The man who, more than anyone else, orchestrated the transformation of Auschwitz into the central extermination camp of the Nazi system by overseeing the building of the new gassing installations in Birkenau was Pohl’s construction chief, Hans Kammler. “In Kammler,” historian Michael Thad Allen wrote, “technological competence and extreme Nazi fanaticism coexisted…. For his intensity, his mastery of engineering, his organizational genius, and his passion for National Socialism, SS men esteemed Kammler as a paragon.”109 In Speer’s words, “nobody would have dreamed that some day he would be one of Himmler’s most brutal and most ruthless henchmen.”110 The Kammlers of the Third Reich were the technological managers of the “Final Solution” during its mid-and late phases. As previously emphasized, their ideological fanaticism was essential to keep the system working in spite of increasing difficulties.
On January 29, 1943, Max Bischoff, the head of Auschwitz Zentrale Bauleitung (Central Building Management) reported to Kammler: “Crematorium II has been completed—save for some minor construction work—using all the forces available, in spite of unspeakable difficulties and severe cold, in twenty-four-hour shifts. The fires were started in the ovens in the presence of Oberingenieur Kurt Prüfer, representative of the contractors of the firm Topf and Sons, Erfurt, and they are working most satisfactorily. The planks from the concrete ceiling of the cellar used as a mortuary have not yet been removed, on account of the frost. This is not very important, however, as the gassing cellar can be used for that purpose. The firm Topf and Sons was not able to start deliveries of the aeration and ventilation equipment according to the timetable requested by Central Building Management because of restrictions in the use of railroad cars. As soon as the aeration and ventilation equipment arrives, the installing will start.”111
Crematorium II was activated in March 1943. The gas chamber was built mainly underground and accessed by way of the underground disrobing hall. But its roof was slightly elevated above ground level to allow the pouring in of the Zyklon B pellets from the canisters, through four openings protected by small brick chimneys built around and over them. In the gas chambers of Crematoriums II and III, the Zyklon pellets were not thrown from the vents to the floor of the chamber but lowered in containers that descended into “wire mesh introduction devices [Drahtnetzeinschiebvorrichtungen],” or wire mesh columns. The columns allowed for the full release of the gas into the chamber—once the adequate temperature was reached—and the retrieval of the pellets at the end of the operation to avoid further release of gas while the corpses were being pulled from the chamber (which had no other openings but the single access door.)112
Apart from the hall for disrobing and the gas chamber (or gas chambers), the basements of crematoriums built on two levels included a hall for the handling of the corpses (for the pulling out of gold teeth, cutting women’s hair, detaching prosthetic limbs, collecting any valuables such as wedding rings, glasses, and the like) by the Jewish Sonderkommando members after they had dragged the bodies out of the gas chamber. Then elevators carried the corpses to the ground floor, where several ovens reduced them to ashes. After the grinding of bones in special mills, the ashes were used as fertilizer in the nearby fields, dumped in local forests, or tossed into the river, nearby. As for the members of the Sonderkommandos, they were periodically killed and replaced by a new batch.
Prüfer was so proud of his installation that he had it patented.113 Besides Topf, a dozen other firms were involved in the construction of the four crematoriums.114 Despite the slow process of setting up the new units, their frequent malfunctioning, and the insufficient burning capacity of the ovens during peak activity (which compelled the camp authorities to revert to open-pit burning), the Auschwitz murder machinery did fulfill its task.
Primo Levi, whose journey to Auschwitz we described, was a twenty-four-year-old chemist from Turin who had joined a small group of Jews hiding in the mountains above the city, within the loose framework of the Resistance organization Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty). On December 13, 1943, Levi and his companions were arrested by the Fascist militia and, a few weeks later, transported to the Fossoli assembly camp. By the end of February 1944 the Germans took over. On February 22 the 650 Jews of the camp were deported northward.
“The climax [of the four-day journey] came suddenly,” Levi later wrote: “The door opened with a crash, and the dark echoed with outlandish orders in that curt, barbaric barking of Germans in command which seems to give vent to millennial anger…. In less than ten minutes all the fit men had been collected together in a group. What happened to the others, to the women, to the children, to the old men, we could establish neither then nor later: The night swallowed them up, purely and simply. Today, however, we know…that of our convoy no more than ninety-six men and twenty-nine women entered the respective camps of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau, and that of all the others, more than five hundred in number, not one was living two days later.”115
About her arrival in Birkenau at the age of twelve, Ruth Kluger remembered that when the doors of the freight car were unsealed, unaware that one had to jump, she fell on the ramp: “I got up and wanted to cry,” she reminisced, “or at least sniffle, but the tears didn’t come. They dried up in the palpable creepiness of the place. We should have been relieved…to be breathing fresh air at last. But the air wasn’t fresh. It smelled like nothing on earth, and I knew instinctively and immediately that this was no place for crying, that the last thing I needed was to attract attention.” Kluger then noted the same welcoming party as Levi: “We were surrounded by the odious, bullying noise of the men who had hauled us out of the train with the monosyllables ‘raus, raus’ (get out), and who simply didn’t stop shouting as they were driving us along, like mad, barking dogs. I was glad to be walking safely in the middle of our heap of humanity.”116
In the din of human barking, some inmates later remembered the Raus, others the Schneller: The effect was the same. Greta Salus, who also arrived from Theresienstadt, described her first impression: “Schneller, schneller, schneller (faster, faster, faster)—it still rings in my ears, this word that from now on hounded us day and night, whipped us on, and never gave us any rest. On the double—that was the watch word; eat, sleep, work, die on the double…. I often asked people with the same experiences what their impressions were on their arrival in Auschwitz. Most of them weren’t able to tell me much about it, and almost all of them said they were utterly addled and half-dazed, as though they had been hit on the head. They all perceived the floodlights as torturous and the noise as unbearable.”117
The first selection took place on arrival, on the spot. As SS physician Friedrich Entress explained in his postwar statement, “The young people under sixteen, all the mothers in charge of children, and all the sick or frail people were loaded into trucks and taken to the gas chambers. The others were handed over to the head of the labor allocation and taken to the camp.”118
In fact Entress should have remembered one more category of Jews selected on arrival: interesting specimens for some of the medical or anthropological experiments. Thus Entress’s notorious colleague, Joseph Mengele, who very often took part in the initial selections, was also present at arrivals to search for his special material. “Scouting incoming transports for twins with the order Zwillinge heraus! (Twins forward!), he also looked for individuals with physical abnormalities who might be used for interesting postmortems. Their measurements were taken, they were shot by an SS noncom, and their bodies dissected. Sometimes their cleaned bones were sent to Verschuer’s research institute in Berlin-Dahlem.”119 (Prof. Dr. Otmar von Verschuer was Mengele’s mentor and the Director of the Institute for Biological-Racial Research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Dahlem.)
The deportees selected for slave labor were usually identified with a serial number, tattooed on their lower left arm; the category to which they belonged was indicated on their striped inmate “uniform” by a colored triangle (with different colors for poli
ticals, criminals, homosexuals, Gypsies) which, for all Jews was turned into a six-pointed star by the addition of a reversed yellow triangle.120 The results of the initial selections aimed at filling the ranks of the labor pool were at times truly disappointing. For example, in a transport from Theresienstadt at the end of January 1943, fewer than 1,000 out of some 5,000 deportees could be of some use at the I. G. Farben works. The others were immediately gassed.121 It was even worse in March, although the transports from Berlin were filled with deportees seized during the Fabrikaktion. As family members had been taken along with the deported men, in the transport of March 3, out of a total 1,750 Jews, 1,118 were women and children. Only two hundred of these women and children were not immediately subjected to “special treatment.” And so it went with the four transports that followed.122
The march, or transportation to the crematoriums, of those selected for immediate gassing usually took place without incidents, as, according to a well-honed routine, the victims were told they would undergo disinfection. At the entrance of the crematorium, the new arrivals were taken in charge by a few SS men and by Jewish Sonderkommando members. These Sonderkomanndo men mixed with the unsuspecting victims in the undressing hall and, if need be, like the SS guards, they offered a few soothing comments. Once the undressing was completed and the belongings carefully hung on numbered hooks (shoes tied together), to prove that there was no ground for fear, the party of SS men and Sonderkommando inmates accompanied the throng of candidates for “disinfection” into the gas chamber, fitted with the shower contraptions. A member of the Sonderkommando usually stayed until the very last moment; often an SS man also remained standing at the doorsill until the last victim had crossed it. Then, the door was hermetically sealed and the gas pellets poured in.123
A physician was on duty to ensure that gassing had been completed and no sign of life remained. Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, professor of medicine at the University of Münster and an SS Hauptsturmführer, kept a diary about his daily activities at Auschwitz between August 30 and November 20, 1942: “2 September 1942. For the first time, at three this morning, present at a special operation (Sonderaktion)…5 September 1942…. In the evening around 8 o’clock again attended a Sonderaktion from Holland. The men [the Sonderkommando inmates] push themselves to participate in these operations, because special provisions are passed out, including a fifth of liquor, 5 cigarettes, 100 grams of baloney [bologna], and bread…. 6 September: Today, Sunday, excellent lunch: tomato soup, one-half chicken with potatoes and red cabbage (20 grams fat). Sweets and fantastic vanilla ice cream…. Evening at 8 o’clock outside again for a Sonderaktion.”124
Incidentally, there could be a weird association between Kremer’s obsessive attention to his daily food intake, which reappears throughout the diary, and his research in Auschwitz on the medical aspects of starvation. His specimens would be put on a dissection table, interrogated about their weight loss, then killed and dissected. The effects of starvation could then be studied at leisure. According to Robert Jay Lifton, Kremer was expecting to pursue his research after the war.125
On September 5 Kremer attended a selection of Muselmannen [Muslims], in this case of women slave laborers no longer fit for work; it did not proceed as easily as the selection of new arrivals; the victims knew what awaited them. “The gassing of exhausted women in the concentration camp, cachectics generally known by the term ‘Muslims’ was especially unpleasant,” Kremer declared in his deposition in a postwar trial. “I remember that I once took part in the gassing of a group of women. I couldn’t say now how many there were. When I arrived near the bunker, they were sitting on the ground, still dressed. Because their camp clothes were in rags, they were not admitted into the undressing barracks; they had to undress in the open air. From their behavior I deduced that they knew what was in store for them, for they were crying and pleading with the SS men for their lives. But all were chased into the gas chambers and gassed…. It was under the impressions that I felt at the time that I wrote in my diary on 5 September 1942: ‘The most horrible of horrors. Hauptscharführer Thilo was quite right when he said to me today that we had reached the anus of the world.’ I used that expression because I couldn’t imagine anything more frightful or more monstrous.”126
Much has been written about the members of the Sonderkommando, those few hundreds of inmates, almost all Jews, who lived at the very bottom of hell, so to speak, before being killed and replaced by others. As we just saw, at times they helped the SS in soothing the fears of the prisoners entering the gas chambers, they pulled out the bodies, plundered the corpses, burned the remains, and disposed of the ashes; sorted and dispatched the belongings of the victims to “Kanada” (the derisive appellation of the hall where the belongings were stored and processed). An inmate of the women’s camp that adjoined the crematoriums, Krystina Zywulska, asked one of the Sonderkommando members how he could bear to do this work, day in and day out. His explanations—the will to live, witnessing, revenge—ended with what probably was the gist of it all: “You think that those working in Sonderkommandos are monsters? I’m telling you, they’re like the rest, just much more unhappy.”127
In many ways Auschwitz illustrated the difference between the Nazi concentration camp system in general and the extermination system in its specific anti-Jewish dimension. In this multipurpose camp with a mixed population of inmates, the non-Jewish inmates soon became aware of the fundamental difference between their own fate and that of the Jews. The non-Jewish inmate could survive, given some luck and some support from his national or political group. The Jew, on the other hand, had ultimately no recourse against death and, as a norm, remained utterly defenseless. For many a Polish or Ukrainian inmate, or for many a German “criminal” inmate, this was but one more opportunity to exercise their own anti-Jewish terror within the generalized system of terror or just to assert their own power against this entirely powerless group.128
Alluding to the status of Jews in the camp system in general and in Auschwitz particularly, where he himself had been an inmate, Yisrael Gutman put it this way: “The Jews were pariahs in the concentration camps and were regarded as such by the other internees. Anti-Semitism was perceptible in the camps and assumed the most violent forms. Attacks against Jews were encouraged by the Nazis. Even those who were not anti-Jewish and were in a position to oppose the tide of hatred which flooded the camp acceded to the accepted norms and regarded the Jews as abandoned, miserable creatures who were best avoided.” There were also many examples of help extended to Jews, but for Gutman, “These were of sporadic, individual nature, while anti-Semitic attitudes and attacks on Jews were the rule in the majority of camps.”129
Among Jews themselves the constant threat of death at any sign of weakness exacerbated tensions, including the prejudices of each national group against some others: “Instead of displaying solidarity [the Jews in Auschwitz] felt enmity toward one another,” Benedikt Kautsky wrote, with somewhat exaggerated harshness…. “The ‘Poles’ now stood opposed to the ‘Germans,’ the ‘Dutch’ to the ‘French,’ and the ‘Greeks’ to the ‘Hungarians.’ It was by no means unusual for one Jew to use arguments against another Jew that were not very different from those of the anti-Semites.”130 As for those Jews who had been granted some power over their brethren, as “kapos,” for example, they often clung to the illusion of saving their own skin by brutalizing other Jews. Not all of them followed this path, but many did.131
As Auschwitz was turning into the main murdering center of the regime, the Jewish inmates soon considerably outnumbered all the other groups added together. According to historian Peter Hayes, “From the opening of the camp in May 1940 to its evacuation in January 1945, some 1.3 million people were transported to the site, of whom only about 200,000 ever left alive, only 125,000 of these surviving the Third Reich. Of these captives, 1.1 million were Jews, about eighty percent of whom succumbed upon arrival or shortly thereafter.”132
“The Jews arrive here, that is, to Aus
chwitz, at a weekly rate of 7 to 8,000,” Pvt. SM wrote home on December 7, 1942, on his way to the front. “Shortly thereafter they die a ‘hero’s death.’” And he added: “It is really good to see the world.”133
SM was not alone in enjoying Auschwitz. For the approximately 7,000 members of the SS who at one time or another were assigned to the camp and served there first under Höss until November 1943, then under Arthur Liebehenschel and Richard Baer, life was definitely not unpleasant.134 All the usual amenities were available: decent housing, good food (as we saw from Kremer’s diary), medical care, long stays for spouses or companions, and regular furloughs to the Heimat or to special vacation spots.135 In the camp itself, to relieve the stress generated by their work, the SS could enjoy music played specially for them by the female inmates’ orchestra, which performed from April 1943 to October 1944.136 And outside the camp, cultural life comprised an array of performances, once every two or three weeks at least, with a preference for comedies, A Bride in Flight, Interrupted Wedding Night, or Merry Varieties, and soirées under the motto “Attack of the Comics.” There was no shortage of classics either: In February 1943 the Dresden State Theater presented Goethe Then and Now.137
VII
Details about the extermination spread through any number of channels in the Reich and beyond. Thus, for example, every summer hundreds of women visited their husbands who were guards in Auschwitz and other camps, as just mentioned; they often stayed for long periods of time. As for the German population of the town of Auschwitz, it complained about the odor produced by the overloaded crematories.138 This particular problem was confirmed by Höss: “It became apparent during the first cremations in the open air that in the long run it would not be possible to continue in that manner. During bad weather or when a strong wind was blowing, the stench of burning flesh was carried for many miles and caused the whole neighborhood to talk about the burning of Jews, despite official counter-propaganda. It is true that all members of the SS detailed for the extermination were bound to strict secrecy over the whole operation, but as later SS legal proceedings showed, this was not always observed. Even the most severe punishment was not able to stop their love of gossip.”139
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