Inside the Gas Chambers

by Shlomo Venezia

  Throughout this phase, the death rate increased suddenly, reaching 5 percent in Dachau and over 9 percent in Buchenwald.10 This rate continued to increase. On the eve of the war, the death rate at Buchenwald reached nearly 14 percent.

  It is important to emphasize that the Jews were not, before 1938, included systematically in this repressive penal system. The large numbers of them who, from 1933 onwards, were sent to the camps within the concentration camp system were sent generally because they belonged to another “category” of persons targeted by legislation

  When, from November 9, 1938, the round-ups started to affect the Jewish population as a whole, approximately 35,000 persons were imprisoned, mainly in the camps at Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau. In less than three months, 243 of them were killed, more than over the previous five years.11 But the majority of them were freed, after having declared that they would emigrate.

  THE WAR: FROM GHETTOIZATION TO THE FORMULATION OF THE “FINAL SOLUTION” (1939–1941)

  The period from 1939 to 1941, characterized by the outbreak of the worldwide conflict, represented the second phase in the process of persecution and destruction of the Jews of Europe. On September 1, 1939, German troops invaded Polish territory. It was in this country of 27,000,000 inhabitants that the largest Jewish community in Central and Eastern Europe was found, comprising over 3,200,000 persons. So the Jews constituted nearly 12 percent of the total population and over 30 percent of the urban population.

  Seventeen days after the outbreak of war, Poland was divided between the two invading powers, Germany and the Soviet Union. The Jewish population, more numerous in the part under German control, was thus subjected to the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazi regime. A major demographic restructuring of the territory was undertaken; it consisted of “repatriating” the Volksdeutsche (persons of German ethnic origin) who lived in Soviet territory, and expelling the local populations who were deemed dangerous from a “racial” point of view (mainly Jews, but also certain Poles considered “non-germanizable”).12 It was a question of shifting the Reich’s “ethnic” frontier over five hundred miles. This plan thus created the conditions to make the Reich “judenfrei” (free of Jews), via the forced emigration eastwards of the whole Jewish population of the Reich.

  In the two months that followed the invasion, the territories occupied by Germany were divided into two distinct parts: the territories in the west of Poland (Upper Silesia, the Warthegau, the district of Danzig-Pomerania, and East Prussia) were incorporated into the Reich, while those in central and east Poland (the districts of Lublin, Kraków, Radom, and Warsaw) were transformed into a reserve for a labor force. That territory was called the “General Government,” and placed under rigid German administration.

  Special SS troops were used to eliminate part of the Polish elite, as well as many Jews, so as to expel them as quickly as possible. In addition, new KL were set up in the conquered territories to imprison the local intelligentsia and a new category of prisoners: prisoners of war. Thus, from September 2 onwards, KL-Stutthof was opened near Danzig,13 and in April 1940, KL-Auschwitz was set up between Kraków and Katowice.

  To facilitate the expulsion eastwards of the whole of the Jewish population, a plan was drawn up to bring together and concentrate the Jewish population into urban centers. From spring 1940 onwards began the systematic ghettoization of the Polish Jews (including, in certain cases, as in Łódź , part of the Gypsy population). In certain places, such as Piotrków Tribunalski, this operation took place as early as October 1939, while in certain other towns, such as Białystok, sealing off the ghetto was postponed until September 1941. The first major operation took place in the annexed region of the Warthegau (providing a blueprint for all successive operations), with the establishment of the Łódź ghetto in the most dilapidated part of town. At the beginning of February, the Chief of Police promulgated an order establishing a Jüdischer Wohnbezirk (a Jewish dwelling zone); on March 8, the Nazis massacred nearly 2,000 Jews found outside the designated district; on May 1 the ghetto was hermetically sealed and an order announced the execution of any Jew found outside the ghetto; finally, the possessions that the victims had been forced to abandon behind them were systematically pillaged.

  Town by town, the local administrations adopted the same procedure, with a few adaptations, in particular when it came to the assembling of small dispersed Jewish communities into towns that became town-ghettos (such as the small town of Szydłowiec) or in Kraków, where the process of ghettoization followed a different pattern.14

  The ghetto was generally formed of a set of buildings without any open or green spaces, situated in the center of the town and next to a railway station (according to Reinhard Heydrich’s instructions). In some cities such as Warsaw (the most populous ghetto, in which 450,000 Jews were confined), Kraków, or Radom, a wall (reminiscent of medieval city walls with entry gates) was built around the ghetto. In other cities, such as Łódź, only barbed-wire fences surrounded the ghetto, and in yet other cities, such as Lublin, there was no wall or fence.15

  In tandem with this, a set of labor camps, the Zwangsarbeitslager or ZAL, designed to exploit the Jewish workforce, were established across the territory.

  However, as far as Nazi policies were concerned, the ghettos could represent only a temporary solution to a much wider territorial problem. Between spring 1940 and summer 1941, with the waves of expulsion of Jews from West to East and the gathering of local Jews, the Nazi bureaucracy progressively transformed the program of forced emigration into a policy for the “Endlösung der Judenfrage” (final solution of the Jewish question).

  MASS EXTERMINATION: THE SHOAH (1941–1945)

  The third phase was that of physical extermination. It began in June 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union.

  The invasion forces were followed by “special troops”16 (Einsatzgruppen), whose task it was to shoot the Jewish population within the field of intervention (which spread progressively from the Baltic to all of White Russia). These “mobile combat units” of the SS managed to carry out their destructive task with the help of the Wehrmacht and elements recruited among the local population, some of whom joined the auxiliary troops of the SS. The number of their victims is estimated at between 1,500,000 and 1,800,000 persons.17

  In order to eliminate the Jews on Soviet territory, the Germans used the method of mass execution that seemed to them, in this case, to be the most efficient way of achieving the desired aim. This system of murder, adopted by mobile units, allowed them to eliminate the greatest number of possible victims who had not been forced to live, as in Poland, in limited urban centers. But major problems rapidly cropped up and forced the German bureaucracy to identify new methods of murder, establishing a more “distant” relation between the victims and their executioners. In addition, the presence of gigantic common graves near the big cities and the fact that it was practically impossible to hide from local populations the reality of these mass executions, and, as a result, not attract attention from international public opinion, made the situation almost untenable. In a short time, the psychological state of some of the troops carrying out the massacres became a matter of concern to various echelons of the leadership.

  Mass executions were not the only method of murder practiced by the regime. Indeed, after the outbreak of the war, a vast secret plan was developed inside the Reich with the aim of preserving the purity of the “Volksgemeinschaft.” This plan, with the name Aktion T4, involved the elimination of the mentally ill. It began with the death of handicapped children by injecting them with fatal doses of medicine. Then, another technique was developed to bring about death in adults: gassing by inhalation of pure carbon monoxide, from a canister, in institutes specially furnished for this purpose and provided with gas chambers. This operation cost the lives of approximately 70,000–80,000 victims.18 The technique was repeated and used again between 1939 and 1940 in asylums and sanatoria in Poland, Pomerania, and East Prussia, to eliminate interned pat
ients. There, the gas was inhaled from canisters of carbon monoxide installed in the trucks transporting the victims.

  Between summer and autumn 1941, the Nazi bureaucracy took the decision to use these methods of programmed and scientific “elimination” on the Jewish population of occupied Europe. This was the biggest murder project ever conceived. To this end, the administration needed to define the operational methods that would be the most effective in achieving this large-scale goal.

  In September, experiments in fixed-place gas chambers resumed, in the region of Minsk.19 However, there was a new element as compared with the method used in operation T4: the gas used was the exhaust gas from the engine, introduced into the chamber by pipes. At the same time, a variant of the Gaswagen (gas trucks) was tested in Ukraine with the gas being fed in no longer by canisters but directly via the exhaust pipe.20 The Gaswagen were adopted for the first big murder operation carried out in December, in Chełmno, on Jews from the Łódź ghetto and the zones around the Wartheland. The same types of vehicles were used at almost the same time in Serbia, in the Semlin camp, to kill the Jews of Belgrade.

  The systematic elimination of the Jews of the General Government (also including East Galicia, after the invasion of the USSR) was organized between the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942. The operation, which was subsequently called “Aktion Reinhard,” was entrusted to the chief of police of the Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik, and his collaborator, Christian Wirth. The latter, as did many civil servants who went on to work on the elimination of the Jews of the General Government, had been directly involved in implementing operation T4.

  In order to carry out this task, three places were identified as having good rail links and thus suitable for building murder installations, fixed-site gas chambers with motor gas pumped in: Bełzec (between Kraków and Lwów), Sobibór (near Lublin) and Treblinka (between Warsaw and Białystok). The first camp to function was Bełzec, in March 1942, then Sobibór between April and May, and finally Treblinka in July.21

  The three camps were constructed on an identical basic composite structure: a sector reserved for the dwelling blocks for the guards (mainly Ukrainians) and a very limited number of prisoners who picked up and sorted possessions stolen from the victims (in Bełzec, the first camp to be opened, this distinction was not as rigid); a sector around the ramp inside the camp for the “unloading” of the Jews (the tracks running right into the camp); a zone of barracks for storing the objects (Sortierplatz); a space and a building in which the victims had to undress; an obligatory zone of passage for the victims (Schlauch – a tube) surrounded by barbed wire; a building at the end of this Schlauch in which the gas chambers were located, plus a room with a big diesel motor; and finally a large open space for the common graves in which the bodies were at first buried, and subsequently burned in the open.

  In 1943, after the liquidation of almost all the Polish ghettos and the setting up of the new structures of extermination in Birkenau (including gas chambers and crematorium ovens), Aktion Reinhard came to an end and the structures were definitively dismantled in autumn. This operation killed over 1,700,000 victims in these three camps, in addition to all the Jews killed during the liquidation of the various ghettos, as well as those who were killed in the forced labor camps for Jews inside the General Government.

  AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU AND ITS ROLE IN THE “FINAL SOLUTION”

  On April 27, 1940, KL-Auschwitz was established in a former military barracks in the small town of Oświęcim situated in the territory of Eastern Upper Silesia that had shortly before been annexed to the Reich. It was initially created as a concentration camp for Polish political opponents.22 On May 4, 1940, SS-Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Höß (who came from KL-Sachsenhausen) was appointed camp commandant. As in all the Nazi KL, a crematorium (Krematorium I) was installed as a sanitary measure so as to burn the corpses and thus avoid the spread of epidemics. The crematorium at Auschwitz was thus built and delivered by the German firm Topf & Söhne, of Erfurt.23

  During his first visit to the camp on March 1, 1941, Himmler gave orders to extend the Lager in view of the imminent arrival of 30,000 prisoners and to place at the disposal of the largest German chemical company, IG Farben, 10,000 prisoners who would be building the firm’s new factory in the neighboring village of Dwory.

  Between summer and autumn of the same year, the Auschwitz administration carried out experiments on new murder techniques similar to those that were being tried in the East. At the beginning of September, 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 Polish prisoners who were sick and deemed unsuitable for work were sent to a room in the basement of Block 11 and killed with Zyklon B gas. This gas had hitherto been used solely to disinfect barracks and clothing. Following this first experiment in mass gassing with Zyklon B, part of the mortuary room of Crematorium I was transformed into a gas chamber. It was in this “provisional” gas chamber that Soviet prisoners of war were eliminated, as were prisoners deemed unsuitable for work (within the context of “Aktion 14f13”) and the first transports of Jews from Upper Silesia.

  At the end of September 1941, the order was given to build a huge new camp some two miles away from the Stammlager (main camp). This order gave rise to the camp at Birkenau (later called Auschwitz II-Birkenau), initially planned as a camp for prisoners of war (KGL – Kriegsgefangenenlager), principally Soviet POWs. But within two months, the decision was taken in Berlin, at the instigation of the big industries, to make large-scale use of the Soviet labor force within the Reich. This was decisive for the future of Birkenau, since the camp, although built by and for Russian prisoners, eventually became a mainly Jewish prison. This change in direction was confirmed by an order from Himmler dated January 25, 1942, announcing that Jews rather than Soviet POWs would be sent there.24

  At the Wannsee conference, at the beginning of 1942, plans for the elimination of all the Jews of Europe were presented to the leaders of the National Socialist Party. This plan included the deportation to the camps and immediate elimination of the Jews considered “unsuitable” for work (with a very broad definition that took in the great majority of the population) and the exploiting to death of the minority subjected to forced labor.

  Auschwitz-Birkenau, whose geographical position was central (especially as it was at the junction of the main railway lines crossing Europe), and which was provided with structures adapted to the planned expansion of the activities of murder, assumed a decisive role in the destruction of the Jewish people.

  During March 1942, as Aktion Reinhard was beginning with the first gassings in Bełzec, a small farm in the forest surrounding Birkenau (still under construction) was transformed so that it could contain two gas chambers. In June, a second small farm a hundred or so yards farther on was in turn adapted to contain four gas chambers. These structures were called Bunker 1 and Bunker 2 (or, as the prisoners called them: the “red house” and the “white house”). Wooden barracks were set up near these two structures to act as places where the victims being sent to their deaths would undress. The Jews designated for death were gassed in the bunkers shortly after their arrival on the unloading ramp. This Judenrampe,25 situated near the warehouse of the town of Oświęcim, was used from then on exclusively for the arrival of convoys of Jews. The “initial selection” on the arrival of the convoys was set up shortly after the activation of Bunker 2. This process separated the small minority of Jews placed temporarily in the camp to be exploited as a labor force from the vast majority (over 80 percent) who were sent directly to their deaths in the gas chambers. Eventually, all of the Jews were to be eliminated.

  After being gassed in the bunkers, the victims’ bodies were buried in big common graves dug nearby. From September onwards, the corpses were systematically burned. The extracting of the corpses from the gas chamber and their liquidation in the graves was entrusted to a group of Jewish prisoners called the Sonderkommando. The victims’ belongings and clothes were sent to be sorted in a special zone of the camp situated initially between t
he camps of Auschwitz I and Birkenau, and called “Effektenlager I” or “Kanada I.”

  The Jews “selected” for forced labor followed a different route and were sent into structures called Saunas, where they underwent the process of registration and disinfection: the hair on their heads and bodies was shaved off. After a shower, their identity numbers were tattooed on their left forearms (Auschwitz was the only KL where prisoners’ registration numbers were tattooed). Before being incorporated into the camp – which at that time had two principal sectors, BIa for the men and BIb for the women – and being sent into one or another of the various labor kommandos inside and outside the camp, the prisoners were sent to the “quarantine” sector.

  In 1942, following the arrival of massive numbers of Jews from all over Europe, German industries in the Auschwitz area adopted the practice of “renting out” the prisoners’ labor. Now that practice spread, resulting in the creation of several sub-camps near factories and worksites. The Monowitz camp (which later became Auschwitz III) was thus set up opposite the Buna factory of IG Farben, in July. In all of the Auschwitz complex, the prisoners’ conditions were not conducive to survival: hygiene and food were appalling, and the captives were subjected to continual ill-treatment. Internal “selections” were regularly carried out to eliminate people who had become too weak to work; the camp was thus to be emptied of its “useless mouths.”

  In 1943, the Birkenau camp was extended with the opening of a whole sector, BII, bigger than BI. This new zone in the camp was subdivided into several sectors (also called “camps”) separated by barbed and electrified wire. Thus sector BIIa became the quarantine sector for men; BIIb became the camp for Jewish families deported from the Theresienstadt26 ghetto; BIIc was used in 1944 as a “Durchgangslager” (transit camp), especially for Jewish women deported from Hungary; BIId became the men’s camp; BIIe became the camp for Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) families;27 and finally sector BIIf became the men’s hospital. The whole of sector BI was transformed into the women’s camp.