Voices from the Holocaust

by Jon E. Lewis

  The pre-requisite for any exemption must always be the personal merit of the person of mixed blood. (Not the merit of the parent or spouse of German blood.)

  Persons of mixed blood of the first degree who are exempted from evacuation will be sterilized in order to prevent any offspring and to eliminate the problem of persons of mixed blood once and for all. Such sterilization will be voluntary. But it is required to remain in the Reich. The sterilized ‘person of mixed blood’ is thereafter free of all restrictions to which he was previously subjected.

  2) Treatment of Persons of Mixed Blood of the Second Degree Persons of mixed blood of the second degree will be treated fundamentally as persons of German blood, with the exception of the following cases, in which the persons of mixed blood of the second degree will be considered as Jews:

  a) The person of mixed blood of the second degree was born of a marriage in which both parents are persons of mixed blood.

  b) The person of mixed blood of the second degree has a racially especially undesirable appearance that marks him outwardly as a Jew.

  c) The person of mixed blood of the second degree has a particularly bad police and political record that shows that he feels and behaves like a Jew.

  Also in these cases exemptions should not be made if the person of mixed blood of the second degree has married a person of German blood.

  3) Marriages between Full Jews and Persons of German Blood.

  Here it must be decided from case to case whether the Jewish partner will be evacuated or whether, with regard to the effects of such a step on the German relatives, [this mixed marriage] should be sent to an old-age ghetto.

  4) Marriages between Persons of Mixed Blood of the First Degree and Persons of German Blood

  a) Without Children.

  If no children have resulted from the marriage, the person of mixed blood of the first degree will be evacuated or sent to an old-age ghetto (same treatment as in the case of marriages between full Jews and persons of German blood, point 3.)

  b) With Children.

  If children have resulted from the marriage (persons of mixed blood of the second degree), they will, if they are to be treated as Jews, be evacuated or sent to a ghetto along with the parent of mixed blood of the first degree. If these children are to be treated as Germans (regular cases), they are exempted from evacuation as is therefore the parent of mixed blood of the first degree.

  5) Marriages between Persons of Mixed Blood of the First Degree and Persons of Mixed Blood of the First Degree or Jews.

  In these marriages (including the children) all members of the family will be treated as Jews and therefore be evacuated or sent to an old-age ghetto.

  6) Marriages between Persons of Mixed Blood of the First Degree and Persons of Mixed Blood of the Second Degree.

  In these marriages both partners will be evacuated or sent to an old-age ghetto without consideration of whether the marriage has produced children, since possible children will as a rule have stronger Jewish blood than the Jewish person of mixed blood of the second degree.

  SS-Gruppenführer Hofmann advocates the opinion that sterilization will have to be widely used, since the person of mixed blood who is given the choice whether he will be evacuated or sterilized would rather undergo sterilization.

  State Secretary Dr Stuckart maintains that carrying out in practice of the just mentioned possibilities for solving the problem of mixed marriages and persons of mixed blood will create endless administrative work. In the second place, as the biological facts cannot be disregarded in any case, State Secretary Dr Stuckart proposed proceeding to forced sterilization.

  Furthermore, to simplify the problem of mixed marriages, possibilities must be considered with the goal of the legislator saying something like: ‘These marriages have been dissolved.’

  With regard to the issue of the effect of the evacuation of Jews on the economy, State Secretary Neumann stated that Jews who are working in industries vital to the war effort, provided that no replacements are available, cannot be evacuated.

  SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich indicated that these Jews would not be evacuated according to the rules he had approved for carrying out the evacuations then underway.

  State Secretary Dr Bühler stated that the General Government would welcome it if the final solution of this problem could be begun in the General Government, since on the one hand transportation does not play such a large role here nor would problems of labour supply hamper this action. Jews must be removed from the territory of the General Government as quickly as possible, since it is especially here that the Jew as an epidemic carrier represents an extreme danger, and on the other hand he is causing permanent chaos in the economic structure of the country through continued black market dealings. Moreover, of the approximately 2½ million Jews concerned, the majority are unfit for work.

  State Secretary Dr Bühler stated further that the solution to the Jewish question in the General Government is the responsibility of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD and that his efforts would be supported by the officials of the General Government. He had only one request, to solve the Jewish question in this area as quickly as possible.

  In conclusion, the different types of possible solutions were discussed, during which discussion both Gauleiter Dr Meyer and State Secretary Dr Bühler took the position that certain preparatory activities for the final solution should be carried out immediately in the territories in question, in which process alarming the populace must be avoided.

  The meeting was closed with the request of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD to the participants that they afford him appropriate support during the carrying out of the tasks involved in the solution.

  The first mass gassings of Jews at Auschwitz began in February 1942. Although the extermination of European Jewry would now largely be achieved with Zyklon B, the Nazis did not neglect the bullet.

  ‘The cries and screams of the children could be heard’: Mass Execution at Krepiec Forest, Poland, 22 April 1942

  ANDRZEJ WOJCIK

  The Krepiec forest is one of the largest mass execution sites of Jews in Poland. Although the incident witnessed by Wojcik – a Pole living nearby – took place in April 1942, executions had been occurring in the forest since May 1940 and they would only end in October 1942, when the gas chambers at Majdanek were fully functioning.

  On 22 April 1942 I was at home and suddenly I noticed that six or seven trucks, full of children between two and fourteen years of age, arrived at the forest. The children were driven down to the pits and the Germans shot them. From the place of the murder the cries and screams of the children could be heard. In all this lasted from 2 a.m. until 6 a.m. The Germans were in helmets and blue uniforms. It is difficult for me to say from which formation they were. Visibility was difficult because at the beginning it was still dark. I observed the massacre from a distance of about fifty metres. I don’t know how many children were killed. They were transported by trucks, completely overcrowded.

  About 8 a.m. nine trucks full of Jews arrived at the forest. The area was surrounded by Lithuanian soldiers. I know this because people described them to me as Lithuanians. The Jews were driven down from the trucks and they were led to the same place where the children were murdered. Some of the Jews held their children in their arms. I observed the massacre from a distance of about 150 metres but from a different direction than before. Germans drove the Jews down to the pits. There were horrible screams. A group of six SS officers and Lithuanians shot into the Jews who were already in the pits. I’m sure that they were SS men because on their caps they had death’s head insignia and on their sleeves the signs of SS. The execution lasted from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. I observed these murders the entire time. I heard from people that a Jewess escaped from the mountain of bodies but that later, attempting to escape, she was shot in a field.

  The next day I went to the place of the executions and I noticed that the pits were covered partially by earth and partially by
bushes. Legs, hands and heads stood out from the pits. The earth around the pits was covered in blood. I was there about twenty minutes.

  Inside the Crematorium at Auschwitz: The View of a Sonderkommando, May 1942

  FILIP MÜLLER

  Prisoner 29236, Müller was a Slovakian Jew who arrived on one of the earliest transports to Auschwitz. He began working in a ‘Sonderkommando’, a unit of inmates whose prime job was disposing of corpses in the camp’s crematoria, almost immediately. He was one of the very few Sonderkommandos to survive the Holocaust: the SS administration regularly culled these workers who were, after all, prime witnesses to their crimes against the Jews.

  We had been running for about 100 metres, when a strange flat-roofed building loomed up before us. Behind it a round redbrick chimney rose up into the sky. Through a wooden gate the two guards led us into a yard which was separated from the outside world by a wall. To our right was the building we had seen, with an entrance in the middle. Above the door hung a wrought-iron lamp. Under it stood an SS man who, according to his insignia, was an Unterscharführer. He was still young, with sandy hair and a commanding presence, and I learned later that his name was Stark. In his hand he held a horsewhip. He greeted us with the words: ‘Get inside, you scum!’ Then, belabouring us with his whip, he drove us through the entrance into a passage with several doors which were painted pale blue. We were confused and did not know which way we were meant to go. ‘Straight ahead, you shits!’ Stark shouted, opening one of the doors. The damp stench of dead bodies and a cloud of stifling, biting smoke surged out towards us. Through the fumes I saw the vague outlines of huge ovens. We were in the cremation room of the Auschwitz crematorium. A few prisoners, the Star of David on their prison uniforms, were running about. As the glow of the flames broke through the smoke and fumes, I noticed two large openings: they were cast-iron incinerators. Prisoners were busy pushing a truck heaped with corpses up to them. Stark pulled open another door. Flogging Maurice and me, he hustled us into a larger room next door to the cremation plant.

  We were met by the appalling sight of the dead bodies of men and women lying higgledy-piggledy among suitcases and rucksacks. I was petrified with horror for I did not know then where I was and what was going on. A violent blow accompanied by Stark yelling: ‘Get a move on! Strip the stiffs!’ galvanized me into action. Before me lay the corpse of a woman. With trembling hands and shaking all over I began to remove her stockings. It was the first time in my life that I had touched a dead body. She was not yet quite cold. As I pulled the stocking down her leg, it tore. Stark who had been watching, struck me again, bellowing: ‘What the hell d’you think you are doing? Mind out, and get a move on! These things are to be used again!’ To show us the correct way he began to remove the stockings from another female corpse. But he did not manage to take them off without at least a small tear.

  I was like one hypnotized and obeyed each order implicitly. Fear of more blows, the ghastly sights of piled-up corpses, the biting smoke, the humming of fans and the flickering of flames, the whole infernal chaos, had paralyzed my sense of orientation as well as my ability to think. It took some time before I began to realize that there were people lying there at my feet who had been killed only a short while before. But what I could not imagine was how so many people could have been killed at one time.

  When Stark returned he ordered Maurice and myself to the cremation room. Handing each of us a long crow-bar and a heavy hammer he ordered us to remove the clinker from the grates of those ovens which were not then in use. Neither Maurice nor I had ever done any work like this before, so we did not know what we were supposed to do. Instead of hammering the crow-bars into the clinker on the grates we thrust them into the ash pit and damaged the fire-brick lining. When Stark discovered the damage we had done, he hustled us back into the room where the corpses were and fetched a prisoner called Fischl – later to become our foreman – who went on with cleaning the grates.

  Maurice and I continued stripping corpses. Cautiously I began to look around. I noticed that there were some small greenish-blue crystals lying on the concrete floor at the back of the room. They were scattered beneath an opening in the ceiling. A large fan was installed up there, its blades humming as they revolved. It struck me that where the crystals were scattered on the floor there were no corpses, whereas in places further away, particularly near the door, they were piled high.

  My stay in the camp had undermined my health. I was weakened by starvation, my feet were swollen and the sole raw from wearing rough wooden clogs. It was therefore not surprising that, with the constant rush and hurry, I longed for a moment of rest. I kept a watchful eye on Stark and waited for a chance to take a breather while he was not looking. My moment came when he went across to the cremation room. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a half-open suitcase containing food. Pretending to be busy undressing a corpse with one hand, I ransacked the suitcase with the other. Keeping one eye on the door in case Stark returned suddenly I hastily grabbed a few triangles of cheese and a poppyseed cake. With my filthy, blood-stained fingers I broke off pieces of cake and devoured them ravenously. I had only just time to pocket a piece of bread when Stark returned. He clearly thought we were slacking and shouted at us to work faster. An hour later we had undressed about 100 corpses. There they lay, naked and ready to be cremated.

  In another suitcase I found a round box of cheese and several boxes of matches with Slovakian labels. And as I looked a little more closely at the faces of the dead, I recoiled with horror when I discovered among them a girl who had been at school with me. Her name was Yolana Weis. In order to make quite sure I looked at her hand because Yolana’s hand had been deformed since childhood. I had not been mistaken: this was Yolana. There was another dead body which I recognized. It was that of a woman who had been our neighbour in Sered, my home town. Most of the dead were dressed in civilian clothes, but there were a few wearing military uniforms. Two wide, red stripes on the back of their jackets and the letters SU in black showed them to be Soviet prisoners-of-war.

  Meanwhile Fischl had finished cleaning the grates. Now all six ovens were working, and Stark ordered us to drag the naked corpses across the concrete floor to the ovens. There Fischl went from corpse to corpse, forcing their mouths open with an iron bar. When he found a gold tooth he pulled it out with a pair of pliers and flung it into a tin. Stripped and robbed of everything, the dead were destined to become victims of the flames and to be turned into smoke and ashes. Final preparations were now in hand. Stark ordered the fans to be switched on. A button was pressed and they began to rotate. But as soon as Stark had checked that the fire was drawing well they were switched off again. At his order ‘Shove ’em in!’ each one of us set to work doing the job he had been given earlier.

  I now began to realize the dangerous position in which I found myself. At that moment I had only one chance to stay alive, even if only for a few hours or days. I had to convince Stark that I could do anything he expected from a crematorium worker. And thus I carried out all his orders like a robot.

  Coming from the room where I had been undressing corpses into the cremation room, there were two ovens on the left and four on the right. A depression roughly twenty to twenty-five centimetres deep and one metre wide ran across the room and in this rails had been laid. This track was about fifteen metres long. Leading off from the main track were six branch rails, each four metres long, going straight to the ovens. On the main track was a turn-table which enabled a truck to be moved on to the branch tracks. The cast-iron truck had a box-shaped superstructure made of sheet metal, with an overall height and width of just under one metre. It was about eighty centimetres long. An iron hand-rail went right across its entire width at the back. A loading platform made of strong sheet metal and not quite two metres long jutted out in the front; its side walls were twelve to fifteen centimetres high. Open at the front, the platform was not quite as wide as the mouth of the oven so that it fitted easily into the muffle. On the plat
form there was also a box-shaped pusher made of sheet metal, higher than the side walls of the platform and rounded off at the top. It was about 40 centimetres deep, thirty to forty centimetres high, and could be moved back and forth quite easily. Before the truck was loaded, the pusher was moved to the back of the platform. To move the truck from one track to another, one ‘had to hold on to the turn-table to prevent the truck from jumping off the rails as it left the turn-table.

  To begin with, the corpses were dragged close to the ovens. Then, with the help of the turn-table, the truck was brought up to a branch rail, and the front edge of the platform supported by a wooden prop to prevent the truck from tipping during loading. A prisoner then poured a bucket of water on the platform to stop it from becoming too hot inside the red-hot oven. Meanwhile two prisoners were busy lifting a corpse on to a board lying on the floor beside the platform. Then they lifted the board, tipping it sideways so that the corpse dropped on the platform. A prisoner standing on the other side checked that the body was in correct position.

  When the truck was finally loaded two corpses were lying on either side facing the oven while a third was wedged between them feet first. Now the time had come to open the oven door. Immediately one was overcome by the fierce heat which rushed out. When the wooden prop had been removed, two men took hold of the front end of the platform on either side, pulling it right up to the oven. Simultaneously two men pushed the truck from behind, thus forcing the platform into the oven. The two who had been doing the carrying in front, having meanwhile nipped back a few steps, now braced themselves against the hand-rail while giving the pusher a vigorous shove with one leg. In this way they helped complete the job of getting the corpses right inside the oven. As soon as the front part of the pusher was inside the oven, the truck with its platform was pulled back. In order to prevent the load of corpses from sliding out of the oven during this operation, a prisoner standing to one side thrust an iron fork into the oven pressing it against the corpses. While the platform – which had been more than three-quarters inside the oven – was being manoeuvred on its truck back on to the turn-table, the oven door was closed again.