Architects of Death

by Karen Bartlett

  Occupations varied from barbers to office workers (there were even German-speaking Jewish women working for the Gestapo) to manual labourers to the team of Sonderkommandos – prisoners who worked in the gas chambers sorting through possessions, pulling out gold teeth and clearing away the bodies. This was a truly horrible task, but these prisoners would usually be given extra food and had better living conditions (although they were usually gassed themselves after several weeks). Most workers were ordered to take part in different types of manual labour: some were sent to the laundry room, others joined an external labour unit making German ammunitions and many worked in the warehouses, sorting out the endless piles of clothes and belongings taken from people arriving on the transports.

  Working in the warehouses, which were referred to as ‘Canada’ because they were the land of plenty, was a sought-after job for many reasons: women prisoners got to grow their hair back, take cold showers and could often pilfer extra food rations from the provisions that came in on the transports.

  Eva Schloss remembers:

  ‘Canada’ itself seemed like a strange wonderland – full of surprising things. I approached one huge metal pile, glinting in the sunlight, and discovered to my amazement they were thousands of pairs of spectacles. Another warehouse was piled up to the ceiling with eiderdowns, while another housed nothing but false legs and arms.

  There were shoes in every shape and size, and thousands and thousands of suitcases and trunks. ‘One area had children’s suitcases with their names and date of birth, usually carefully painted on to the front of the cases by their parents. Another room was filled with hundreds of empty prams – like a perpetual waiting room for a nursery that no babies ever returned from.’66

  The purpose of ‘Canada’ was to plunder every conceivable piece of Jewish property and send it back to Germany, where it would be distributed to soldiers and their families, as well as ordinary people. “Canada” was nothing more than a gruesome graveyard of things,’ Eva Schloss wrote.67 German men were shaving with Jewish razors, while good German mothers pushed Jewish prams and grandparents put on Jewish glasses to read newspaper reports about the war effort. In July 1944, 2,500 wristwatches were sent to the residents of Berlin who had suffered damage from Allied air raids. A former Polish inmate named Wanda Szaynok remembered watching a transport of empty baby carriages, five abreast, making its way to Auschwitz station. There were so many prams it took an hour to go past.68

  In a crazed effort not to ‘waste’ anything, the Nazis even piled up the hair they had shaved off prisoners, and made it into carpets and socks. All clippings over 2 cm in length were reused, and the proud Aryans of the Third Reich walked around wearing the hair of dead Jews.

  It was theft and plunder on a truly mammoth scale. In the crematoria, teams of workers pulled out gold teeth from the victims, which were soaked in acid to remove tissue and muscle, and then melted down into gold ingots and shipped to Germany. This gold was supposed to be reused by the SS dental service (one year’s supply from 1942 would have been sufficient for the whole of the SS for the full six years of the war), but, inevitably, much of it made its way into the hands of camp guards and Swiss bank accounts, including the International Bank of Settlements in Basel.

  While institutional plunder was sanctioned, individual theft by guards was not. Nazis regarded stealing as a major problem – not to mention a deep moral failing. All officially plundered property was supposed to be accounted for in Berlin, but many soldiers posted in the camps were involved in brazen corruption – and made personal fortunes by stealing from ‘Canada’. Later, in 1943, the Nazis launched a full-scale investigation into corruption at the camp and arrested many guards, as well as temporarily removing founding commandant Höss (He was in fact promoted to overseeing all concentration camps from Berlin, but he kept his family housed at Auschwitz, and returned to his role overseeing the camp in May 1944.)

  In truth, though, the SS guards at Auschwitz-Birkenau did not need to steal to benefit from their time at the camp. Compared to other soldiers, they had an easy life, and most of the men were aware of their privileges and enjoyed themselves. The SS guards had a good canteen, a cinema and a theatre, plenty of plundered food and drink (including copious amounts of alcohol, rollmop herrings, and sardines to supplement the SS diet of sausage and bread). They also enjoyed frequent day trips which helped take their minds off any nasty activities that might be troubling their consciences. Very few guards who were questioned after the war admitted to being troubled at all by the horrors of Auschwitz: some had brought their families with them, and their children played innocently just outside the camp. Others enjoyed spa breaks at the Solahütte retreat in the nearby mountains. There they entertained women SS guards, and were photographed laughing, conducting tea parties and relaxing in deck chairs on the veranda. A few even went to church.

  Twenty-one-year-old Oskar Groening arrived to take up a posting as an SS corporal at Auschwitz in the summer of 1942. On his first day at the camp he witnessed the arrival of a transport of Jewish prisoners; he later claimed that he was upset by what he saw. Up to 90 per cent of these arrivals were sent to be murdered at once in the gas chambers, but some stragglers were left behind. Sick people and lost children

  were simply killed with a shot through the head … A child was simply pulled by the leg … then when it cried like a sick chicken, they chucked it against the edge of the lorry. I couldn’t understand why an SS man would take a child and throw its head against the side of a lorry.69

  Groening claimed he protested to his superiors about the sadistic nature of the killing, though not about the murder itself, which he believed was justifiable: ‘The children are not the enemy at the moment. The enemy is the blood in them. The enemy is their growing up to become a Jew who could be dangerous.’70

  Despite initial qualms, Groening freely admitted that he grew to like life at the camp: ‘Auschwitz main camp was like a small town. It had its gossip. It even had a vegetable shop … there was a sports club, of which I was a member. There were dances – all fun and entertainment.’ There were also his friends, his fellow guards, whom he grew fond of: ‘The special situation at Auschwitz led to friendships which, I still say today, I think back on with joy.’71

  Setting your ‘qualms’ to one side was something that all SS officers at Auschwitz became experts at (if they had ever cared to begin with). Even commandant Rudolf Höss, the innovator of so much death and misery, admitted that sometimes he had to have a few stiff drinks, or take a brisk gallop on his horse, to clear his head of the horrors he had witnessed. Occasionally, nothing could completely still the quiet voices, like the Jewish woman ‘under the blossoming fruit trees of the cottage orchard’, who was accompanying a group of unsuspecting children into the gas chambers and leaned over to whisper: ‘How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children. Have you no heart at all?’72

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IS THERE ANYONE LEFT TO BURN?

  After five years of horror, the Red Army soldiers from the First Ukrainian Front arrived at the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau on 27 January 1945. There had been intense fighting in the area for weeks, and SS forces had abandoned the camp, and then returned to it, before finally leaving for good. At the Auschwitz main camp 1,000 prisoners remained, while 6,000 people were still living at Birkenau and 600 at Monowitz, the slave-labour camp attached to the IG Farben plant. While German citizens reacted with fear and horror to the news of the Soviet advance, for the victims of the Nazis these men were liberators.

  Eva Schloss recalls:

  The door to the barrack was flung open and a woman shouted ‘There’s a bear at the gate – a bear!’… Nervously, we made our made down to the entrance and peered at the peculiar sight. Indeed, there was a ‘bear’. A large man covered in bearskins, staring back at us with the same startled expression. Perhaps I should have been more cautious, but all I felt at that moment was unrestrained joy and I ran into his arms and hugged him.73
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br />   Another Eva who remembers the liberation is ten-year-old Eva Mozes Kor. She echoes the same sentiment:

  We ran up to them and they gave us hugs, cookies and chocolates. Being so alone, a hug meant more than anybody could imagine because that provided the human warmth we were starving for. We were not only starved for food but we were starved for human kindness and the Soviet Army did provide some of that.74

  The remaining prisoners had been existing on their own for almost two weeks. Earlier that month, the SS guards had blown up the camp crematoria, torn down electric fences and some guard towers, burned records in the administration building and dispatched thousands of those prisoners deemed well enough to walk on ‘death marches’ to other camps within Austria and Germany. But nothing could hide the appalling crimes. Two months later a Soviet commission produced a report into Nazi activities at Auschwitz, detailing the function of the crematoria, the fact that they were built by Topf and Sons and the method of mass gassing:

  The Germans organised the Auschwitz concentration camp into a huge industrial complex for the mass annihilation of human beings. The murder was mostly carried out by means of the toxic substance, Zyklon (B), with the bodies subsequently being incinerated in crematoria or fire pits. Transport trains arrived in Auschwitz from all German-occupied countries – France, Belgium, Holland, Yugoslavia, Poland, Greece and others – bearing people destined for annihilation. Only a small number of healthy people remained in the camp and were used either as manpower in armaments factories or as guinea pigs for various medical experiments, after which they were killed.

  During the existence of the Auschwitz camp from 1940 to January 1945, powerful crematoria were in operation there, with a total of fifty-two separate chambers for the incineration of bodies. People were gassed to death in vast numbers in specially equipped, technologically perfect gas chambers that were in the same buildings as the crematoria, but separate from them. Incineration of the many corpses took place both in these perfectly equipped technical installations and in special fires. Here in the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Germans streamlined the processes and achievable scale of human mass murder.

  The first crematorium with its six chambers, built in 1941, was soon unable to satisfy the appetite of Hitler’s executioners, so four further crematoria were planned and built – at incredible speed – in the Birkenau part of the camp.

  1. The technology of the mass murderers – gas chambers and crematoria

  Crematorium I

  The first crematorium at the Auschwitz camp (referred to as Crematorium I) was put into operation in early 1941. The crematorium had two furnaces with two chambers, heated by coke-powered generators. Towards the end of 1941 (September, October), a third furnace with two chambers, of the same type as the first two, was added to this room. Each chamber could take three to five bodies at a time, and incineration took roughly half an hour. The number of incinerated corpses reached 300–350. The crematorium building contained a gas chamber with closable, airtight doors with viewing windows at both ends and four closable, airtight hatches in the ceiling. It was through these hatches that the Zyklon (B) gas was inserted to kill the people.

  The crematorium was in use until March 1943, i.e. for two years.

  The construction of new crematoria.

  After Reichsführer SS Himmler had inspected the Auschwitz concentration camp in the summer of 1942, he ordered the massive expansion and technical improvement of the existing facilities for gassing people and destroying their bodies. (Letter dated 3.8.1942, No. 11450/42/BI/Ga) The company of Topf and Sons in Erfurt was commissioned to build the powerful crematoria. Work on the construction of four crematoria in the Birkenau satellite camp started immediately after this; on the general camp plan (drawing 2216) these are designated with the numbers 2 and 3, 4 and 5. Berlin demanded that construction of the crematoria be sped up and that all work be completed by the start of 1943 (letter from Auschwitz to the company of Topf and Sons, dated 22 December 1942, No. 20420/42/Er/L), letter dated 12 February 1943, letter dated 29 January 1943.

  Crematoria II and III

  Crematoria II and III (building plan nos. 932 and 933) were constructed identically and symmetrically on either side of the street. In the autumn of 1943, a railway line was rerouted to connect it directly to the crematoria; the sole purpose of this was to deliver the people from the transport trains straight to the crematoria. Coke and other materials were delivered by road. Each of the ten furnaces in the two crematoria had three chambers and two half-generator furnaces. A single chamber could hold three to five bodies, which could be cremated within twenty to thirty minutes. This means that, fully laden, the thirty chambers of the two crematoria could incinerate roughly 6,000 bodies in a day. To speed up the incineration process, the natural ventilation was supplemented with the installation of additional extraction fans. Each of these had a capacity of 10,000 cubic metres of furnace gas per hour. These fans were not in use for long, however, as they repeatedly and quickly broke down due to the extreme levels at which the furnaces were working. The extraction fans were therefore removed, after which only natural draughts were used…

  Crematorium II was in operation from March 1943 to October 1944, i.e. for one year and seven months; Crematorium III from April 1943 to October 1944, i.e. one year and six months.

  Both Crematorium II and Crematorium III had underground rooms that were shown on the building plans as ‘corpse cellars’ but which were in reality intended for gassing people.

  People arriving on the transport trains were violently forced into the underground changing rooms (shown as ‘corpse cellar no. 2’ on diagram nos. 932 and 933) by the Germans. The changing room was 50 metres long, 7.9 metres wide (area: 395m2) and 2.3 metres high (volume: 910m3). The second underground room, designated ‘corpse cellar no. 1’, was 30 metres long, 7 metres wide (area: 210m2) and 2.4 metres high (volume: 504m3). It had four 45 x 45 cm hatches in its ceiling, in chessboard-style. There was a 30 cm long pipe above these, hermetically sealed with a layer of felt and a massive concrete cover. Between each hatch and the floor were tall columns, whose surface was of reticulated iron. In addition, dummy shower heads were attached to the ceiling.

  Our investigations have concluded that these rooms, i.e. ‘corpse cellar no. 1’, were used in both crematoria as gas chambers for the murder of people. Each gas chamber had been fitted with a ventilator with intake and extraction functionality. With its 3.5 horsepower motor, the intake ventilator had a capacity of 8,000 cubic metres of air per hour. The extraction ventilator had a 7.5 horsepower motor, giving it a capacity of 16,000 cubic metres of air per hour.

  If the people were standing as close together as possible, ten per square metre, between 2,000 and 2,100 people could fit into this kind of chamber at a time.

  Crematoria IV and V

  Crematoria IV and V each had one furnace with eight chambers (making a total of sixteen chambers). These crematoria were built in the Birkenau satellite camp, 750 metres away from Crematoria II and III, and were arranged symmetrically to each other. Each chamber could hold three to five bodies, and cremation took roughly 30–40 minutes. This means that, fully laden, 3,000 bodies could be cremated in the sixteen chambers of these two crematoria in a single day.

  Crematorium IV was in operation from the end of March 1943 to August 1944, i.e. one year and five months. Crematorium V was in use from May 1943 to January 1945, a total of one year and eight months; gassings of people took place there for one year and six months. Investigations have found that the Germans stopped using the gas chambers at the Birkenau satellite camp after October 1944, and took steps to have the gas chambers and crematoria removed. Crematoria IV and V had an annexe, 20 metres long and 12 metres wide, a total of 240 m2.

  This annexe contained three sections, divided from each other by walls; each of these was a gas chamber. Hatches had been built into the external walls of the gas chambers at a height of about 2 metres, to allow the Zyklon (B) to be poured in; these were covered
with bars and had covers to hermetically seal them. The Zyklon (B) was let into the gas chambers through these hatches. Each gas chamber had two hermetically sealed doors. A corridor separated the gas chambers from the changing rooms which, together, were exactly the same size as the gas chambers.

  It is significant that in official correspondence the Germans called the gas chambers ‘special bathrooms’ (Letter no. 12 115/42/Er/Ha dated 21 August 1942).75

  Although some of the details of the Soviet report have since been revised (historians now estimate that approximately 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, 1 million of whom were Jews), the commission outlined in seven pages the entire process of the Auschwitz death machine as it was planned, established and expanded over the course of four years. It was a process that Topf and Sons chose to be intimately involved with from the beginning.

  Since securing the first contract with Buchenwald, Topf and Sons had been keenly bidding for work supplying ovens to other concentration camps. They were not the only supplier, and faced stiff competition from their old rival, the Kori company in Berlin. Kori had always opposed the rules relating to human reverence in civil cremation, and also possessed strong personal connections to senior figures in the SS – meaning that they were successful in winning the contract to supply several camps. In 1940, for example, the SS ordered a Topf oven for the Flossenburg camp, but ultimately installed one from Kori.

  As was the case at Buchenwald and Auschwitz, the purpose and size of individual camps were often in a state of flux. Frequently an order would be given to murder a large number of people. As circumstances in the camp changed, so did the requirements for disposing of the victims. Kurt Prüfer, in particular, proved adept at thinking on his feet. In July 1940, he discovered that the SS planned to use a mobile oven designed for Flossenburg at the Mauthausen satellite camp at Gusen in Austria instead. Upon hearing this, Prüfer took it upon himself to write and suggest that the SS take an identical mobile oven from Dachau, where it was not being used as the oil required to heat it was not available, and Topf would design a new coke-fired oven for Dachau. On this occasion the SS did not take Prüfer up on his offer – but it shows how Prüfer was prepared to do almost anything to accommodate SS demands.