KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (87 page)

Outside the Third Reich, meanwhile, more people were rising up, and the German occupiers
answered with extreme force; many resisters were murdered on the spot, and many more deported to concentration camps.
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Among them were several tens of thousands of men and women arrested inside France.
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Even more new KL prisoners arrived from occupied Poland, in the wake of the doomed Warsaw Uprising. The insurgency had been triggered on August 1, 1944, by the Polish Home Army, which hoped to
drive the German occupiers out just before the seemingly imminent arrival of the Red Army. But the Soviet advance stalled, and the uprising was put down with extraordinary brutality by Nazi troops, who had long seen the city as the hotbed of Polish resistance. After nine terrible weeks, some one hundred and fifty thousand local civilians had been killed and much of Warsaw lay in ruins (among the
dead were several hundred prisoners from the local KL, who had briefly tasted freedom during the uprising). As for the survivors, SS officials were determined to add them to their slave labor force; in mid-August, the SS dreamed of four hundred thousand extra prisoners for the concentration camps. In the end, an estimated sixty thousand men, women, and children were deported from the remains of Warsaw
to the KL. Among them was a twenty-one-year-old seamstress (her name is unknown), who was forced out of her destroyed building in September 1944 with her husband and neighbors. After several days in packed cattle trucks, the men were dragged out near Sachsenhausen. “Families that were separated screamed and cried,” she recalled. Then the train took the remaining women and children to Ravensbrück,
where some twelve thousand prisoners from Warsaw arrived in all.
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Diverse as the KL population was, there was one prisoner group that grew faster than any other—Jews. In the course of 1944, the German authorities forced more Jewish men, women, and children to the KL than ever before. According to one estimate, almost two-thirds of all new arrivals between spring and autumn 1944 had to wear the
yellow star. By the end of the year, more than two hundred thousand were registered as KL inmates; any Jews in German-controlled territory were now most likely held inside concentration camps.
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Among them were many Polish Jews who had survived outside the KL system until now. Tens of thousands came from abandoned forced labor camps, including the so-called Schmelt camps in Upper Silesia.
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Others
arrived from the last ghettos. During the final liquidation of Lodz in August 1944, almost sixty-seven thousand Jews were deported to Auschwitz; around two-thirds were murdered on arrival.
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Auschwitz also continued to receive deportation trains from the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe, as the RSHA pursued Jews who had so far escaped its clutches. Among the largest transports in 1944 were those
from France, Holland, Slovakia, Greece, and Italy. One of these trains, which arrived late on February 26 from a camp in Modena, brought Primo Levi to Auschwitz, together with 649 other Jews; 526 of them were gassed on arrival.
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Further prisoners arrived from Theresienstadt. In May 1944, some 7,500 Jews, many of them old, orphaned, or ill, were deported to Auschwitz during a Nazi effort to put
the ghetto into better light for the impending visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross; many thousands more, especially younger prisoners, followed in the autumn.
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By far the largest number of Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1944 came from Hungary. After Hungary had distanced itself from its German partner, seeking a separate peace with the Allies, Nazi forces invaded the country
in March 1944. The German occupation was a catastrophe for Hungarian Jewry, which had so far been spared from the Holocaust. German troops were accompanied by Adolf Eichmann and his team. Drawing on their experience with round-ups, deportations, and extermination, Eichmann’s men proceeded with great speed and efficiency. Mass transports began in mid-May 1944, and by July, when they were stopped after
an intervention by the Hungarian regent Horthy, at least four hundred and thirty thousand Jews had been taken to Auschwitz.
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After SS units removed Horthy in mid-October 1944, the Nazis renewed their effort to deport the remaining Hungarian Jews. Trains were scarce now, as transport shortages started to bite, so tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children were forced on marches to the
distant Austrian border. By the end of 1944, an estimated seventy-six thousand Jews had been driven toward Austria. Here, some survivors were forced to build fortifications, while others were taken to the KL. Among them was the teenager Eva Fejer, who eventually reached Ravensbrück. “At first,” she later said, “we thought we were coming into a decent camp, not least because we had been made to
believe that it would be good as long as one behaved properly.” She soon learned the truth.
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Nazi leaders and industrialists saw the Hungarian Jews as an important addition to the workforce. Even before the mass deportations began, there were plans—pushed forward by Hitler and Himmler—to send one hundred thousand or more as slave laborers to the KL inside Germany. In particular, the prisoners
were earmarked for Fighter Staff relocation projects. When Albert Speer asked in a meeting on May 26, 1944, when these prisoners would arrive, he was assured by Kammler that the transports were already “on their way.” But before they reached the building sites inside the old German borders, these Hungarian Jews had to pass through Auschwitz. After all, the SS was only interested in slaves who could
work; all those who were too young, old, or weak would be murdered.
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The Murder of Hungarian Jews

Auschwitz was never more lethal for Jews than in spring and summer 1944. Among the dead were many regular prisoners, including most inmates from the Theresienstadt family camp.
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The overwhelming majority of victims, however, had only just arrived. Huge numbers poured into Auschwitz—between May
and July 1944, more Jews were deported to the camp than during the entire preceding two years—and nearly all came from Hungary. Their murder marked the climax of the Holocaust in Auschwitz, at a time when most European Jews under German control had long since been killed.
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The man who oversaw the extermination of Hungarian Jews was a familiar figure in Auschwitz: Rudolf Höss, the old commandant.
Around late April or early May 1944, shortly before the deportations started, Höss traveled to Hungary to meet his friend Eichmann at his temporary residence in Budapest (Eichmann, in turn, visited Auschwitz several times in spring 1944). The two men brooded over the deportation schedules to determine how many trains “could be dealt with” in Auschwitz, as Höss put it. In addition, Höss wanted
to inform his WVHA superiors how many slave laborers they could expect, once those deemed unfit had been gassed. Höss conducted trial selections in Hungary, and concluded that most Jews had to die; at best, he estimated, twenty-five percent would be selected for labor.
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Next, Höss traveled to Auschwitz, returning to the scene of his earlier crimes, and on May 8, 1944, took over temporarily as
senior commandant of the Auschwitz camp complex.
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In view of the scale of the impending genocide, WVHA leaders had dispatched their most experienced manager of mass murder.
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In their eyes, the reappointment of Höss was all the more pressing because the position of the current senior commandant, Arthur Liebehenschel, had become untenable. Apparently, the reserved Liebehenschel had gained a reputation
as a soft touch, though the immediate reason for his removal was a private drama.
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Back when Liebehenschel had worked in the WVHA, he had fallen for Richard Glücks’s secretary, who eventually joined him in Auschwitz after his divorce. But after Liebehenschel sought permission to remarry, his superiors learned a dark secret: early in the Third Reich, his fiancée had been arrested for a relationship
with a Jew. Oswald Pohl was horrified. He dispatched his bullish adjutant Richard Baer to tell Liebehenschel to terminate the relationship. After Baer broke the news in the Auschwitz officer mess late on April 19, 1944, Liebehenschel sobbed and got drunk. Then he confronted his pregnant fiancée, who protested her innocence. Two days later, the love-stricken Liebehenschel, his eyes swollen from
crying, told Baer that he stood by his lover, adding that the Gestapo must have forced her into a false confession all those years ago. There was no way back now for Liebehenschel, who had broken the SS racial code (by consorting with a suspected “race defiler”), its unspoken rules (by accusing the Gestapo of torture), and its social norms (by acting “anything but manly,” as Baer called it). Pohl
swiftly removed Liebehenschel and after a brief stint as caretaker of the depleted Majdanek camp, he left the Camp SS embittered and sick.
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His fall eased the return of Höss to Auschwitz in late spring 1944. Here was a man SS leaders could trust with the largest extermination program the KL system had ever seen. Höss surrounded himself with a handful of close associates and killing experts,
whom he had known for years. Among them was the Camp SS veteran Josef Kramer, who had served as Höss’s first adjutant in Auschwitz in 1940, and now returned from Natzweiler to become commandant of Birkenau. Another familiar face was Otto Moll, who had gained plenty of experience at the Birkenau gas chambers in 1942–43, and was called back from a satellite camp to oversee the crematoria complex once
more.
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After Höss and his men had completed some last-minute preparations, the mass deportations from Hungary began. Between mid-May 1944 and mid-July 1944, trains came on an almost daily basis and Auschwitz was soon overwhelmed; on some days, as many as five transports arrived, carrying around sixteen thousand Jews (between January and April 1944, during the Liebehenschel era, a daily average
of around two hundred Jews had arrived in Auschwitz). While Adolf Eichmann marveled at the “record performance” of his men, H
ö
ss implored his friend to slow things down. But even a dressing down from Oswald Pohl made no difference, with Eichmann pushing for even more transports, citing “force majeure during wartime” (as he told his sympathizers after the war).
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As they emerged from the trains,
the Hungarian Jews had little idea what awaited them; few had heard of Auschwitz and fewer still of the gas chambers. The Camp SS, meanwhile, swung into action. SS doctors subjected all these new arrivals to selections, in contrast to some other Jewish deportation transports in 1944. In general, the SS applied the same criteria used previously; those classified as unfit for labor included pregnant
women, older prisoners, young children, and their accompanying parents. At the end of each day, the Auschwitz SS sent statistics about the selections to the WVHA, to update the managers about newly available slave laborers. Overall, the local SS officers stuck to Höss’s forecast and picked out around one in four Jews from Hungary for slave labor. The fate of these approximately one hundred and
ten thousand prisoners differed: some were formally registered in Auschwitz, some were sent to other KL, some perished in Birkenau transit compounds. The remaining three hundred and twenty thousand or so Hungarian Jews, declared unfit, were killed straightaway, during a murderous frenzy that lasted until the mass deportations stopped in July 1944.
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Rudolf Höss threw himself into mass murder
with customary zeal, knowing that he would return to the WVHA once he had completed his mission (he was succeeded as senior commandant of the Auschwitz camp complex on July 29, 1944, by the ruthless Richard Baer, who liked to show off his experience as a frontline SS warrior by wearing his old Death’s Head division uniform).
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During his time in charge, Höss did his best to accelerate the extermination
process. Trains from Hungary no longer stopped outside the camp but followed a single track to a hastily completed ramp right inside Birkenau; as they lined up here on arrival, the deported Jews could hear the incongruous tunes of one of the camp orchestras, brought in to lull them into a false sense of security. After the SS selection, the great majority of the newcomers walked directly
toward their deaths, carrying small children and supporting the weak as they filed past several Birkenau compounds on the way to the gas chambers. Left at the ramp, after the trains pulled away to collect yet more victims, were all the suitcases, bags, and bundles, gathered up by the greatly expanded Canada Commando.
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The Birkenau crematoria burned longer than ever, stoked by the Special Squad,
now some nine hundred prisoners strong and working around the clock. The SS also put bunker 2 back into use for gassings and reactivated crematorium V (out of commission since autumn 1943). But because the SS still murdered more Jews than it could burn in the crematoria, it decided to use open-air pits for cremation, as well, just as in 1942. To hide these crimes from new arrivals, Oswald Pohl
gave the go-ahead—after an inspection of the camp on June 16, 1944, at the height of the murder—to erect a fence around the crematoria areas.
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SS men stationed inside the killing complex lost their last inhibitions. They murdered in such a rush that some victims were still breathing when the doors of the gas chambers were unlocked. Sometimes the killers bypassed the gas chambers altogether, shooting
Hungarian Jews at the burning pits, beating them to death, or throwing them into the flames alive. This inferno was overseen by Otto Moll, who made Dr. Mengele look human, according to one survivor.
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Because of the sheer number of incoming deportation trains in summer 1944, the SS was sometimes unable to carry out its selections at the Birkenau ramp. In such cases, new arrivals were taken to
transit compounds, where their ultimate fate would be decided later. The largest of these compounds was a huge, unfinished extension of Birkenau known as “Mexico” (BIII), which held an estimated seventeen thousand Jewish women from Hungary and elsewhere by early autumn 1944. Living conditions were worse than almost anywhere else in the camp. There was no running water and barely any food. Huge vats
served as toilets, and instead of clothes, many prisoners wore blankets draped around their shoulders (this apparently reminded some of ponchos, hence the name “Mexico”). Barracks, each holding around one thousand women, were unfurnished, with prisoners lying on the muddy ground; Ágnes Rózsa, the teacher from Nagyvárad we encountered earlier, shared a small urine-soaked sheet with four other women.
Some prisoners, like Rózsa, were eventually deported elsewhere for forced labor. But many others wasted away or were led to the gas chambers. This was the perpetrators’ preferred solution to the human catastrophe they had created. A former Camp SS man later testified that his colleagues had often talked about murdering the prisoners left in “Mexico.” The catchphrase was: “Let them go through
the chimney.”
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