Dark Continent, page 22
It was partly to circumvent such unease, and partly to improve the efficiency of the killing process, that the use of gas in specially designed death camps was developed. The period when this policy was set in motion seems to have been the late summer and early autumn of 1941, at around the time that Himmler personally watched Einsatzkommando 8 carry out a mass shooting in Minsk. The SS had already tried out mobile gas vans in East Prussia and the General Government in 1939–40. And just when Himmler was searching for an alternative to shootings, public outrage forced the euthanasia campaign in the Reich to be wound down. Hitler’s Chancellery had kept the T-4 programme under its own control; now it made the personnel, with their expertise in gassing techniques, available for transfer eastwards.
In September 1941, some euthanasia centres received Jewish inmates from the concentration camps, a sign that their function was already being shifted to the mass murder of Jews. At around the same time, a castle at Chelmno, near Łódź, was converted into a rudimentary death camp, and stationary gas vans operated by former euthanasia programme specialists were used to kill off the remaining Jewish population of the Warthegau from December 1941. The Einsatzgruppen started to use mobile vans throughout the East. SS technicians developed two types—the smaller Diamond, with a capacity of twenty-five/thirty people, and the larger Saurer which held fifty/sixty—and carefully monitored their performance, especially in bad weather. “Since December 1941, ninety-seven thousand have been processed, using three vans, without any defects showing up in the machines,” notes one report.54
The key to the Final Solution, however, was the construction of special extermination centres in the General Government. The SS focused initially on the area of Lublin, which under the earlier resettlement plans had been designated as a dumping-ground for Jews from western Poland. Former euthanasia specialist Christian Wirth was put in charge of the first death camp, Belzec, and gassing by carbon monoxide began there in March 1942. Exhausted Soviet POWs built the Majdanek camp in late 1941 and the first Jews were sent there from Lublin in December. By September 1942 gas chambers were in operation there too. Other former euthanasia operatives were assigned to the death camps of Treblinka and Sobibor. Gas chambers were constructed at these and other sites, and expanded as problems with capacity emerged.55
Auschwitz itself had been growing from its first use as a camp for Polish political prisoners. SS town planners dreamed of turning the Polish Oświęcimcim into Stadt Auschwitz, a nucleus for German colonization, with orderly streets, modern cinemas and rich fields regained from the marshes which surrounded the town. In addition to the prison barracks, the camp complex housed the giant synthetic rubber factory which I G Farben executives had wanted to build out of the range of Allied bombers. A gigantic new camp at nearby Birkenau housed Soviet POWs in truly appalling conditions, and it was on these that an insecticide called Zyklon-B, patented by an I G Farben subsidiary, was tested for the first time on 3 September 1941. A little later on, new gas chambers were built purposely for mass extermination. In 1942–43 Birkenau became the main death camp for Europe’s Jews.56
By 1942, then, the technological prerequisites for industrialized mass murder were in place. Death camps were under construction and cheap poison gases had been tested and were available. Spearheaded by the SS, backed by Hitler, the complex diplomatic, legal and logistical arrangements were now set in train for the extermination of the entire Jewish population of occupied Europe. The subject had been intensively discussed by the Nazi leadership during October and November 1941; its administrative dimensions formed the theme of the Wannsee Conference, originally scheduled for December but postponed until January 1942. By the time that Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy, was assassinated in May 1942, the Jews of Poland were being killed in “Operation Reinhard,” and the first trainloads of Jews from Slovakia had arrived at Auschwitz.57
In early 1943, SS chief statistician Richard Korherr drafted a report on the progress of the Final Solution for Himmler, in which he noted that 1,449,692 Polish Jews had already received “special treatment.” Himmler rebuked him for using that particular euphemism, and corrected the text to read: “Transportation of the Jews out of the Eastern Provinces to the Russian East: [1,449,692].” But the numbers speak for themselves. By the end of 1943, when the death camps were closed down, approximately 150,000 Jews had been murdered in Kulmhof/Chelmno, 200,000 in Sobibor, 550,000 in Belzec, and 750,000 in Treblinka—thus the Jews of Poland were mostly killed in the so-called “Reinhard” camps. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the giant combined labour camp and extermination centre, remained in operation for another year. Between March 1942 and November 1944, well over one million people were killed there, mostly Jews from Greece, Hungary, France, Holland and Italy as well as Poland.58,
The overall impact of the Final Solution was summarized by Korherr in the provisional report he prepared for Hitler in April 1943. “Altogether, European Jewry must have been reduced by almost 1/2 since 1933, that is to say, during the first decade of the development of the power of National Socialism. Again half, that is a quarter of the total Jewish population of 1937, has fled to other continents.” In fact, the final death toll was considerably higher, since the killing went on, inside and outside the camps, until the end of the war.59,
By the war’s end, between five and six million European Jews had been killed, almost half of the eleven million Jews recorded at the Wannsee conference. In some countries, such as Poland and Greece, almost the entire community was murdered. Other ethnic groups were also decimated, notably between 200,000 and 500,000 gypsies (many of whom were murdered in Belzec and Birkenau), Serbs, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians; but the systematic nature of the Final Solution makes it a case apart. Compared with the primitive techniques employed by other exponents of genocide such as the Croat Ustaše (who slaughtered at least 334,000 Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia) and the Romanians (who carried out bloody pogroms in Transnistria), the Endlösung demonstrated the superior genocidal efficiency of an operation conducted by a modern bureaucracy with industrial equipment.60,
We need not assume the complicity of all Germans to accept that responsibility for, and knowledge of, this crime stretched far beyond the ranks of the SS. Propaganda Minister Goebbels referred in a diary entry of 27 March 1942 to the “liquidation” of the Jews of Poland; by May, Reich Railway Department heads were conferring with the SS over transportation aspects of “the complete extermination” of the Jews. The Army, the Navy and the Foreign Office all played their part. In Salonika,. for example, a tiny team of SS “experts” could not have deported one fifth of the city, nearly 50,000 people, without the active support of the local military administration. As for scientists, doctors and academics, their advice and enthusiastic involvement had been integral to the Nazi racial programme from the start.61 When foreign governments were approached for support, their reactions depended upon the prospects for German victory, the nature of local attitudes towards the Jews and the opportunity costs of resistance. They tended to be particularly cooperative in handing over Jewish refugees and other non-nationals, but they were usually more reluctant to allow their own fellow-citizens to be deported. Some governments, notably the French, the Slovak and the Croat, were at least as enthusiastic in their anti-Semitism as the Germans and responded warmly to the chance of removing their Jewish population “to the east.” In Romania and later Hungary where extreme anti-Semitic movements briefly held power, the bloody consequences shocked the Germans themselves. Even where the locals dragged their heels, as in Greece or the Netherlands, cooperation among the various German authorities often ensured that a high proportion of the local Jewish population was deported. Virtually none emulated the Danes in helping most Jews to escape, though the Italians—for their own reasons—did all they could to obstruct the Final Solution in the areas under their control. And as for neutral Sweden and Switzerland, recent revelations indicate their willingness to turn Nazi racial policy to their own advantage.
The British and American governments, for their part, suffered from no lack of information. Churchill was receiving Ultra decrypts of the Einsatzgruppen reports from the East, which summarized the killing totals. Several individuals, including Jan Karski, an astonishingly brave Polish emissary, emerged from occupied Europe to brief London and Washington with eyewitness accounts of the ghettos and even the death camps themselves. But apart from some vague public warnings to the Germans, little was done, and the chance to bomb the camps was passed over. Whether this inaction stemmed from anti-Semitism, from inability to imagine was what taking place, or from the fact simply that the Final Solution was never a central concern of the Allied war effort remains a matter of controversy.62
Popular opinion inside occupied Europe is also difficult to gauge. Anti-Semitism was a continent-wide phenomenon with a long history, of course, and in some areas explains an attitude of detachment and even enthusiasm for the Jews’ plight. Nor should it be forgotten that genocide always offers spectacular opportunities for enrichment—abandoned factories, shops and properties, furniture and clothes—with which popular satisfaction may be purchased by the occupying power. After 1940, Eichmann extended the “Vienna model” of “Aryanization” of Jewish property to Amsterdam, Paris, Salonika and Europe’s other major cities, while Rosenberg’s agents alone plundered the equivalent of 674 trainloads of household goods in western Europe. Seventy-two trainloads of gold from the teeth of Auschwitz victims were sent to Berlin. If most of this went into German homes or Swiss bank vaults, a considerable sum lined the pockets of unscrupulous collaborators, informers and agents of every nationality. Yet it must be said that approval of the Final Solution was not a common phenomenon. In response to the horrors of occupation, most people living under Nazi control had retreated into a private world and tried to ignore everything that did not directly concern them. With traditional moral norms apparently thrown to the wind, the unusual cruelty of the Germans towards the Jews created a more general alarm among non-Jews.
What cannot escape our attention are German reactions—or the lack of them. There was no public protest inside the Reich to match the furore over the euthanasia campaign. Most Germans appear to have accepted that the Jews were no longer part of their community. Ordinary middle-aged policemen took part in mass executions; university professors, lawyers and doctors commanded the Einsatzgruppen. They did not do so out of fear: there is no recorded instance of a refusal to shoot innocent civilians being punished by death. Rather, the letters of concentration camp guards and death-squad killers reveal what ordinary individuals living in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century were capable of doing under the influence of a murderous ideology. Even in the midst of killing, private concerns about girlfriends, wives or children continued to worry them.
When SS-Untersturmführer Max Täubner was tried by the SS and Police Supreme Court in Munich in May 1943 for the unauthorized shooting of Jews in the Ukraine, the court offered a revealing insight into the moral values of the Third Reich. Its judgment stressed that killing Jews was not in itself a crime: “The Jews have to be exterminated and none of the Jews that were killed is any great loss.” In the court’s eyes, Täubner’s offence lay rather in killing them cruelly and allowing “his men to act with such vicious brutality that they conducted themselves under his command like a savage horde.” Even though he had acted out of “a true hatred for the Jews” rather than “sadism,” he had revealed an “inferior” character, and a “high degree of mental brutalization.” “The conduct of the accused,” ran the verdict, “is unworthy of an honourable and decent German man.”63
A similar acceptance of racially motivated killing was evident inside the Reich. The segregation of forced labourers and POW workers, enforced by the Gestapo, became accepted as a normal state of affairs. Denunciations of foreign workers were commonplace. The public hanging or flogging of workers who formed sexual relationships with German citizens seem to have occasioned little protest, as did the restrictions imposed by the police on their movements and activities: Polish workers were, for example, forbidden to use bicycles or to attend church. Nazi views on the inferiority of “East workers” seem to have been commonly accepted. The inhabitants of Mauthausen grew used to seeing camp inmates shuffling through their streets and the casual brutality of their SS guards. When several hundred Russian POWs managed to escape from the camp, on 2 February 1945, only two local families are recorded as having offered a hiding-place and shelter. Most of the escapees were quickly rounded up or shot like “rabbits” by local farmers, excited Hitler Youth teenagers and townspeople eager to participate in a terrifying bloodletting.64
The death camps formed part of a larger “concentration camp universe” in which the SS ruled over hundreds of thousands of inmates in a vast network of camps stretching right across Europe. The boundaries of this “universe” stretched as far north as Norway, as far south as Crete. By the end of the war, some 1.6 million people had been incarcerated, of whom over one million had died (in addition to those deliberately targeted for extermination). In Europe as a whole there were more than 10,000 camps, including—in addition to the eight extermination camps and the twenty-two main concentration camps with their 1,200 offshoots—over four hundred ghetto camps, some twenty-nine psychiatric homes and thirty children’s homes where patients were murdered, twenty-six camps in the occupied eastern territories where mass murder was institutionalized, as well as numerous others housing POWs, civilian workers, juveniles or “Germanizable” east Europeans.65 Some thirty-three nationalities were to be found among the inmates at Dachau, over fourteen in Ravensbruck. The conditions of work were so oppressive that even many so-called labour camps were regarded by the inmates as centres of extermination. Describing the granite quarry at Gross-Rosen, near Breslau, a French doctor who arrived there from Auschwitz noted: “Nowhere did I see individual murders carried out with such dexterity as at Grossrosen; murder was practised without qualms, by the kapos, by the Camp police, by the SS and their dogs. With consummate skill they could kill a man with two or three blows.”66
The inmates of these camps provided the basis for the main economic activity of the SS, which by 1944 extended from mining to heavy industry, from land reclamation to scientific “research.” Four hundred and eighty thousand of the 600,000 prisoners in the camps in late 1944 were termed fit for work. Their tasks included sorting the possessions of dead prisoners for distribution to the Waffen-SS or other departments, building, quarrying and mining, as well as manufacturing in the Buna works and other industrial operations. Like the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the wartime Reich became a slave labour economy.
In February 1944 armaments czar Speer enlisted Himmler’s help in “deploying concentration camp inmates in functions that I regard as especially urgent.” This request inaugurated a rapid expansion of slave labour in munitions, in aircraft construction and particularly in building the underground missile works at “Dora” and Peenemünde. Death rates here were horrendous: 2,882 of 17,000 workers died on the “Dora” project within a few months: Speer regarded the project as a “sensational success.” Overall, some 140,000 prisoners were used by Speer while 230,000 were utilized as slave labour by industrial firms in the private sector. By this point the armaments crisis had reached such a point that for the first time anti-Semitic ideology was overridden and Hungarian Jews were moved from Auschwitz as additional labourers.67
Barbarossa also extended the range of SS responsibilities in other directions. Terror replaced the rule of law in the East, and Himmler was authorized to deal with civilians directly without reference to the courts. The Waffen-SS became Himmler’s army, growing from around 75,000 men in 1939–40 to nearly 500,000 by late 1944, part-threat part-partner to the Wehrmacht and as such a key instrument for Hitler in his gradual Nazification of the Army. The SS was given responsibility for policing the occupied territories in the East, while SS-Gruppenführer Bach-Zelewski was placed in charge of coordinating anti-partisan operations.
Needless to say, such operations resulted in enormous destruction and loss of life. The basic strategy was “to answer terror with terror.” Reprisal ratios were set for attacks on German life or property. As a result thousands of villages were burned down and hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in the course of “cleansing operations.” Their impact upon partisan activity was almost certainly counterproductive, driving young men into clandestine activity. Efforts at a more sophisticated counter-insurgency strategy would have to wait several decades: after 1945 European colonial powers, and the Americans, studied and learned much from the failures of Nazi retaliatory anti-guerrilla policies.
While the partisans never really posed a significant military threat to German rule, they did obstruct the process of Germanization. Here, too, Barbarossa made Nazi thinking more extreme and more ambitious. Following the conquest of the Ukraine and Belorussia, SS town planners lost no time in drawing up proposals for new small German towns dotted across the Ukraine. “General Plan East” envisaged a massive settlement programme stretching from Lithuania to the Crimea over twenty-five years. At Auschwitz, inmates dug fish ponds and built barns for model farms where Nazi colonists could be trained before heading east.
In the real world, however, certain difficulties with the entire Germanization idea were becoming apparent. One was corruption, for among the Germans from the Old Reich was a high proportion of “gold-diggers” (or “golden pheasants,” as they were known) and carpet-baggers, attracted by the prospects of quick riches and easy plunder. By contrast, few farmers wanted to make the move. Settlers felt exposed in rural areas where their life and property were endangered by the embittered local population.
