Surviving prisoners watching from blocks nearby remembered how for a time the signal for the orderlies to pour the crystals down the vents was given by a Sergeant Moll. “Na, gib ihnen schon zu fressen” (“All right, give ‘em something to chew on”), he would laugh and the crystals would be poured through the openings, which were then sealed.
Through heavy-glass portholes the executioners could watch what happened. The naked prisoners below would be looking up at the showers from which no water spouted or perhaps at the floor wondering why there were no drains. It took some moments for the gas to have much effect. But soon the inmates became aware that it was issuing from the perforations in the vents. It was then that they usually panicked, crowding away from the pipes and finally stampeding toward the huge metal door where, as Reitlinger puts it, “they piled up in one blue clammy blood-spattered pyramid, clawing and mauling each other even in death.”
Twenty or thirty minutes later when the huge mass of naked flesh had ceased to writhe, pumps drew out the poisonous air, the large door was opened and the men of the Sonderkommando took over. These were Jewish male inmates who were promised their lives and adequate food in return for performing the most ghastly job of all.* Protected with gas masks and rubber boots and wielding hoses they went to work. Reitlinger has described it.
Their first task was to remove the blood and defecations before dragging the clawing dead apart with nooses and hooks, the prelude to the ghastly search for gold and the removal of teeth and hair which were regarded by the Germans as strategic materials. Then the journey by lift or rail-wagon to the furnaces, the mill that ground the clinker to fine ash, and the truck that scattered the ashes in the stream of the Sola.*
There had been, the records show, some lively competition among German businessmen to procure orders for building these death and disposal contraptions and for furnishing the lethal blue crystals. The firm of I. A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, manufacturers of heating equipment, won out in its bid for the crematoria at Auschwitz. The story of its business enterprise was revealed in a voluminous correspondence found in the records of the camp. A letter from the firm dated February 12, 1943, gives the tenor.
TO THE CENTRAL CONSTRUCTION OFFICE OF THE S.S. AND POLICE, AUSCHWITZ:
SUBJECT: Crematoria 2 and 3 for the camp.
We acknowledge receipt of your order for five triple furnaces, including two electric elevators for raising the corpses and one emergency elevator. A practical installation for stoking coal was also ordered and one for transporting ashes.60
The correspondence of two other firms engaged in the crematorium business popped up at the Nuremberg trials. The disposal of the corpses at a number of Nazi camps had attracted commercial competition. One of the oldest German companies in the field offered its drawings for crematoria to be built at a large S.S. camp in Belgrade.
For putting the bodies into the furnace, we suggest simply a metal fork moving on cylinders.
Each furnace will have an oven measuring only 24 by 18 inches, as coffins will not be used. For transporting the corpses from the storage points to the furnaces we suggest using light carts on wheels, and we enclose diagrams of these drawn to scale.61
Another firm, C. H. Kori, also sought the Belgrade business, emphasizing its great experience in this field since it had already constructed four furnaces for Dachau and five for Lublin, which, it said, had given “full satisfaction in practice.”
Following our verbal discussion regarding the delivery of equipment of simple construction for the burning of bodies, we are submitting plans for our perfected cremation ovens which operate with coal and which have hitherto given full satisfaction.
We suggest two crematoria furnaces for the building planned, but we advise you to make further inquiries to make sure that two ovens will be sufficient for your requirements.
We guarantee the effectiveness of the cremation ovens as well as their durability, the use of the best material and our faultless workmanship.
Awaiting your further word, we will be at your service.
Heil Hitler!
C. H. KORI, G.M.B.H.62
In the end even the strenuous efforts of German free enterprise, using the best material and providing faultless workmanship, proved inadequate for burning the corpses. The well-constructed crematoria fell far behind at a number of camps but especially at Auschwitz in 1944 when as many as 6,000 bodies (Hoess put it at as many as 16,000) had to be burned daily. For instance, in forty-six days during the summer of 1944 between 250,000 and 300,000 Hungarian Jews alone were done to death at this camp. Even the gas chambers fell behind and resort was made to mass shootings in the Einsatzkommando style. The bodies were simply thrown into ditches and burned, many of them only partly, and then earth was bulldozed over them. The camp commanders complained toward the end that the crematoria had proved not only inadequate but “uneconomical.”
The Zyklon-B crystals that killed the victims in the first place were furnished by two German firms which had acquired the patent from I. G. Farben. These were Tesch and Stabenow of Hamburg, and Degesch of Dessau, the former supplying two tons of the cyanide crystals a month and the latter three quarters of a ton. The bills of lading for the deliveries showed up at Nuremberg.
The directors of both concerns contended that they had sold their product merely for fumigation purposes and were unaware that lethal use had been made of it, but this defense did not hold up. Letters were found from Tesch and Stabenow offering not only to supply the gas crystals but also the ventilating and heating equipment for extermination chambers. Besides, the inimitable Hoess, who once he started to confess went the limit, testified that the directors of the Tesch company could not have helped knowing how their product was being used since they furnished enough to exterminate a couple of million people. A British military court was convinced of this at the trial of the two partners, Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher, who were sentenced to death in 1946 and hanged. The director of the second firm, Dr. Gerhard Peters of Degesch of Dessau, got off more lightly. A German court sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment.63
Before the postwar trials in Germany it had been generally believed that the mass killings were exclusively the work of a relatively few fanatical S.S. leaders. But the records of the courts leave no doubt of the complicity of a number of German businessmen, not only the Krupps and the directors of the I. G. Farben chemical trust but smaller entrepreneurs who outwardly must have seemed to be the most prosaic and decent of men, pillars—like good businessmen everywhere—of their communities.
How many hapless innocent people—mostly Jews but including a fairly large number of others, especially Russian prisoners of war—were slaughtered at the one camp of Auschwitz? The exact number will never be known. Hoess himself in his affidavit gave an estimate of “2,500,000 victims executed and exterminated by gassing and burning, and at least another half million who succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000.” Later at his own trial in Warsaw he reduced the figure to 1,135,000. The Soviet government, which investigated the camp after it was overrun by the Red Army in January 1945, put the figure at four million. Reitlinger, on the basis of his own exhaustive study, doubts that the number gassed at Auschwitz was “even as high as three quarters of a million.” He estimates that about 600,000 died in the gas chambers, to which he adds “the unknown proportion” of some 300,000 or more “missing,” who were shot or who died of starvation and disease. By any estimate the figure is considerable.64
The bodies were burned, but the gold fillings in the teeth remained and these were retrieved from the ashes if they had not already been yanked out by special squads working over the clammy piles of corpses.* The gold was melted down and shipped along with other valuables snatched from the condemned Jews to the Reichsbank, where under a secret agreement between Himmler and the bank’s president, Dr. Walther Funk, it was deposited to the credit of the S.S. in an account given the cover name of “Max Heiliger.” This prize booty from the e
xtermination camps included, besides gold from dentures, gold watches, earrings, bracelets, rings, necklaces and even spectacles frames—for the Jews had been encouraged to bring all their valuables with them for the promised “resettlement.” There were also great stocks of jewelry, especially diamonds and much silverware. And there were great wads of banknotes.
The Reichsbank, in fact, was overwhelmed by the “Max Heiliger” deposits. With its vaults filled to overflowing as early as 1942, the bank’s profit-minded directors sought to turn the holdings into cold cash by disposing of them through the municipal pawnshops. One letter from the Reichsbank to the Berlin municipal pawnshop dated September 15 speaks of a “second shipment” and begins, “We submit to you the following valuables with the request for the best possible utilization.” The list is long and itemized and includes 154 gold watches, 1,601 gold earrings, 132 diamond rings, 784 silver pocket watches and “160 diverse dentures, partly of gold.” By the beginning of 1944 the Berlin pawnshop itself was overwhelmed by the flow of these stolen goods and informed the Reichsbank it could accept no more. When the Allies overran Germany they discovered in some abandoned salt mines, where the Nazis had hidden part of their records and booty, enough left over from the “Max Heiliger” account to fill three huge vaults in the Frankfurt branch of the Reichsbank.66
Did the bankers know the sources of these unique “deposits”? The manager of the Precious Metals Department of the Reichsbank deposed at Nuremberg that he and his associates began to notice that many shipments came from Lublin and Auschwitz.
We all knew that these places were the sites of concentration camps. It was in the tenth delivery in November, 1943, that dental gold appeared. The quantity of dental gold became unusually great.67
At Nuremberg the notorious Oswald Pohl, chief of the Economic Office of the S.S., who handled the transactions for his organization, emphasized that Dr. Funk and the officials and directors of the Reichsbank knew very well the origins of the goods they were trying to pawn. He explained in some detail “the business deal between Funk and the S.S. concerning the delivery of valuables of dead Jews to the Reichsbank.” He remembered a conversation with the bank’s vice-president, Dr. Emil Pohl.
In this conversation no doubt remained that the objects to be delivered [came from] Jews who had been killed in concentration camps. The objects in question were rings, watches, eyeglasses, gold bars, wedding rings, brooches, pins, gold fillings and other valuables.
Once, Pohl related, after an inspection tour through the vaults of the Reichsbank where the valuables “from the dead Jews” were inspected, Dr. Funk tendered the party a pleasant dinner in which the conversation turned around the unique origins of the booty.68*
“THE WARSAW GHETTO IS NO MORE”
More than one eyewitness has commented on the spirit of resignation with which so many Jews met their deaths in the Nazi gas chambers or in the great execution pits of the Einsatz squads. Not all Jews submitted to extermination so gently. In the spring days of 1943 some 60,000 Jews walled up in the Warsaw ghetto—all that remained of 400,000 who had been herded into this place like cattle in 1940—turned on their Nazi tormentors and fought.
Perhaps no one has left a more grisly—and authoritative—account of the Warsaw ghetto rebellion than the proud S.S. officer who put it down.* This German individual was Juergen Stroop, S.S. Brigadefuehrer and Major General of Police. His eloquent official report, bound in leather, profusely illustrated and typed on seventy-five pages of elegant heavy bond paper has survived.† It is entitled The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More.69
By the late autumn of 1940, a year after the Nazi conquest of Poland, the S.S. had rounded up some 400,000 Jews and sealed them off within a high wall from the rest of Warsaw in an area approximately two and a half miles long and a mile wide around the old medieval ghetto. The district normally housed 160,000 persons, so there was overcrowding, but this was the least of the hardships. Governor Frank refused to allot enough food to keep even half of the 400,000 barely alive. Forbidden to leave the enclosure on the pain of being shot on sight, the Jews had no employment except for a few armament factories within the wall run by the Wehrmacht or by rapacious German businessmen who knew how to realize large profits from the use of slave labor. At least 100,000 Jews tried to survive on a bowl of soup a day, often boiled from straw, provided by the charity of the others. It was a losing struggle for life.
But the ghetto population did not die fast enough from starvation and disease to suit Himmler, who in the summer of 1942 ordered the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto to be removed altogether “for security reasons.” On July 22 a great “resettlement” action was instituted. Between then and October 3 a total of 310,322 Jews, according to Stroop, were “resettled.” That is, they were transported to the extermination camps, most of them to Treblinka, where they were gassed.
Still Himmler was not satisfied. When he paid a surprise visit to Warsaw in January 1943 and discovered that 60,000 Jews were still alive in the ghetto he ordered that the “resettlement” be completed by February 15. This proved to be a difficult task. The severe winter and the demands of the Army, whose disaster at Stalingrad and whose consequent retreats in southern Russia gave it first claim to transportation facilities, made it difficult for the S.S. to obtain the necessary trains to carry out the final “resettlement.” Also, Stroop reported, the Jews were resisting their final liquidation “in every possible way.” It was not until spring that Himmler’s order could be carried out. It was decided to clear out the ghetto in a “special action” lasting three days. As it turned out, it took four weeks.
The deportation of more than 300,000 Jews had enabled the Germans to reduce the size of the walled-in ghetto and as S.S. General Stroop turned his tanks, artillery, flame throwers and dynamite squads on it on the morning of April 19, 1943, it comprised an area measuring only 1,000 by 300 yards. It was honeycombed, though, with sewers, vaults and cellars which the desperate Jews had converted into fortified points. Their arms were few: some pistols and rifles, a dozen or two machine guns that had been smuggled in, and homemade grenades. But they were now on that April morning determined to use them—the first time and the last in the history of the Third Reich that the Jews resisted their Nazi oppressors with arms.
Stroop had 2,090 men, about half of them Regular Army or Waffen-S.S. troops, and the rest S.S. police reinforced by 335 Lithuanian militia and some Polish police and firemen. They ran into unexpected resistance the first day.
Hardly had operation begun [Stroop reported in the first of his many teletyped daily reports], than we ran into strong concerted fire by the Jews and bandits. The tank and two armored cars pelted with Molotov cocktails … Owing to this enemy counterattack we had to withdraw.
The German attack was renewed but found heavy going.
About 1730 hours we encountered very strong resistance from one block of buildings, including machine-gun fire. A special raiding party defeated the enemy but could not catch the resisters. The Jews and criminals resisted from base to base and escaped at the last moment … Our losses in first attack: 12 men.
And so it went for the first few days, the poorly armed defenders giving ground before the attacks of tanks, flame throwers and artillery but keeping up their resistance. General Stroop could not understand why “this trash and subhumanity,” as he referred to the besieged Jews, did not give up and submit to being liquidated.
Within a few days [he reported] it became apparent that the Jews no longer had any intention to resettle voluntarily, but were determined to resist evacuation … Whereas it had been possible during the first days to catch considerable numbers of Jews, who are cowards by nature, it became more and more difficult during the second half of the operation to capture the bandits and Jews. Over and over again new battle groups consisting of 20 to 30 Jewish men, accompanied by a corresponding number of women, kindled new resistance.
The women belonged to the Chalutzim, Stroop noted, and had the habit, he said, of “firing pistols with
both hands” and also of unlimbering hand grenades which they concealed in their bloomers.
On the fifth day of the battle, an impatient and furious Himmler ordered Stroop to “comb out” the ghetto “with the greatest severity and relentless tenacity.”
I therefore decided [Stroop related in his final report] to destroy the entire Jewish area by setting every block on fire.
He then described what followed.
The Jews stayed in the burning buildings until because of the fear of being burned alive they jumped down from the upper stories … With their bones broken, they still tried to crawl across the street into buildings which had not yet been set on fire … Despite the danger of being burned alive the Jews and bandits often preferred to return into the flames rather than risk being caught by us.
It was simply incomprehensible to a man of Stroop’s stripe that men and women preferred to die in the flames fighting rather than to die peacefully in the gas chambers. For he was shipping off the captured whom he did not slaughter to Treblinka. On April 25 he sent a teletype to S.S. headquarters reporting that 27,464 Jews had been captured.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Page 154
