Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination

by Saul Friedlander

  Krombach’s letter, studded with all the prejudices against Polish and Czech Jews common among German Jews, is one more expression of the absence of overall solidarity, the tensions among inmates, and the sauve qui peut mentality (his own words) that prevailed in Izbica, as everywhere else.83 Whether Izbica’s Jews knew the destination of the outgoing transports is unclear from the letter, as he certainly wished to shield Ellenbogen from further anguish. “In the meantime [since his arrival in April],” he writes, “many transports have left here. Of the approximately 14,000 Jews who arrived, only 2–3,000 are still here. They go off in cattle trucks, subject to the most brutal treatment, with even fewer possessions, i.e. only the clothes they are wearing. That is one rung farther down the ladder. We have heard nothing more of these people (Austerlitz, Bärs, etc.). After the last transport, the men who were working outside the village returned to find neither their wives, nor children, nor their possessions.84

  After indicating that in the recent transports the men had been taken off the trains in Lublin—which confirms what we know of the selection process introduced there—Krombach admits that, although he refused to join the Jewish police, he was compelled to take part in the deportation of “Polish Jews”: “You have to suppress every human feeling and, under the supervision of the SS, drive the people out with a whip, just as they are—barefoot, with infants in their arms. There are scenes which I cannot and will not describe but which will take me long to forget.”85 It remains puzzling that somebody who did not belong to the Jewish police would have been compelled to chase the Polish Jews “with a whip” out of their homes and into the cattle cars.

  In a second part of his report, Krombach seems to know more or be ready to tell more: “Recently on one morning alone more than 20 Polish Jews were shot for baking bread…. Our lives consist of uncertainty and insecurity. There could be another evacuation tomorrow, even though the officials concerned say that there won’t be any more. It becomes more and more difficult to hide given how few people are here now—particularly as there is always a given target [a quota of deportees] to be met.”86 Then, almost paradoxically, he uses a metaphor from his youthful readings: “The Wild West was nothing compared to this!”87 Could it be that, after all, he had no clear understanding of his situation?

  In the fall of 1942 all contact with Ernst Krombach was lost. According to some reports, at about that time he had been blinded either in an accident or by the SS. In April 1943 the last Jews of Izbica were shipped to Sobibor.88

  V

  While the killings in Chelmno ran smoothly on, the building of Belzec, which had started on November 1, 1941, progressed apace, and in early March, the first transports of Jews reached the Lublin district, close to the camp. Assistance from the local authorities was necessary at first. On March 16, 1942, an official from the Population and Social Welfare Bureau of the district, Fritz Rauter, discussed the situation with Hauptsturmführer Hermann Höfle, Globocnik’s main deportations expert, who volunteered some explanations. A camp was being built in Belzec, along the railway line Deblin-Trawniki; Höfle was ready to take in four or five transports daily. These Jews, he explained to Rauter, “were crossing the border [of the General Government] and would never return.” The next day the gassings started.89

  At first, some 30,000 out of the 37,000 Jews of the Lublin ghetto were exterminated. Simultaneously another 13,500 Jews arrived from various areas of the district (Zamóść, Piaski, and Izbica), and from the Lwov area; in early June deportees from Krakow followed. Within four weeks some 75,000 Jews had been murdered in this first of the three “Aktion Reinhardt” camps (named in Heydrich’s memory),90 by the end of 1942 about 434,000 Jews would be exterminated in Belzec alone.91 Two survived the war.

  Sometime in late March or April 1942, the former Austrian police officer and euthanasia expert Franz Stangl traveled to Belzec to meet its commandant, SS Hauptsturmführer Christian Wirth. Forty years later, in his Düsseldorf jail, Stangl described his arrival in Belzec: “I went there by car,” he told the British journalist Gitta Sereny. “‘As one arrived, one first reached Belzec railway station, on the left side of the road. It was a one-story building. The smell…’ he said. ‘Oh God, the smell. It was everywhere. Wirth wasn’t in his office. I remember, they took me to him…. He was standing on a hill, next to the pits…the pits…full…they were full. I can’t tell you; not hundreds, thousands, thousands of corpses…. Oh God. That’s where Wirth told me—he said that was what Sobibor was for. And that he was putting me officially in charge.’”92 Some two months later Sobibor—whose construction began at the end of March 1942—was in operation and Stangl, its attentive commandant, usually toured the camp in white riding attire.93

  About 90,000 to 100,000 Jews were murdered in Sobibor during its first three months of operation; they came from the Lublin district and, either directly or via ghettos of the Lublin area, from Austria, the Protectorate, and the Altreich.94 And, while the exterminations were launched in Sobibor, the construction of Treblinka began.

  Extermination in the “Aktion Reinhardt” camps followed standard procedures. Ukrainian auxiliaries, usually armed with whips, chased the Jews out of the trains. As in Chelmno, the next step was “disinfection”; the victims had to undress and leave all their belongings in the assembly room. Then the throng of naked and terrified people was pushed through a narrow hallway or passage into one of the gas chambers. The doors were hermetically sealed; the gassing started. At the beginning bottles of carbon monoxide were still used in Belzec; later they were replaced by various engines. Death was slow to come in these early gas chambers (ten minutes or more): Sometimes the agony of the victims could be watched through peepholes. When all was finished, the emptying of the gas chambers was left, again as in Chelmno, to Jewish “special commandos,” who would themselves be liquidated later on.

  Around Belzec and throughout the Lublin district, rumors spread. On April 8, 1942, Klukowski, the Polish hospital director, noted: “The Jews are upset [probably “in despair” in the original]. We know for sure that every day two trains, consisting of twenty cars each, come to Belzec, one from Lublin, the other from Lwow. After being unloaded on separate tracks, all Jews are forced behind the barbed-wire enclosure. Some are killed with electricity, some with poison gases, and the bodies are burned.” Klukowski went on: “On the way to Belzec the Jews experience many terrible things. They are aware of what will happen to them. Some try to fight back. At the railroad station in Szczebrzeszyn a young woman gave away a gold ring in exchange for a glass of water for her dying child. In Lublin, people witnessed small children being thrown through the windows of speeding trains. Many people are shot before reaching Belzec.”95

  On April 12, having mentioned on the previous day that the deportation of Jews from Zamóść was about to start, Klukowski noted: “The information from Zamóść is horrifying. Almost 2,500 Jews were evacuated. A few hundred were shot on the streets. Some men fought back. I do not have any details. Here in Szczebrzeszyn there is panic. Old Jewish women spent the night in the Jewish cemetery, saying they would rather die here among the graves of their own families than be killed and buried in the concentration camps.” And the following day: “Many Jews have left town already or hidden…. In town a mob started assembling, waiting for the right moment to start removing everything from the Jewish homes. I have information that some people are already stealing whatever can be carried out from homes where the owners have been forced to move out.”96

  By April 1942 gassings had reached their full scale in Chelmno, Belzec, and Sobibor; they were just starting in Auschwitz, and would soon begin in Treblinka. Simultaneously, within a few weeks, huge extermination operations by shooting or in gas vans would engulf further hundreds of thousands of Jews in Belorussia and in the Ukraine (the second sweep), while “standard” on-the-spot killings remained common fare throughout the winter in the occupied areas of the USSR, in Galicia, in the Lublin district, and several areas of eastern Poland. At the same t
ime again, slave labor camps were operating throughout the East and in Upper Silesia; some camps in this last category were a mix of transit areas, slave labor, and killing centers: Majdanek near Lublin or Janowska Road, on the outskirts of Lwov, for example. And, next to this jumble of slave labor and extermination operations, tens of thousands of Jews toiled in ordinary factories and workshops, in work camps, ghettos, or towns, and hundreds of thousands were still alive in former Poland, in the Baltic countries, and further eastward. While the Jewish population in the Reich was rapidly declining as deportations had resumed in full force, in the West, most Jews were leading their restricted lives without a sense of immediate danger. Yet the German vise was closing rapidly, and within two or three months, even minimal everyday normality would have disappeared for most Jews in occupied Europe.

  In Auschwitz the gassing of the Jews began with small groups. In mid-February 1942, some 400 older Jews from the Upper Silesian labor camps of “Organization Schmelt,” deemed unfit for work, arrived from Beuthen.97

  On this occasion, as during the previous killing of Soviet prisoners in the Zyklon B experiments, the reconverted morgue of the main camp (Auschwitz I) crematorium was turned into a gas chamber. The proximity of the camp administration building complicated matters: The personnel had to be evacuated when the Jews marched by and a truck engine was run to cover the death cries of the victims.98 Shortly thereafter the head of the construction division of the WVHA, Hans Kammler, visited the camp and ordered a series of rapid improvements. A new crematorium with five incinerators, previously ordered for Auschwitz I, was transferred to Auschwitz II–Birkenau—and set in the northwest corner of the new camp, next to an abandoned Polish cottage. This cottage, “Bunker I,” soon housed two gas chambers. On March 20 it became operational; its first victims were another group of elderly “Schmelt Jews.”99

  VI

  In the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, the “second sweep” of the killing units was launched on an even larger scale than the first, at the end of 1941; it lasted throughout 1942.100 In some areas, such as the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (RKU), according to a report from the Wehrmacht Armaments Inspectorate, mass executions had never stopped and were going on without interruption apart from brief organizational slowdowns, from mid-1941 to mid-1942.

  The Wehrmacht report indicated that barely a few weeks after the end of the military operations, the systematic execution of the Jewish population had started. The units involved belonged mainly to the Order Police: they were assisted by Ukrainian auxiliaries and “often, unfortunately, by the voluntary participation of members of the Wehrmacht.” The report described the massacres as “horrible”; they included indiscriminately men, women, old people and children of all ages. The scope of the mass murders was yet unequaled on occupied Soviet territory. According to the report, approximately 150,000 to 200,000 Jews of the Reichskommissariat were exterminated (it would ultimately be around 360,000). Only in the last phase of the operation a tiny “useful” segment of the population (specialized artisans) was not killed. Previously economic considerations had not been taken into account.101

  At the outset, as we saw, the intensity of the massacres differed from one area to another; at the end, of course, in late 1942 and early 1943, the outcome would be the same: almost complete extermination. During the “first sweep,” as Einsatzkommandos, police battalions, and Ukrainian auxiliaries were moving along with the Werhmacht, the killings in the western part of the Ukraine—Generalbezirk Volhyn-Podolia (General district Volhynia-Podolia)—encompassed approximately 20 percent of the Jewish population. In Rovno, however, the capital of the Reichskommissariat, some 18,000 people—that is, 80 percent of the Jewish inhabitants, were murdered.102

  From September 1941 to May 1942, the Security Police (Einsatzgruppe C and Einsatzkommando 5), headquartered in Kiev, organized its hold on the RKU. The HSSPF in the Ukraine, SS General Prützmann and his civilian counterpart, Reichskomissar Koch, cooperated without any difficulty, as both came from Königsberg. Koch delegated all “Jewish matters” to Prützmann, who in turn passed them on to the chief of the Security Police. But, as emphasized by historian Dieter Pohl, “the civilian authorities and the Security Police reached harmonious cooperation in the mass murder: The initiatives came from both sides.”103

  Given the immense territories they had under their control and the variety of languages or dialects of the local populations, the Germans relied from the outset on the help of local militias that, over the months, became regular auxiliary forces, the Schutzmannschaften. The Order Police units and the Gendarmerie were German; the Schutzmannschaften soon widely outnumbered them and participated in all activities, including the killings of Jews in some major operations such as the extermination of part of the Jewish population of Minsk in the late fall of 1941. There the Lithuanian Schutzmannschaften distinguished themselves.104

  The auxiliary units included Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Belorussians. A Polish underground report about the liquidation of the Brest Litovsk ghetto in late 1942 is telling: “The liquidation of the Jews has been continuing since 15 October. During the first three days about 12,000 people were shot. The place of execution is Bronna Góra. At present the rest of those in hiding are being liquidated. The liquidation was being organized by a mobile squad of SD and local police. At present, the ‘finishing off ’ is being done by the local police, in which Poles represent a large percentage. They are often more zealous than the Germans. Some Jewish possessions go to furnish German homes and offices, some are sold at auction. Despite the fact that during the liquidation large quantities of weapons were found, the Jews behaved passively.”105

  Once Hitler decided to move his forward headquarters to Vinnytsa (in the Ukraine), the Jews of the area had to disappear. Thus, in the first days of 1942, 227 Jews who lived in the immediate neighborhood of the planned headquarters were delivered by “Organization Todt” to the “Secret Military Police” and shot on January 10. A second batch of approximately 8,000 Jews who lived in nearby Chmelnik were shot around the same time. Then came the turn of the Jews of Vinnytsa. Here the operation was delayed by a few weeks, but in mid-April the Secret Military Police reported that the 4,800 Jews of the town had been executed (umgelegt). Finally approximately 1,000 Jewish artisans who worked for the Germans in the same area were murdered in July, on orders of the local commander of the Security Police.106

  The two Reichskommissare, Lohse and Koch, enthusiastically supported mass murder operations. Koch in particular requested that in the Ukraine all Jews be annihilated in order to reduce local food consumption and fill the growing food demands from the Reich. As a result the district commissars, at their meeting in August 1942, agreed with the head of the Security Police, Karl Pütz, that all the Jews of Reichskommissariat Ukraine, with the exception of 500 specialized craftsmen, would be exterminated: This was defined as the “hundred percent solution.”107

  In the Baltic countries—in Lohse’s domain—particularly in Lithuania, Jäger could always be relied on as far as mass murder was concerned. On February 6, 1942, Stahlecker asked him to urgently report the total number of executions of his Einsatzkommando 3, according to the following categories: Jews, communists, partisans, mentally ill, others; furthermore, Jäger had to indicate the number of women and children. According to the report, sent three days later, by February 1, 1942, Einsatzkommando 3 had executed 136,421 Jews, 1,064 communists, 56 partisans, 653 mentally ill, 78 others. Total: 138,272 (of whom 55,556 were women and 34,464 were children).108

  At times Jäger went too far. Thus, on May 18, 1942, following an army complaint about the liquidation of 630 Jewish craftsmen in Minsk, contrary to prior agreements, Gestapo chief Müller had to remind him of several orders issued by Himmler: “Jews and Jewesses capable of working, between ages 16 and 32, should be exempt from special measures, for the time being.”109

  On several occasions the extermination campaign led to difficulties between one of Rosenberg’s appointees, the
Generalkommissar for Weissruthenien (Belorussia), Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube, and the SD. At the end of 1941, Kube had been shocked to discover that Mischlinge and decorated war veterans had been included among the deportees from the Reich to Minsk. But, it is at the beginning of 1942 that the General Kommissar launched his main assault against the SS and their local commander, chief of the Security Police, Dr. Eduard Strauch. Kube did not object to the extermination of the Jews as such but rather to the methods used in the process: gold teeth and bridges were pulled out of the mouths of victims awaiting their death; many Jews, merely wounded in the executions, were buried alive, and the like. This, in Kube’s terms, was “boden-lose Schweinerei” [utterly disgusting] and Strauch was the chief culprit, denounced to Lohse, to Rosenberg, possibly to Hitler.

  Kube’s complaints drew a sharp response from Heydrich on March 21. As for Strauch, he started compiling a hefty file of accusations against the Generalkommissar whose leadership he considered worse than nil, whose entourage was corrupt and dissolute and who, on various occasions, had shown friendliness to Jews.110 Neither Kube nor Strauch was recalled, and, as we shall see, the confrontation was to culminate in 1943. In the meantime, however, Strauch had approximately half of the remaining Minsk ghetto population of 19,000 Jews massacred in late July 1942.111

  At times technical difficulties hampered the killings. On June 15, 1942, for example, the commander of the Security Police and the SD in the Ostland urgently requested an additional gas van, as the three vans operating in Belorussia did not suffice to deal with all the Jews arriving at an accelerated rate. Furthermore, he demanded twenty new gas hoses [carrying the carbon monoxide from the engines back into the vans], as those in use were no longer airtight.112 In fact the functioning of the vans occasioned a series of complaints that, in turn, led to a spirited response from “Referat IID3” of the RSHA, on June 5, 1942.