The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by William Shirer

  All in all, according to Karl Eichmann, the head of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo, two million persons, almost all Jews, were liquidated by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. But this is almost certainly an exaggeration; it is strange but true that the S.S. bigwigs were so proud of their exterminations that they often reported swollen figures to please Himmler and Hitler. Himmler’s own statistician, Dr. Richard Korherr, reported to his chief on March 23, 1943, that a total of 633,300 Jews in Russia had been “re-settled”—a euphemism for massacre by the Einsatzgruppen.51 Surprisingly enough this figure tallies fairly well with exhaustive studies later made by a number of experts. Add another hundred thousand slain in the last two years of the war and the figure is probably as accurate as we will ever have.*

  High as it is, it is small compared to the number of Jews who were done to death in Himmler’s extermination camps when the “final solution” came to be carried out.

  THE “FINAL SOLUTION”

  One fine June day of 1946 at Nuremberg three members of the American prosecution staff were interrogating S.S. Obergruppenfuehrer Oswald Pohl, who, among other things, had been in charge of work projects for the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps. Pohl, a naval officer before he joined the S.S., had gone into hiding after the German collapse and had not been apprehended until a year later—in May 1946—when he was discovered working on a farm disguised as a farmhand.†

  In answer to one question Pohl used a term with which the Nuremberg prosecution, busy for months in poring over millions of words from the captured documents, had begun to become familiar. A certain colleague by the name of Hoess had, Pohl said, been employed by Himmler “in the final solution of the Jewish question.”

  “And what was that?” Pohl was asked.

  “The extermination of Jewry,” he answered.

  The expression crept with increasing frequency into the vocabulary and the files of the leading Nazis as the war progressed, its seeming innocence apparently sparing these men the pain of reminding one another what it meant and perhaps too, they may have thought, furnishing a certain cover for their guilt should the incriminating papers ever come to light. Indeed at the Nuremberg trials most of the Nazi chiefs denied that they knew what it signified, and Goering contended he had never used the term, but this pretense was soon exploded. In the case against the fat Reich Marshal a directive was produced which he had sent Heydrich, the chief of the S.D., on July 31, 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen were already falling with gusto to their extermination tasks in Russia.

  I here with commission you [Goering instructed Heydrich] to carry out all preparations with regard to … a total solution of the Jewish question in those territories of Europe which are under German influence …

  1 furthermore charge you to submit to me as soon as possible a draft showing the … measures already taken for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question.*52

  Heydrich knew very well what Goering meant by the term for he had used it himself nearly a year before at a secret meeting after the fall of Poland, in which he had outlined “the first step in the final solution,” which consisted of concentrating all the Jews in the ghettos of the large cities, where it would be easy to dispatch them to their final fate.†

  As it worked out, the “final solution” was what Adolf Hitler had long had in mind and what he had publicly proclaimed even before the war started. In his speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, he had said:

  If the international Jewish financiers … should again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war the result will be … the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe.

  This was a prophecy, he said, and he repeated it five times, verbatim, in subsequent public utterances. It made no difference that not the “international Jewish financiers” but he himself plunged the world into armed conflict. What mattered to Hitler was that there was now a world war and that it afforded him, after he had conquered vast regions in the East where most of Europe’s Jews lived, the opportunity to carry out their “annihilation.” By the time the invasion of Russia began, he had given the necessary orders.

  What became known in high Nazi circles as the “Fuehrer Order on the Final Solution” apparently was never committed to paper—at least no copy of it has yet been unearthed in the captured Nazi documents. All the evidence shows that it was most probably given verbally to Goering, Himmler and Heydrich, who passed it down during the summer and fall of 1941. A number of witnesses testified at Nuremberg that they had “heard” of it but none admitted ever seeing it. Thus Hans Lammers, the bullheaded chief of the Reich Chancellery, when pressed on the witness stand replied:

  I knew that a Fuehrer order was transmitted by Goering to Heydrich … This order was called “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.”53

  But Lammers claimed, as did so many others on the stand, that he did not really know what it was all about until Allied counsel revealed it at Nuremberg.*

  By the beginning of 1942 the time had come, as Heydrich said, “to clear up the fundamental problems” of the “final solution” so that it could at last be carried out and concluded. For this purpose Heydrich convened a meeting of representatives of the various ministries and agencies of the S.S.-S.D. at the pleasant Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942, the minutes of which played an important part in some of the later Nuremberg trials.54 Despite the current setback of the Wehrmacht in Russia the Nazi officials believed that the war was almost won and that Germany would shortly be ruling all of Europe, including England and Ireland. Therefore, Heydrich told the assembly of some fifteen high officials, “in the course of this Final Solution of the European Jewish problem, approximately eleven million Jews are involved.” He then rattled off the figures for each country. There were only 131, 800 Jews left in the original Reich territory (out of a quarter of a million in 1939), but in the U.S.S.R., he said, there were five million, in the Ukraine three million, in the General Government of Poland two and a quarter million, in France three quarters of a million and in England a third of a million. The clear implication was that all eleven million must be exterminated. He then explained how this considerable task was to be carried out.

  The Jews should now in the course of the Final Solution be brought to the East … for use as labor. In big labor gangs, with separation of sexes, the Jews capable of work are brought to these areas and employed in road building, in which task undoubtedly a great part will fall through natural diminution.

  The remnant that finally is able to survive all this—since this is undoubtedly the part with the strongest resistance—must be treated accordingly, since these people, representing a natural selection, are to be regarded as the germ cell of a new Jewish development.

  In other words, the Jews of Europe were first to be transported to the conquered East, then worked to death, and the few tough ones who survived simply put to death. And the Jews—the millions of them—who resided in the East and were already on hand? State Secretary Dr. Josef Buehler, representing the Governor General of Poland, had a ready suggestion for them. There were nearly two and a half million Jews in Poland, he said, who “constituted a great danger.” They were, he explained, “bearers of disease, black-market operators and furthermore unfit for work.” There was no transportation problem with these two and a half million souls. They were already there.

  I have only one request [Dr. Buehler concluded], that the Jewish problem in my territory be solved as quickly as possible.

  The good State Secretary betrayed an impatience which was shared in high Nazi circles right up to Hitler. None of them understood at this time—not, in fact, until toward the end of 1942, when it was too late—how valuable the millions of Jews might be to the Reich as slave labor. At this point they only understood that working millions of Jews to death on the roads of Russia might take some time. Consequently long before these unfortunate people could be worked to death—in most cases the attempt was not even begun—Hitler and Himmler decided to d
ispatch them by quicker means.

  There were two—principally. One of them, as we have seen, had begun shortly after the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941. This was the method of mass slaughter of the Polish and Russian Jews by the flying firing squads of the Einsatzgruppen, which accounted for some three quarters of a million.

  It was this method of achieving the “final solution” that Himmler had in mind when he addressed the S.S. generals at Posen on October 4, 1943.

  … I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly …

  I mean … the extermination of the Jewish race … Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written …55

  No doubt the bespectacled S.S. Fuehrer, who had almost fainted at the sight of a hundred Eastern Jews, including women, being executed for his own delectation, would have seen in the efficient working by S.S. officers of the gas chambers in the extermination camps an even more glorious page in German history. For it was in these death camps that the “final solution” achieved its most ghastly success.

  THE EXTERMINATION CAMPS

  All the thirty odd principal Nazi concentration camps were death camps and millions of tortured, starved inmates perished in them.* Though the authorities kept records—each camp had its official Totenbuch (death book)—they were incomplete and in many cases were destroyed as the victorious Allies closed in. Part of one Totenbuch that survived at Mauthausen listed 35,318 deaths from January 1939 to April 1945.† At the end of 1942 when the need of slave labor began to be acute, Himmler ordered that the death rate in the concentration camps “must be reduced.” Because of the labor shortage he had been displeased at a report received in his office that of the 136,700 commitments to concentration camps between June and November 1942, some 70,610 had died and that in addition 9,267 had been executed and 27,846 “transferred.”57 To the gas chamber, that is. This did not leave very many for labor duties.

  But it was in the extermination camps, the Vernichtungslager, where most progress was made toward the “final solution.” The greatest and most renowned of these was Auschwitz, whose four huge gas chambers and adjoining crematoria gave it a capacity for death and burial far beyond that of the others—Treblinka, Belsec, Sibibor and Chelmno, all in Poland. There were other minor extermination camps near Riga, Vilna, Minsk, Kaunas and Lwów, but they were distinguished from the main ones in that they killed by shooting rather than by gas.

  For a time there was quite a bit of rivalry among the S.S. leaders as to which was the most efficient gas to speed the Jews to their death. Speed was an important factor, especially at Auschwitz, where toward the end the camp was setting new records by gassing 6,000 victims a day. One of the camp’s commanders for a period was Rudolf Hoess, an ex-convict once found guilty of murder, who deposed at Nuremberg on the superiority of the gas he employed.‡

  The “Final Solution” of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time there were already in the General Government of Poland three other extermination camps: Belzec, Treblinka and Wolzek …

  I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their extermination. The camp commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of half a year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto.*

  He used monoxide gas and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Zyklon B, which was a crystallized prussic acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from three to fifteen minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon climatic conditions.

  We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about a half hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.

  Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their ten gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each.

  Hoess then explained how the victims were “selected” for the gas chambers, since not all the incoming prisoners were done away with—at least not at once, because some of them were needed to labor in the I. G. Farben chemical works and Krupp’s factory until they became exhausted and were ready for the “final solution.”

  We had two S.S. doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. These would be marched by one of the doctors, who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit to work were sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work.

  Always Herr Hoess kept making improvements in the art of mass killing.

  Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated, while at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated.

  We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.

  Sometimes, Hoess explained, a few “special prisoners”—apparently Russian prisoners of war—were simply killed by injections of benzine. “Our doctors,” he added, “had orders to write ordinary death certificates and could put down any reason at all for the cause of death.*58

  To Hoess’s blunt description may be added a brief composite picture of death and disposal at Auschwitz as testified to by surviving inmates and jailers. The “selection,” which decided which Jews were to be worked and which ones immediately gassed, took place at the railroad siding as soon as the victims had been unloaded from the freight cars in which they had been locked without food or water for as much as a week—for many came from such distant parts as France, Holland and Greece. Though there were heart-rending scenes as wives were torn away from husbands and children from parents, none of the captives, as Hoess testified and survivors agree, realized just what was in store for them. In fact some of them were given pretty picture postcards marked “Waldsee” to be signed and sent back home to their relatives with a printed inscription saying:

  We are doing very well here. We have work and we are well treated. We await your arrival.

  The gas chambers themselves and the adjoining crematoria, viewed from a short distance, were not sinister-looking places at all; it was impossible to make them out for what they were. Over them were well-kept lawns with flower borders; the signs at the entrances merely said BATHS. The unsuspecting Jews thought they were simply being taken to the baths for the delousing which was customary at all camps. And taken to the accompaniment of sweet music!

  For there was light music. An orchestra of “young and pretty girls all dressed in white blouses and navy-blue skirts,” as one survivor remembered, had been formed from among the inmates. While the selection was being made for the gas chambers this unique musical ensemble played gay tunes from The Merry Widow and Tales of Hoffmann. Nothing solemn and somber from Beethoven. The death marches at Auschwitz
were sprightly and merry tunes, straight out of Viennese and Parisian operetta.

  To such music, recalling as it did happier and more frivolous times, the men, women and children were led into the “bath houses,” where they were told to undress preparatory to taking a “shower.” Sometimes they were even given towels. Once they were inside the “shower-room”—and perhaps this was the first moment that they may have suspected something was amiss, for as many as two thousand of them were packed into the chamber like sardines, making it difficult to take a bath—the massive door was slid shut, locked and hermetically sealed. Up above where the well-groomed lawn and flower beds almost concealed the mushroom-shaped lids of vents that ran up from the hall of death, orderlies stood ready to drop into them the amethyst-blue crystals of hydrogen cyanide, or Zyklon B, which originally had been commercially manufactured as a strong disinfectant and for which, as we have seen, Herr Hoess had with so much pride found a new use.