territories, 9 and it was only after this second part of Action 14f13 was concluded that the T4 staff were used on a larger scale from March 1942 within the context of
the ‘Final Solution’ in Poland.
What is remarkable in our context is the close temporal link between the end of
the first euthanasia action in August in the context of T4 and the decision to
deport the German Jews in September, as well as the concrete preparations for
other mass murders of Jews in other territories under German occupation, or their
start in October 1941. While in view of the fact that the euthanasia programme had
become public knowledge, the regime did not want to hazard any further agitation
among the population and stopped the T4 programme, they would respond to
certain expressions of displeasure prompted by the introduction of the Jewish star
in September 1941 with increased repression and intimidation. 10
The starting point for the deployment in Eastern Europe of the killing technol-
ogy already used in the context of the euthanasia programme must also have
Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders
279
occurred in August 1941. On a visit to Minsk Himmler is believed to have issued the
order to seek killing methods that would put less of a strain on the perpetrators, SS
men and Police than the mass executions. 11 Shortly after this visit Bach-Zelewski, the HSSPF for Russia Centre, tried—presumably in vain—to call Herbert Lange,
the leader of the Sonderkommando that had for a long time been murdering
patients in gas vans, to a ‘presentation’ in Minsk. 12 Nebe, the leader of Einsatzgruppe B and at the same time Chief of the Reich Criminal Police Office, who was
also likely to have been present at the meeting with Himmler, turned to the
Criminal Technical Institute with a request for appropriate support. Experts
from the institute then came to Belarus. After a further attempt to kill mentally
ill people near Minsk with explosives had led to terrible results, 13 patients were killed in walled-up rooms with car exhaust fumes introduced from outside in a
mental institution in Mogilev as well as in Novinki and Minsk (Himmler had
visited the latter on 15 August). 14
On the basis of these experiences, amongst other things, the decision was made
to create transportable gas chambers for the Einsatzgruppen. The model for this
was one already used by Lange’s Sonderkammando to murder Polish mental
patients in the winter of 1939/40, except that now, instead of using carbon
monoxide from gas canisters the exhaust from the vehicle was introduced directly
into the closed vehicle body itself. The requisite conversion of the vehicles was
undertaken by the Criminal Technical Institute. 15 Early in November 1941, during an experiment in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, around thirty prisoners
were killed in one of these vehicles. 16
In the occupied Soviet territories the gas vans were first used to murder people
around November, early December. By the end of 1941 an estimated total of six of
these original-series gas vans was deployed by all four Einsatzgruppen. 17
At around the same time, from October/November 1941, gas vans were also
deployed in the murder of Jews in the Warthegau by Sonderkommando Lange.
For 8 December there is evidence of the use of gas vans in Chelmno, a gas-van
station that had been built in the meantime. 18 In this territory, as already described in detail, they were familiar with this killing technology, since as early as 1940 and
again in the summer of 1941 mental institution inmates had been murdered using
gas vans. 19
In parallel with the development of gas vans, however, steps were taken to set
up stationary gas chambers in the occupied Eastern territories. There exists a
letter, dated 25 October 1941, from the Adviser on Racial Issues in the Eastern
Ministry, Wetzel, to Reichskommissar Lohse concerning these preparations.
Wetzel was responding to a report from Lohse on 4 October ‘concerning the
solution of the Jewish question’:20
With reference to my letter of 18 October I wish to inform you that Oberdienstleiter Brack of the Führer’s Chancellery has already declared himself willing to work on the production 280
Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941
of the required accommodation as well as the gassing apparatus. At present, the apparatus in question is not available in sufficient numbers. It must first be manufactured. Since in Brack’s view the manufacture of the apparatus in the Reich presents far greater difficulties than on the spot, Brack considers it most expedient to send his people, especially his
chemist Dr Kallmeyer, to Riga forthwith, and take charge of everything else.
Lohse was to request this staff from Brack. Eichmann had agreed to the procedure:
‘According to Sturmbannführer Eichmann, camps for Jews are to be set up in Riga
and Minsk to which Jews from the Old Reich may also be sent. At present, Jews
are being evacuated from the Old Reich, to Litzmannstadt but also to other camps,
before later being sent to the East, if fit for work, for work deployment.’ According
to ‘circumstances . . . there is no objection to those Jews who are not fit for work
being removed with Brack’s aids’. Those ‘fit for work, on the other hand, will be
transported East for work deployment. It should be taken as read that among the
Jews who are fit for work men and women are to be kept separate.’
In fact, however, in Riga it was not gas chambers (described as ‘accommodation’)
that were used but, as mentioned above, gas vans.
The decision to build a first extermination camp in Belzec in the district of
Lublin, where murder was to be carried out with exhaust fumes from a solidly
mounted engine, may be assumed to have been made in mid-October, and
building work began in early November. At the end of 1941, the construction of
a second extermination camp in the district of Lublin, Sobibor, may have been
prepared. 21 It is possible that in November/December 1941 the installation of a further extermination camp in Lemberg (district of Galicia) was being considered. 22 In fact Brack made staff from the T4 Action available for Belzec, Sobibor, and the camp at Treblinka which was built later—the extermination camps of
what would later be known as ‘Aktion Reinhardt’. There were around ninety-two
people whom Brack sent to the General Government in stages. The basic agree-
ment that this work should go ahead appears to have been made with Himmler on
14 December 1941. In December 1941 Christian Wirth arrived in Lublin, further
groups in March 1942, and in June 1942, a time when the systematic murder of the
Jews in the districts of Lublin and Galicia had already begun, or was being
extended to the remaining districts of the General Government. 23
While in Belzec, the Warthegau, and the occupied Eastern territories mass
murders were in preparation or had already been carried out using engine
exhausts, the leadership of Auschwitz concentration camp chose a different path.
Various categories of prisoners were systematically murdered in Auschwitz in
the autumn of 1941: Soviet prisoners of war who had already been shot or beaten
by guards since first arriving in the summer, also, from the summer of 1941, sick
prisoners (as part of Action 14f13), Jewish forced labourers from Upper Silesia who
were regularly handed over as ‘unfit
for work’ by ‘Organisation Schmelt’, and
Poles handed over for execution by the Kattowitz Gestapo. 24 The plan to expand Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders
281
Auschwitz concentration camp to a capacity of 30,000 prisoners was followed, at
the end of September 1941, by the order to construct another camp for prisoners of
war in Auschwitz and, early in October, its capacity was raised from an initial
50,000 to 100,000 prisoners. 25 In the wake of these measures the camp leadership decided to undertake a far larger number of executions.
To this end, alongside experiments with fatal injections, 26 tests were begun with the poison gas Zyklon B, which had been used in Auschwitz for disinfection since
July 1941.27 It appears that in early September 600 Soviet prisoners of war who had been deemed by a Gestapo commission to be ‘fanatical Communists’, as well as
250 sick prisoners, were murdered with Zyklon B in a cellar in block 11. Later,
presumably in the middle of September 1941, a further 900 Soviet prisoners of war
were murdered with the gas after the ‘morgue’ (‘Leichenkammer’) in the crema-
torium had been provisionally converted for this purpose. 28 There is a series of indications that even before the end of the year several smaller groups of Jews were
also murdered in Auschwitz with Zyklon B; presumably they were the ones who
had been selected from the Schmelt camps as no longer fit for work. 29
The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höß, states in his memoir written in
Cracow prison that the question of a suitable poison gas was discussed during a
visit by Eichmann. However, the dating of this visit is uncertain. Some statements
by Höß suggest the autumn of 1941, others suggest a later time, such as the spring
of 1942.30 While he himself was not in Auschwitz, Höß wrote, his deputy used Zyklon B on his own initiative to murder Soviet prisoners of war; later he agreed
with Eichmann to use this gas in future. 31 This plainly self-exculpatory account, which, for understandable reasons, was in fact disputed by Eichmann during his
hearing in Jerusalem, 32 makes it clear once again that Höß is hardly an ideal witness for the history of Auschwitz concentration and extermination.
In the course of the planned expansion of the camp complex and with regard to
the high number of prisoners killed and those who lost their lives in other ways as
a result of the disastrous conditions of imprisonment, on 21 and 22 October the
construction of a new and considerably larger crematorium facility, consisting of a
total of fifteen cremation chambers, was discussed with representatives of the
specialist firm Topf & Söhne. 33 The American historian Michael Thad Allen has indicated that there were already plans at this time to incorporate a ventilation
system along with the aeration system that was already a standard part of such a
facility. He takes this as proof that there were already plans at this point to use the
room as a gas chamber because the introduction of warm air—which fundamen-
tally contradicts the task of a ‘morgue’—was plainly intended to distribute the
Zyklon B more quickly. Aside from this, the plans indicate that the pipes in
question were to be cemented in; Allen presumes that they were thus to be
protected against damage from victims struggling against death. Robert Jan van
Pelt and Deborah Dwork, on the other hand, date the conversion of the ‘morgue’
into a gas chamber only to September 1942, when the building was already under
282
Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941
construction. 34 If we accept Allen’s dating—the current state of research does not allow the question to be definitively resolved—one cannot conclude that a
decision was made a short time previously (in October 1941) to murder the
European Jews. The installation of a gas chamber in the new crematorium
corresponded to what had already been done provisionally in the old cremator-
ium; it was nothing really new, and it was primarily used on non-Jewish victims
who were being murdered at this time. There was also the fact that time was being
taken over the construction of the crematorium: it was not started until August
1942, not in the old camp, but in Birkenau, and the crematorium was finally
completed in March 1943. Similarly, it was only in August 1942 that the decision
was taken considerably to extend the capacity of the crematorium. It was decided,
on the basis of the same plans, to build a second crematorium in Birkenau, which
was finally completed in June 1943. Auschwitz played no part in the planning for
the murder of the European Jews in 1941; the advocates of a radical Judenpolitik
seem to have become aware of its potential only in January 1942, in connection
with Himmler’s order to confine Jews from Germany in concentration camps. 35
Hence, it would be wrong to assume that the conversion of Birkenau camp
complex would have gone ahead at full speed immediately after a decision by
the Führer in the summer or autumn of 1941 to murder the European Jews.
In November 1941 the same firm, Topf & Söhne, also received a commission to
construct a gigantic incineration facility with thirty-two chambers in Mogilev
(Belarus). The reason given to the firm was that such a facility was needed for the
hygienic removal of corpses because of the great danger of epidemics in the East.
As the construction was not completed, the superfluous ovens came to Ausch-
witz. 36 It is not inconceivable that this planned crematorium facility was actually intended for the construction of an extermination camp in Mogilev, whose
function was assumed in the course of the coming months by Auschwitz and
the extermination camps in Poland. 37
Thus, in Auschwitz, in the autumn of 1941—still independent of the plans for the
‘Final Solution’ that were going on at the same time—various developments were
under way which would only a few months later make the camp seem practically
predestined to assume a central role in the murder of the European Jews: the
expansion of the camp, for which a new purpose had to be found when it proved
after a few months that because of the mass deaths among Soviet prisoners of war
the original numbers of prisoners would not be reached; the hitherto unparalleled
expansion of the capacity of the crematoria; and finally the experiments with
poison gas.
Accordingly, late in 1941, preparations were made to construct extermination
camps in Riga, in the area around Lodz (Chelmno), in Belzec, and in Auschwitz,
presumably in Mogilev near Minsk, and possibly in Lemberg (Lvov). 38 Hence, facilities for mass murder with gas were prepared near all the ghettos that had
been selected as destinations for the first three waves of deportation from the
Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders
283
Reich. In Auschwitz they were intended for a large number of predominantly
non-Jewish prisoners, and possibly in the district of Galicia to cover the area that
was to become an important link to the future colonial territories further to the
east. The temporal parallels between the start of the deportations and the
preparation and installation of these murder facilities in the autumn of 1941
reflect the planning of the Nazi regime to extend the strategy of judenfrei areas,
already applied in the Soviet Union, to the Polish territorie
s. In certain regions
that were of central importance for the further population displacements planned
as part of the racist ‘New Order’, at least those members of the local Jewish
population who were ‘unfit for work’ were to be exterminated. Parallel efforts by
various parties during these months to develop technologies for the mass killing
of people with gas are clear indications that preparations were generally under
way to carry out mass murders on a large scale in the near future. (In the case of
Auschwitz these preparations did not primarily affect Jewish prisoners, but
Soviet prisoners of war and sick prisoners.39) However, the plans for systematic mass murder among the Jewish population had so far affected only certain
regions, and the intention to deport the remaining Jews to the occupied Soviet
territories after the end of the war was also a plan for the ‘Final Solution’, the
physical destruction of the European Jews. However, it was a plan that was to be
realized in the long term and not primarily through actions of direct murder. At
this point, the plans to murder people with gas concerned hundreds of thou-
sands, not millions of people.
The fact that the agents in question had still not received an order by late
summer and autumn 1941 to kill all European Jews with gas as quickly as possible,
but that this plan only took shape over the course of the next few months, clarifies,
amongst other things, the complicated story of the transfer of the murder tech-
nology. From 1940 onwards, in the context of the ‘Euthanasia’ programme, a ‘tried
and tested’ technology and a complex organization for the implementation of
mass murder had been developed, which, from August 1941, was available for
other purposes. Instead of transferring this well-practised and available apparatus
to Eastern Europe in one piece, and deploying it for the systematic murder of the
Jews, only part of the staff of the T4 organization was gradually deployed, or
even—as in the case of Riga—offered in vain, while with the gas vans an essentially
already familiar technology was redeveloped and in Auschwitz completely new
purposes were found for the use of Zyklon B. This was a complicated process in
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