KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (58 page)

The death transports of Silesian Jews began soon after Pohl’s visit to Auschwitz. During May 1942, around 6,500 Jews—selected as unfit for work—arrived from several towns in Upper Silesia. Many of them came from B
ę
dzin, just twenty-five miles away, where the first victims were rounded up by the German police and Jewish ghetto militia in a large “action” on May 12, inside the desolate and overcrowded Jewish sector of the small town, which had previously been an important hub for Jewish cultural and economic life in the region. During the following month, another estimated sixteen thousand Jews were deported
from Silesia to Auschwitz, leading Nazi officials in several localities to proudly declare themselves “free of Jews.”
53

The Little Red House

The mass murder of Silesian Jews was witnessed by Filip Müller, a twenty-year-old Slovak Jew who had come to Auschwitz on April 13, 1942, and soon joined a special prisoner detail at the main camp crematorium, which had doubled as a gas chamber since autumn
1941. After the war, Müller testified to the arrival of several transports of Polish Jews in May and June 1942, including many elderly men and women, as well as mothers with children and babies. SS men led the prisoners into the yard outside the crematorium and told them to undress for a shower. Then they locked the victims into the dimly lit, windowless gas chamber inside the crematorium. Panic
soon spread among the trapped prisoners. SS men shouted back: “Don’t burn yourselves in the bath.” Loud engine noises were supposed to drown out the sound of the death struggle, but those standing close to the crematorium, like Filip Müller, caught everything: “We suddenly heard coughing. And the people screamed. You could hear the children, and all of them screamed.” After some time, the screams
died down and then they stopped altogether.
54

The mass murder which began in the gas chamber of the main camp crematorium (later called crematorium I) soon continued in new killing facilities in Birkenau.
55
On a secluded spot near the birch forest, the SS turned an empty farmhouse into a gas chamber. Known as bunker 1, or the “little red house,” the small building was easily transformed; windows
were bricked up, doors insulated and reinforced, and small holes (concealed by flaps) drilled in the walls for the insertion of Zyklon B pellets. Hundreds of prisoners could be forced into two rooms, with wood shavings on the floor to soak up blood and feces.
56
Bunker 1 probably went into operation sometime in mid or late May 1942, and gassings in the main camp crematorium ceased a few months
later.
57

The SS killers saw the relocation of mass gassings to Birkenau as a solution to the practical problems of genocide. Mass murder and the disposal of corpses was proving increasingly cumbersome in the creaking and overused old crematorium, and it attracted too much attention in the main camp; moving the gassings to the isolated Birkenau farmhouse would be more efficient and covert.
58
Moreover,
as Birkenau became a large camp for doomed inmates—with many more on their way—mass selections among the registered inmates there grew more widespread. From the perspective of the SS men, it would be far easier to kill these selected prisoners in Birkenau itself, rather than transport them back to the gas chamber in the main camp. And so Birkenau was designated as the new center for mass
extermination in the Auschwitz complex.

FACTORIES OF DEATH

On June 11, 1942, several SS managers of genocide, led by Adolf Eichmann, met in the offices of the RSHA Jewish Department in Berlin to discuss details of their Europe-wide deportation program. Their mood was grim. Just two days earlier, Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s closest accomplice, had been buried during a bombastic state funeral,
following his assassination by two British-trained agents from Czechoslovakia. Nazi leaders were already wreaking brutal vengeance against the Czech population and agreed that Jews would have to pay, too. During his eulogy for Heydrich on June 9, Himmler told SS generals that the time had come for “a clean sweep” against Jews: “We will wrap up the mass migration of the Jews within a year, no doubt;
afterward, none of them will be migrating anymore.” Auschwitz figured large in Himmler’s thinking. As Eichmann explained two days later, during the meeting in the RSHA, Himmler had ordered the deportation of large numbers of Jewish men and women for forced labor to Auschwitz. The SS managers then hammered out the details: starting in mid-July 1942, some one hundred and twenty-five thousand Jewish
men and women would be taken by train from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to the camp. Himmler still envisaged most of these prisoners as slaves; the bulk of Jews deported to Auschwitz, he ordered, should be young (between sixteen and forty years) and ready for work. But he made a crucial exception: the transports could also include a smaller proportion of Jews—some ten percent—who were
unfit for work. Their fate was clear to Eichmann and the other SS managers. They would be murdered on arrival.
59

Preparing for Genocide

In Himmler’s eyes, Auschwitz was ready to play a major part in the Holocaust. It had been designated as a large forced labor camp for Jews in early 1942, and he now decided that it could also become a sizable death camp. It was isolated enough for secretive
mass murder, but close enough to receive deportations from western and central Europe, thanks to its good railway links.
60
What is more, the basic infrastructure for genocide was already in place, following the mass gassing of alleged commissars from the Soviet Union and of Jews from Silesia. After Auschwitz had proved itself as a regional extermination camp, it was promoted to the first rank
of Nazi death camps. As Commandant Höss proudly put it the following year, the Auschwitz SS had been given an important new task: “the solution of the Jewish question.”
61

The new plans for Auschwitz triggered hectic activity among the Camp SS in June 1942. It was no coincidence, surely, that the head of the company distributing Zyklon B was called to Berlin around this time; the orders of gas
deliveries for Auschwitz soon increased dramatically.
62
Inside the WVHA, key discussions involved Oswald Pohl, who was at Himmler’s side on June 18 and 20, 1942.
63
Just a few days earlier, his KL manager Richard Glücks (now chief of WVHA office group D) had traveled to Auschwitz for face-to-face talks with the local executioners. Rudolf Höss complained after the war that Glücks did not like to
hear about the so-called Final Solution.
64
This may have been true later on, when Glücks was increasingly sidelined, but initially he was hands-on, keeping in close touch with Adolf Eichmann and holding regular talks with his own opposite number in the RSHA, Gestapo head Heinrich Müller.
65
What is more, he was keen to impress his new boss, Pohl, with whom he met regularly to confer about the Holocaust.
66

Glücks arrived in Auschwitz in the late afternoon of June 16, 1942, and probably stayed until the following day. He must have talked about Nazi extermination policy, since the death rate of registered Jewish prisoners shot up dramatically right after his visit.
67
Glücks also toured the camp. His itinerary apparently included the old crematorium in the main camp (now undergoing repairs) and the
storeroom for the clothes of murdered prisoners.
68
Glücks must have been especially keen to see the new extermination facilities in Birkenau. Bunker 1 was already in use. Meanwhile, a few hundred yards away, SS men were turning a second, slightly larger farmhouse—the “little white house”—into another gas chamber, almost certainly as a result of the recent decision to make Auschwitz a European
death camp. Bunker 2 probably went into operation in late June or early July 1942.
69

Just one week after Glücks’s trip to Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss traveled to the WVHA headquarters in Berlin-Lichterfelde, where Pohl had called a meeting of all camp commandants for the evening of Thursday, June 25, 1942. The impending mass deportations to Auschwitz were no doubt on Höss’s mind as he set off for
the German capital. Not long before he left the camp on June 24 to catch the overnight train to Berlin, his staff sent a secret cable to Glücks, asking for a private appointment the following morning or afternoon, so that Höss could “discuss urgent, important matters with you, Brigadeführer.” Glücks’s staff quickly scheduled a meeting in the office of SS engineer Hans Kammler, who was intimately involved
in all the major building projects in Auschwitz.
70
We do not know what the three Camp SS officers plotted during this meeting. But they must have touched on the preparation of Auschwitz for the arrival of vast numbers of Jewish deportees destined to die in the camp.

Mass Deportations

Deportation trains from across Europe started to arrive in Auschwitz, as planned, from July 1942. In previous
months, mass transports of Jews had still been more sporadic. Now, especially from mid-July 1942, they became routine. The transports, usually carrying around one thousand people, arrived on a daily basis; occasionally, two trains came on the same day. In all, more than sixty thousand Jews were taken to Auschwitz during July and August 1942, from France, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Slovakia,
and Croatia.
71
Determined to kill as many Jews as quickly as possible, the RSHA pushed for even more deportations. During a meeting in Berlin on August 28, 1942, Adolf Eichmann told his men to step up transports from Europe over the coming months. This was news to Commandant Rudolf Höss, who had been summoned from Auschwitz to attend the meeting (the following day, Höss briefed Glücks about it).
From autumn 1942, regular transports rolled from the Greater German Reich, initially from Theresienstadt (Terezín) and Berlin. Then, in spring 1943, trains from Salonika arrived; the first four transports in March brought ten thousand Greek Jews to the camp. And in October 1943, after German forces had poured into Italy following its defection to the Allies, the first RSHA train left from Rome
for Auschwitz, with some 1,031 Jewish prisoners on board. Despite the geographical extension across Europe, however, Polish Jews still made up the largest group among the 468,000 Jews deported to Auschwitz during 1942–43.
72

While the reach of the RSHA steadily grew, the number of death trains fluctuated wildly, rising and falling in line with the general pace of the Holocaust. In July 1943, for
example, the RSHA deported fewer than 7,200 Jews to Auschwitz. One month later, more than fifty thousand arrived, after a renewed push to destroy ghettos in east Upper Silesia.
73
Most trains arrived from such ghettos and from transit or internment camps. As in the case of Stanis
ł
aw Jankowski, the prisoners had often been shunted from one camp to another, with the KL the last link in a long chain.
There were many Jewish camps across Europe, some like Westerbork (Netherlands) still well known, others like
Ž
ilina (Slovakia) long since forgotten.
74
Not all these sites were staffed by German authorities. Drancy, for example, was guarded by French policemen until the SS took over in summer 1943.
75
Conditions in the camps varied greatly; though they were often poor, they were generally not lethal.
Crucially, none of these transit camps were run by the WVHA as SS concentration camps, except for Herzogenbusch (Vught) in the Netherlands.

Herzogenbusch, in the district of Noord-Brabant, was not initially conceived as a KL. In summer 1942, Hanns Albin Rauter, the higher SS and police leader in the Netherlands, decided to set up an additional large camp for Jews: before they “depart for the
East,” they would be held there during the “general cleanup in the Netherlands.” But in December 1942, the site was placed under the WVHA as an official concentration camp (Rauter still stayed in the picture, though, resulting in repeated conflicts with the WVHA). The so-called transit camp for Jews was opened on January 16, 1943, with “many buildings only half-finished,” recalled Arthur Lehmann,
a German Jewish lawyer in his early fifties. The new camp quickly filled and by early May 1943, more than 8,600 Jewish men, women, and children were detained here. Many had been officially exempted from immediate deportation, giving them false hope that Herzogenbusch would become a regular ghetto in all but name.
76

At this time, Herzogenbusch bore only superficial similarities to a KL like Auschwitz.
True, there were purpose-built barracks, roll calls, SS guards, and work. But here the resemblance ended. To deceive the Jewish inmates about their ultimate fate, the Herzogenbusch SS acted with far more restraint. For a start, prisoners were allowed to keep their own clothes and belongings; Arthur Lehmann, with his glasses and tussled hair, looked more like a professor than a prisoner. Conditions
during labor—which later included work for the Philips electronics company—were mostly bearable. And although prisoners were divided by gender, with children joining their mothers, the men and women were allowed to visit each other regularly. Most important, much of the internal organization lay in the hands of imprisoned Jews themselves, just like in Nazi ghettos. Jewish leaders like Lehmann,
who became chief of the internal administration, controlled funds for purchases from the canteen, organized food distribution, and maintained links with lawyers and relatives outside the camp. There was also a Jewish camp police (
Ordnungsdienst
), which patrolled the camp and its storeroom, and met new arrivals at the railway station. Inmates accused of theft and other infractions came before a
prisoner court, headed by a former judge, rather than facing SS punishment. Overall, there was little abuse inside the camp, and the Camp SS maintained a low profile. All this was reflected in the comparatively small mortality rate, with around one hundred deaths—almost all of them infants or elderly—among all the twelve thousand Jews who passed through the camp.