The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  Experience has shown that the preparation of prussic acid called Zyklon B caused death with far greater speed and certainty, especially if the rooms were kept dry and gas-tight and closely packed with people, and provided they were fitted with as large intake vents as possible. As far as Auschwitz is concerned, I have never heard of a single person being found alive when the gas chambers were opened half an hour after the gas had been inducted.30

  Those thirty minutes were as horrific as it is possible to contemplate. In the state-of-the-art gas chambers of Crematoria II and III at Auschwitz, the pellets were lowered in containers down Drahtnetzeinschieb-vorrichtungen (wire-mesh introduction columns) and the gas was distributed relatively evenly, but in other gas chambers it collected on the floor and rose upwards, forcing the stronger people to climb on top of the weaker ones in a vain bid to avoid asphyxiation. ‘The people there knew that the end was approaching and tried to climb as high as they could to avoid the gas,’ recalled Sackar. ‘Sometimes all the skin on the bodies peeled due to the effect of the gas.’31 The victims clawed at the doors and walls, and their screaming and weeping could be heard even through the thick metal airtight doors. When the Sonderkommandos entered the chambers they encountered a dreadful sight. As their historian records: ‘The purple, fissured flesh; the faces distorted with pain; and the eyes, bulging and agape, attest to the terrible agonies that these people experienced in their last moments.’32

  Speaking at Nuremberg, the Auschwitz guard Otto Moll spoke of the fate of the babies whose mothers had left them hidden in discarded clothing in the undressing room: ‘The prisoners had to clean up the room after it had been cleared of people, they would then take the babies and throw them into the gas chamber.’ Elsewhere he was asked to estimate how quickly the Zyklon B gas took effect: ‘The gas was poured in through an opening. About one half minute after the gas was poured in, of course I am merely estimating this time as we never had a stop-watch to clock it and we were not interested, at any rate, after one half minute there were no more heavy sounds, and no sounds at all that could be heard from the gas chamber.’ Q: ‘What kind of sounds were heard before that?’ A: ‘The people wept and screeched.’33 Few other accounts put the time as short as that.

  On occasion a Sonderkommando prisoner would recognize family or friends among the dead, and Höss – whose testimony must be seen through the prism of his unrepentant anti-Semitism – claimed that one had to drag his own wife to the furnace, and then sat down to lunch with his colleagues without displaying any untoward emotion. (Conversely, there is another story of a Sonderkommando member accompanying his mother into the gas chamber and then voluntarily remaining with her there to be gassed.) Unsurprisingly the Sonderkommandos were thought of by other Auschwitz inmates as the Nazis’ henchmen, and as ‘especially soulless and savage individuals’.34 Primo Levi wrote that they existed on ‘the borderline of collaboration’ and it is true that the Nazis’ job would have been far more difficult and laborious if the Sonderkommandos had not existed, although they would undoubtedly have found volunteers among the Ukrainian, Baltic or Belorussian auxiliary units to undertake the tasks.

  Yet it should be remembered that the Sonderkommandos had no alternative except death, that they provided food for other inmates when they could, and that they were the only group of inmates to rise up against the Germans. When on 7 October 1944 it became clear that the Sonderkommandos of Crematorium IV were about to be selected, they attacked the SS with stones, axes and iron bars. The ‘uprising’ was over by nightfall, and no prisoner managed to escape, but they killed three SS guards and injured twelve, blew up Crematoria IV with hand-grenades smuggled to them by women prisoners, and tried to escape from the camp, with 250 dying in the attempt and 200 executed the next day. The Jewish women who had smuggled the explosives – Ester Wajcblum, Regina Safirsztajn, Ala Gertner and Róza Robota – were hanged after a week of torture.35 Each of the revolts that took place – in Sobibór, Treblinka and Auschwitz – in the six Nazi extermination camps were carried out by the Sonderkommandos, the only inmates with the physical strength to fight back. It was also they who tried to provide evidence of the genocide for the outside world, by burying accounts of it in tin cans in the soil near the crematoria, which have since been discovered and published.36 One of these, written by Zalman Gradowski, asks, ‘Why am I sitting here quietly instead of lamenting, weeping over my tragedy, and why instead are we frozen, numb, drained of all emotion?’ The answer was that ‘The continual systematic death, the only life of anyone who lives here, deadens, confuses and dulls your senses.’37

  Several of the eighty Sonderkommando prisoners who survived the war submitted themselves to interview, and they attested that they turned themselves into automata in order to survive and bear witness against the Nazis. A sense of apathy and powerlessness, as well as the use of alcohol, helped push what has been described as ‘the intrinsic moral quandary of the Sonderkommando phenomenon’ into the background for these ‘miserable manual labourers of the mass extermination’.38 Surprisingly, suicide was rare among them. ‘Although they knew what was about to happen,’ records their historian, ‘they could not rescue even one Jew.’ That included the infants thrust into their arms by mothers entering the ‘showers’ who had divined that they would not emerge alive.39

  Because the Sonderkommandos were Geheimsträger (bearers of secrets) they had to live together, could not resign their posts and could only hope that the war might end before they were themselves selected. Because they had the first access to parcels that the gassed Jews left in the undressing rooms, they ate better than any other prisoners, which because they were involved in such heavy manual labour suited the Germans. They were allowed to wear civilian clothes rather than prison uniform, had beds with mattresses in rooms over the crematoria, had time to rest and, beyond the daily roll-call, were not constantly overseen by the SS. ‘We never ran short of anything,’ recalled Sackar, ‘clothes, food and sleep too.’40 Their only distinguishing mark, other than their tattooed number, was a red cross on their backs. To differentiate the inmates, and dehumanize them, Jews were made to wear yellow Stars of David, and the rest of the inmates also wore colour-coded strips of fabric sewn on the prison uniform, thus Jehovah’s Witnesses wore purple, homosexuals pink, criminals green, politicals red, Gypsies black, and Soviet POWs had the letters ‘SU’. From 1943 prisoners were tattooed on arms or occasionally legs with numbers.

  The utterly debased sadism and crudity of the German SS and their auxiliary-unit henchmen quite literally knew no bounds. Unremarkably representative was SS Staff Sergeant Paul Grot, at Sobibór, who was recalled by one of the only sixty-four survivors of that camp, Moshe Shklarek, for the way that he would ‘have himself a joke; he would seize a Jew, give him a bottle of wine and a sausage weighing at least a kilo and order him to devour it in a few minutes. When the “lucky” man succeeded in carrying out this order and staggered from drunkenness, Grot would order him to open his mouth wide and would urinate into his mouth.’41 As with any factory, the factory of death had shift labour, foremen (known as capos) and a conveyor-belt, time-and-motion attitude towards maximizing efficiency. The SS gave precise orders about what the Sonderkommandos were allowed to tell those about to be gassed, so that the victims went – at least for the most part – unknowingly to their deaths. Since it was unavoidable anyway, the Sonderkommandos did not want to terrify the victims more than they already were. ‘I avoided looking them in the eye,’ Sackar recalled of the people he escorted into the gas chambers. ‘I always tried hard not to look them straight in the eye, so that they wouldn’t sense anything.’42 He admitted that he and his comrades had ‘become robots, machines’ but denied that he had been entirely desensitized to what was happening: ‘We wept without tears… We had no time to think. Thinking was a complicated matter. We blocked everything out.’ Sackar survived selection by the SS at Auschwitz by mingling with the other prisoners just as the Red Army was about to arrive in January 1945.

 
For those who survived the initial Selektion on the railway siding – known as the Ramp – there were plenty more. Regular barrack inspections would take place to ascertain whether prisoners still had the strength to work effectively, and those who could not, according to the most arbitrary criteria, were gassed. Selektion also took place in the prison hospital where SS doctors would regularly cull the ‘hopelessly ill’ patients. The historian Gideon Greig has identified seven areas of camp life where the absolutely pitiless phenomenon of Selektion regularly operated, against which there was no appeal.43 Selektion officers would carry canes, which could be used as weapons but were more often used to direct inmates without having to come into physical contact with them. ‘All those able to find a way out, try to take it,’ recalled Primo Levi of the process, ‘but they are in the minority because it is very difficult to escape from a selection. The Germans apply themselves to these things with great skill and diligence.’ 44 Driven by thirst one day, Levi – Häftling (prisoner) number 174517 – opened the window of his hut to break off an icicle to drink, but a guard snatched it away. ‘Why?’ Levi asked, only to receive the reply, ‘Hier ist kein warum’ (Here, there is no why).45 Yet in a sense there was; the SS did not want Levi to drink water because they did not want strong inmates, but rather weak, preferably dying ones as the numbers ‘selected’ could always be immediately replenished. Hearing a fellow prisoner thanking God that he was not selected, Levi recollected thinking: ‘Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.’46

  To visit Auschwitz–Birkenau today is to be brought face to face with sights that bring home the horror as powerfully as any book or academic study ever could. Ladders were required to climb up the mountains of shoes that were taken from the victims. (In 2004, when 43,000 pairs were cleaned, some Hungarian money was found tucked into a pair, having somehow survived the official and unofficial looting of the camp.) Huge piles of shaving brushes, toothbrushes, spectacles, prosthetic limbs, baby clothes, combs and hairbrushes, and one million articles of clothing are displayed there. Most of the Jews’ belongings had already long been expropriated and used by the Nazis, but these were left behind when the guards fled the Russians in January 1945. Seven tons of human hair were left, which otherwise would have been used in the German textile industry. Suitcases, of which there are thousands upon thousands in enormous piles, were chalked with the name and birthdates of their owners, such as ‘Klement Hedwig 8/10/1898’. When the prams were taken away from Auschwitz, in rows of five rolling towards the railway station, it took an hour for them all to pass.47 Writing to SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl in January 1943 about ‘the material and goods taken over from the Jews, that is, the emigration of the Jews’, Himmler even went into detail about what would happen to the crystals to be found in their watches, because in warehouses in Warsaw ‘hundreds of thousands – perhaps even millions – are lying there, which for practical purposes could be distributed to the German watchmakers’.48 On another occasion he (at least temporarily) saved five Jewish diamond jewellers from extermination because of their expertise in fashioning the Reich’s highest decoration, the Knight’s Cross with oak leaves and diamonds, which was only ever awarded to twenty-seven people.49

  On 14 September 1942, Albert Speer authorized 13.7 million Reichsmarks to be spent on building huts and killing facilities at Birkenau as fast as possible.50 Four gas chambers, numbered I to IV, were all fully operational by 1943, and were worked at full stretch by the time 437,000 Hungarians were brought there in the late spring of 1944 and killed in only a matter of weeks. A dozen German firms were used in the construction of the gas chambers and crematoria, and Oberingenieur Kurt Prüfer, representing the contractors Topf & Sons of Erfurt, was so proud of his incinerator system at Birkenau that he even had the gall formally to patent it.51 ‘From the chimneys shoot flames thirty feet into the air, visible for leagues around at night,’ recalled a deportee from France, Paul Steinberg, ‘and the oppressive stench of burnt flesh can be felt [sic] as far as [the synthetic-oil production facility of] Buna,’ which was more than 3½ miles away. When bodies had to be burnt in open pits near by, either because the crematoria were working overtime or because they were being renovated through over-use, Höss recalled that ‘The fires in the pits had to be stoked, the surplus fat drained off, and the mountain of burning corpses constantly turned over so that the draught might fan the flames.’52 At the end of the war 7,500 inmates were liberated, of whom 600 were teenagers and children, mostly orphans who had no way even of discovering their own names.

  At Auschwitz between 400 and 800 people could be packed into huts that had originally been designed for forty-two horses. Lice and fleas were endemic, although rats did not survive long because of the protein they provided. The standing cells in Prison Hut 11, which fitted four people at a time in a space 5 by 5 foot square, for up to ten days at a stretch, were used for starvation and suffocation, and the breaking of the human spirit, yet there were examples of great heroism and self-sacrifice. For example, Father Maksymilian Kolbe, a Roman Catholic priest from Warsaw, volunteered to take the place in a starvation cell of another Polish prisoner, Franciszek Gajowniczek, who had a wife and children. Of the ten in the cell, Kolbe was one of those still alive a fortnight later, and so was murdered by lethal injection.53 He was canonized in 1982.

  Viktor Frankl was an inmate of Türkheim, a satellite concentration camp of Dachau, between October 1944 and liberation in April 1945, where he was sent after a short stay at Auschwitz. ‘I shall never forget how I was roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoner,’ he wrote,

  who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or deliria, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand that was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.54

  It was true; for as Primo Levi put it: ‘One wakes up at every moment, frozen with terror, shaking in every limb, under the impression of an order shouted out by a voice full of anger in a language not understood.’

  The human nature of even the most noble people was warped in the struggle for existence. ‘Only those prisoners could keep alive who… had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves,’ recalled Frankl. ‘The best of us did not return.’55 Primo Levi, who somehow survived Auschwitz, likewise explained why it was useless to befriend the weak there, because ‘one knows they are only here on a visit, that in a few weeks nothing will remain of them but a handful of ashes in some nearby field and a crossed-out name on a register.’56 This was exemplified by a patient who was wheezing in one of the upper bunks near Levi in the camp hospital:

  He heard me, struggled to sit up, then fell dangling, head downwards over the edge towards me, with the chest and arms stiff and his eyes white. The man in the bunk below automatically stretched up his arms to support the body and then realized he was dead. He slowly withdrew from under the weight and the body slid to the floor where it remained. Nobody knew his name.57

  Anything approaching human dignity was next to impossible to retain; as Frankl recalled:

  It was a favourite practice to detail a new arrival to a work group whose job it was to clean the latrines and remove the sewage. If, as usually happened, some of the excrement splashed into his face during its transport over bumpy fields, any sign of disgust by the prisoner or any attempt to wipe off the filth would only be punished by a blow from the
capo. And thus the mortification of normal relations was hastened.58

  It was because of experiences like this that another survivor, Elie Wiesel, later a Nobel laureate, was to say in 1983: ‘Auschwitz defies perceptions and imaginations, it submits only to memory. Between the dead and the rest of us there exists an abyss that no talent can comprehend.’59

  At the start of the Holocaust there was a good deal of confusion over the treatment of the people whom the Nazis eventually wished dead. At one moment Hitler wanted the Jews sent to south-east Poland, then it was earmarked as an area for Lebensraum for ethnic Germans to live in. Some German experts feared that allowing the Jews to die of starvation might mean that Germans might catch their diseases. Improvisation, rather than any solid blueprint, was the general rule, at least until a day-long conference held in a villa on the banks of Berlin’s Lake Wannsee in January 1942. This did not inaugurate the Holocaust, as the mass killings at Auschwitz–Birkenau had been going on since the autumn. Nor was it simply a logistics meeting, as no railway or transport people were invited. Nor was it to discuss the fate of the Mischlinge (mixed blood) – such as half-Jews (who were to be vetted) and quarter-Jews (who were to be sterilized, if ‘lucky’) – although the last issue was indeed discussed. Instead its purpose was to place the thirty-seven-year-old Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security Police or SD, at the centre of the process, while also establishing undeniable collective responsibility. Afterwards, no department of the Reich could plead ignorance that genocide was official government policy, despite the sinister euphemisms employed in the circulated minutes, known as the Wannsee Protocol. These were not used at the meeting itself, however, for as Adolf Eichmann recorded in a 1961 memoir, ‘one spoke openly, without euphemisms’. The historian of the conference Mark Roseman describes its Protocol as ‘the most emblematic and programmatic statement of the Nazi way of doing genocide’.60