, pumping carbon monoxide inside. The deportations were coordinated from Globocnik’s
Lublin office. The death camps, meanwhile, were staffed with the experienced killers from the “euthanasia” program. Starting in autumn 1941, more than 120 T-4 veterans—mostly men in their late twenties and thirties—were transferred to the General Government to set up and run the new death camps. At the top stood Christian Wirth, a former police officer who had become the main troubleshooter
during the “euthanasia” action. Wirth now used his murderous know-how as the local T-4 representative and inspector of the Globocnik death camps, earning himself the nickname “Wild Christian.” From summer 1942, as the Holocaust accelerated, he oversaw major changes in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, including the extension of the killing facilities, to ensure the smooth running of the genocide.
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The same aim was pursued farther west, in Auschwitz. Here, too, SS men were hard at work, refining and enlarging the machinery of death for the Holocaust.

“Jews into the KL”

In the early years of the Second World War, the concentration camps had stood on the sidelines of Nazi anti-Jewish policy; the present was largely about ghettos and forced labor camps, and the future about deadly reservations.
Concentration camps, by contrast, were marginal. Even when the Third Reich began to move toward the systematic extermination of European Jews, there were no signs yet that the KL would become more prominent anytime soon. Their peripheral role was reflected in prisoner numbers: by early 1942, Jews made up fewer than five thousand of the eighty thousand KL inmates.
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On January 20, 1942, a crucial
conference took place in the leafy Berlin suburb of Wannsee. At lunchtime, a group of senior party and state officials gathered to coordinate the Nazi Final Solution, under the overall control of the RSHA. The meeting was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, who laid out the general direction. Some aspects were still in flux, but the overall aim was now clear: European Jews would be concentrated in the
occupied east and murdered there, either straightaway or by working them to death. The vision of “annihilation through labor” was an important element of these plans. As Heydrich put it at Wannsee—according to minutes compiled by Adolf Eichmann, the RSHA desk officer who managed the deportations from western and central Europe—large labor gangs would be formed in the east for heavy road construction:
“undoubtedly a large number of them will drop out through natural wastage.”
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Although the specifics remained vague, there was apparently no place for the concentration camps in these genocidal plans, neither as extermination centers nor as hubs for lethal labor. The KL were not on the agenda at Wannsee, and no representative of the concentration camp system had been invited to the gathering.

Within days of the Wannsee conference, however, SS leaders changed their tune. The trigger, it seems, was their final acceptance that the grandiose settlement plans in the east would never be realized with Soviet POWs; too few had arrived in the KL, and too many of those who had were already dead.
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The SS now looked for replacements and soon found them: instead of Soviet soldiers, Jews would build
the gigantic settlements. On January 26, 1942, just six days after Wannsee, Himmler telexed Glücks to outline the change in direction. Since no more Soviet POWs could be expected in the near future, Himmler explained, he had decided to send large numbers of Jews to the KL: “Get ready to accommodate 100,000 male Jews and up to 50,000 Jewesses in the KL within the next four weeks.”
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The decision
to substitute Jews for Soviet POWs was taken impulsively at the top of the Nazi state. On January 25, one day before he informed Glücks, Himmler had evidently discussed the use of Jewish workers with Oswald Pohl. Immediately afterward, Himmler had apparently raised his plan in the Führer’s headquarters. During lunch, Hitler ranted about the need to make Europe free of Jews: “If [the Jew] gets wrecked
along the way, I cannot help it. I see only one thing: total annihilation, if they don’t go voluntarily. Why should I look at a Jew with different eyes than a Russian prisoner?” Soon after the meal, Himmler put Heydrich in the picture, calling him in Prague. The note for this call in Himmler’s office diary reads: “Jews into the KL.”
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