The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Work on the main railway line brought the transports to a temporary halt in the summer of 1942. At the same time, the hot weather caused the tightly packed layers of bodies buried in the pits behind the extermination area to swell up and rise above the ground, as had been the case in Belzec, causing a terrible stench and attracting large numbers of rats and other scavenging animals. The SS men also began to notice a rancid taste in the water. The camp water supply was taken from wells and they were clearly becoming contaminated. So the camp administration constructed a large pit which they filled with wood and ignited; a mechanical excavator was brought in to dig up the corpses, which were placed on grilles above the pit and cremated by a Jewish Special Detachment whose members were afterwards put to death themselves. Meanwhile, the transports resumed in October 1942 and continued until the beginning of May 1943. One transport of 5,000 arrived from Majdanek, with prisoners in striped uniforms already weakened by hunger and maltreatment. On this occasion, the gas chambers had broken down, so the prisoners were kept in the open through the night. 200 of them died from exhaustion or from beatings and shootings administered by the SS during the hours of darkness. The remainder were herded into the gas chambers the next day. Another transport arrived in June 1943 with the prisoners already naked because the SS in Lvov thought this would make it more difficult for them to escape: the journey had been a long one, and twenty-five out of the fifty freight cars contained nothing but corpses. They had died of hunger and thirst, and as an eyewitness later recalled, some of them had been dead for as long as a fortnight by the time they arrived.247

  Jews still had some personal effects with them. These, along with their clothing and the contents of their suitcases, were taken from them. Valuables were impounded by the camp authorities. Many of them found their way into the pockets of individual SS men and their auxiliaries. The most valuable jewellery was sent together with the gold extracted from the tooth fillings of the dead to a central sorting office in Berlin, where the precious metals were melted down into bars for the Reichsbank and the jewellery exchanged in occupied or neutral countries for industrial diamonds needed for German arms factories.248 From August 1942 the collection and delivery of these objects was organized by Pohl’s Economy and Administration Head Office. The confiscation of the furniture and other effects the Jews had left behind, including clothing, crockery, carpets and much else besides, was carried out by Rosenberg’s office and the confiscated items auctioned off in Germany. 249 A report to Pohl’s office estimated the total value of Jewish possessions confiscated in the Reinhard Action up to 15 December 1943 at not far short of 180 million Reichsmarks.250

  By this time, almost 250,000 victims had been killed at Sobibor. When Himmler visited the camp early in 1943, the operation was already winding down. Although no new regular transports were scheduled to arrive, the camp administration arranged a special transport from a labour camp in the district in order for him to observe a gassing in action. Pleased with what he saw, he gave promotions to twenty-eight SS and police officers including Wirth, Stangl and other senior functionaries. He also ordered preparations to be made for the closure of the camps and the removal of all traces of their activity once the final batches of victims had been killed. Sobibor was to be transformed into a storage depot for ammunition captured from the Red Army. Jewish labourers were put to work constructing the new facilities. In the meantime the cremation of the victims’ corpses continued apace. It became clear to the Jewish construction workers, many of them battle-hardened Soviet prisoners of war who arrived on 23 September 1943 and formed a cohesive, well-disciplined group, that they were doomed. They began to organize an escape. On 14 October 1943 they managed to entice most of the camp’s SS personnel and a number of the Ukrainian auxiliaries into the camp workshops on a variety of pretexts and kill them with daggers and axes without attracting the attention of the guards on the watch-towers. The resisters cut the camp’s telephone wires and electicity supply. As they made a break for the main gate, the Ukrainian guards opened fire with automatic weapons, killing many; others broke out through the perimeter fence. Some were killed in the minefield outside the fence but more than 300 out of a total of 600 inmates succeeded in breaking out of the camp (all those who did not succeed were shot the following day). 100 of the escapees were caught and killed almost immediately as the SS and police mobilized a large search operation including spotter planes. But the rest eluded capture, and a number of them eventually found their way to partisan units. Shortly afterwards, a fresh detachment of Jewish prisoners arrived to dismantle the camp. The buildings were razed, trees planted, a farm constructed, and when the work was completed, the Jews were forced to lie down on the roasting grilles and were shot one by one. After December 1943 there was no one left at the camp, and all obvious traces of it had disappeared.251

  II

  The third of the Reinhard Action camps was located at Treblinka, north-east of Warsaw, in a remote wooded area at the end of a single-track branch line running to an old quarry from the railway station at Malkinia, a station on the main railway line from Warsaw to Bialystok. In the spring of 1941 the German occupiers opened a labour camp near the quarry, to excavate materials for use in fortifications on the Soviet- German border in Poland. A year later, the SS selected it as the site of a new death camp. Construction began at the beginning of June 1942, overseen by Richard Thomalla, the SS officer who had built Sobibor. By the time it was begun, the death camps at Belzec and Sobibor were already in operation, so Thomalla tried to improve on them. Jewish workers were brought in to build the new camp; many of them were randomly shot by the SS as they worked, or made to stand in the line of trees as they were felled to clear the ground, so progress was often interrupted. They built a railway spur and station, from which arriving Jews were taken to an undressing room near the ‘ghetto’ where the longer-term prisoners lived. Once they got there, the naked Jews were quickly herded through a narrow fenced-in alleyway (called by the SS the ‘Road to Heaven’) to a large, carefully concealed brick building in the upper camp. This housed three gas chambers, into which the victims were driven with shouts and curses, to be killed by fumes pumped in from diesel engines through a system of pipes. Behind the building was a set of ditches, each 50 metres long, 25 metres wide and 10 metres deep, dug out by a mechanical excavator. Special Detachments of prisoners pushed the bodies in small wagons from the processing area along a narrow-gauge railway and dumped them in the ditches, which were earthed over when they were full.252

  As in Sobibor, arriving Jews were told they had come to a transit camp and that they would receive clean clothes and their safeguarded valuables after going through a disinfection shower. Initially, around 5,000 Jews or more arrived each day, but in mid-August 1942 the tempo of killing increased, and by the end of August 1942, 312,000 Jews, not only from Warsaw but also from Radom and Lublin, had been gassed at Treblinka. Less than two months had passed since the first gassings in the camp on 23 July 1942. The first commandant of the camp, Irmfried Eberl, an Austrian doctor who had worked on the ‘euthanasia’ action, had declared his ambition of exceeding the number of killings in any other camp. The transport trains were unventilated and, without water or sanitation, thousands died en route in the hot weather. The pressure of numbers was such that all pretence was abandoned. Oskar Berger, who arrived on a transport on 22 August 1942, noted ‘hundreds of bodies lying all around’ on the platform, ‘piles of bundles, clothes, suitcases, everything mixed together. SS soldiers, Germans and Ukrainians were standing on the roofs of barracks and firing indiscriminately into the crowd. Men, women and children fell bleeding. The air was filled with screaming and weeping.’ The survivors were driven up to the gas chambers by SS men who beat them with whips and iron bars. In case their screams were heard by those waiting below, the SS set up a small orchestra playing Central European hit songs, to drown out the noise. So many victims arrived that the gas chambers were unable to cope, and, as in the case of the transport that arrived on 22 A
ugust 1942, the SS guards shot large numbers of the Jews in the reception area instead. Even this did not work, and newly arrived trains were left standing for hours, even days, in the summer heat. Many of those inside died of thirst, heatstroke or asphyxiation. The gas chambers frequently broke down, sometimes when the victims were already inside, where they would be forced to wait for hours until repairs were completed. The ditches were rapidly filled, and new ones could not be excavated quickly enough, so that soon there were unburied bodies everywhere.253

  Eberl and his staff confiscated large quantities of the Jews’ possessions for themselves, and gold and money were said to be lying around on the sorting yard in great heaps along with huge piles of clothes and suitcases, which were accumulating far too rapidly to be processed. Ukrainian guards, lacking proper accommodation, had set up tents around the camp, where they partied with local prostitutes. Eberl was reported to have made a Jewish girl undress and dance naked in front of him; she was later shot. Reports of the chaos reached Globocnik and Wirth, who paid a surprise inspection visit and dismissed Eberl on the spot. Wirth had been appointed as general inspector of the three death camps in August 1942, with the brief of streamlining the killing operations. He transferred the command to Franz Stangl, the commandant of Sobibor, at the beginning of September. On his arrival, Stangl established what he thought of as an orderly regime. Neatly dressed, in a smart white jacket, dark trousers and jackboots, he habitually carried a riding-crop, though he did not use it, or take part in any violence personally. He built a fake railway station, complete with timetables, ticket booths and a station clock, though the hands were painted on and never moved. He established gardens, built new barracks and set up new kitchens, all to deceive the arriving victims into thinking they were at a transit camp. Standing, as he regularly did, on a vantage point between the lower and upper camps, he would watch the naked prisoners being driven brutally up the ‘Road to Heaven’, thinking of them, as he confessed later, as ‘cargo’ rather than as human beings. Every so often, Stangl would go home on leave to visit his wife and family. He never told her what his job was, and she thought he was engaged only on construction work.254

  At the camp, scenes of sadism and violence continued. Jewish work details were constantly beaten, and when their term of duty came to an end, they were shot in front of their replacements. Ukrainian auxiliaries would commonly seize and rape young Jewish women, and one, Ivan Demjanjuk, who supervised Jews going into the gas chambers and worked the diesel motor outside, was reported to have sliced off the ears and noses of elderly Jews as they went in.255 In September 1942, one prisoner, Meir Berliner, who was in fact an Argentinian citizen, knifed an SS officer to death at a roll-call. Wirth was called in; he had 160 men executed randomly as a reprisal, and stopped all the work prisoners’ food and water for three days. The incident did not interrupt the flow of victims to the gas chambers. The number of transports fluctuated during the early months of 1943, but by the end of July 1943, the small number of work details kept alive in the camp were becoming conscious that the amount of work to do was declining. Already in the spring of 1942, Himmler had decided that the bodies buried at the extermination camps should be dug up and burned so as to destroy the evidence of the murders. Globocnik resisted the implementation of this policy, except where it was obviously necessary for other reasons, as at Sobibor. Instead of digging up the bodies, he is said to have remarked, they should ‘bury bronze tablets stating that it was we who had the courage to carry out this gigantic task’.256

  In December 1942, however, the cremations began at Chelmno and Belzec, to be followed in April 1943 by Treblinka. Himmler took the decision to close the camps down, since the vast majority of the Jewish inhabitants of the Polish ghettos had now been killed. By late July 1943, after four months, the task of digging up and incinerating some 700,000 corpses that had been crudely buried in mass pits was almost complete. Fewer and fewer transports were arriving at Treblinka. The workers themselves realized that they were next in line for the gas chambers. Clandestine resistance groups were set up in both parts of the camp, and though the plan formed to co-ordinate their actions did not work out in the end, they managed on 2 August 1943 to set part of the camp on fire, acquire weapons and enable almost half of the 850 camp inmates to break through the perimeter fencing and escape. Looking out of his window, Stangl suddenly saw Jews beyond the inner perimeter fence, shooting. The phone wires had not been cut, so Stangl called in reinforcements from outside. The Jewish fighters had not managed to secure many weapons or collect much ammunition, and 350 to 400 were killed by the better-armed SS guards as they returned fire. Only half a dozen guards were shot. Of the men who escaped, half were recaptured shortly afterwards, and perhaps 100 disappeared into the nearby woods; how many of them survived is not known. Almost the only building left intact after the fire was the solid brick house containing the gas chambers.257

  Stangl initially intended to rebuild the camp, but three weeks later, he was summoned by Globocnik, who told him that the camp was to be closed down immediately and he was to be transferred to Trieste to organize the suppression of partisans. Back at the camp, Stangl packed his bags, then called together all the remaining Jewish labourers ‘because’, he said later without the slightest trace of irony, ‘I wanted to say goodbye to them. I shook hands with some of them.’258 After he left, they were killed. Meanwhile, the uprisings at Sobibor and Treblinka had strengthened Himmler’s belief that Jews anywhere were a security risk. The numbers of inmates in the two camps were small, but there were some 45,000 Jews, including women and children, in three labour camps in the Lublin area run by Reinhard Action staff, especially at Travniki and Poniatowa, and a large number of Jews at the Majdanek concentration camp as well. Himmler decided they should all be killed immediately. In a carefully planned, military-style operation codenamed ‘Operation Harvest Festival’, thousands of police, SS and Military SS men surrounded the camps, where the men had already been made to dig trenches on the pretext that they were building defensive fortifications. When the German forces arrived, they made all the inmates undress and go to the trenches, where they were all shot. A clandestine Jewish resistance group at Poniatowa seized a barrack building and opened fire on the SS, but the Germans set the barracks on fire and burned all the Jews inside alive. At Majdanek, all the Jewish inmates were selected and, together with many more Jews brought in from the smaller labour camps in the Lublin district, were made to undress, driven to previously prepared trenches and shot. As the trenches filled up, the newly arriving naked victims were made to lie on top of the dead bodies before they were shot themselves. Beginning around six in the morning, the killings continued until five in the afternoon. Some 18,000 Jews were murdered in the camp on this single day. At Travniki and Majdanek, camp loudspeakers broadcast dance music at full volume throughout the action, to drown out the sound of the shooting and the cries of the victims. All in all, ‘Operation Harvest Festival’ killed a total of 42,000.259

  Little or no trace of the Reinhard Action camps remains today. Following the uprising, the remaining buildings at Treblinka were demolished, the land was grassed over and planted with flowers and trees, and the bricks from the gas chambers were used to build a small farm, designed to be lived in by a Ukrainian who promised to tell visitors that he had been there for decades.260 But local Polish people knew what had been there, and in the summer of 1944 rumours spread that Jews had been buried there without having had their gold teeth removed, and that their clothing, full of jewellery and valuables, had been buried with them. For many months, large numbers of peasants and farm workers scoured the area, looking for buried treasure. When a member of the Polish state war crimes commission visited the site of Treblinka on 7 November 1945 she found ‘masses of all kinds of pilferers and robbers with spades and shovels in their hands . . . digging and searching and raking and straining the sand. They removed decaying limbs from the dust [and] bones and garbage that were thrown there.’ The macabre treasure-hunt
ended only when the Polish government set up official memorials on the camp sites and posted guards around them.261

  According to a report sent to Eichmann on 11 January 1943 and intercepted by British monitoring services, the number of Jews killed in the Reinhard Action camps by the end of the previous year totalled nearly one and a quarter million.262 A more complete list of all Jews ‘evacuated’ or ‘sluiced through the camps’ in the east was provided on Himmler’s orders by his ‘Inspector for Statistics’, Richard Korherr, on 23 March 1943; it put their number at 1,873,539, though this included killings outside the Reinhard camps as well. A shorter version of the report, updated to 31 March 1943 and prepared in the large type used for documents intended to be read by the short-sighted Hitler, was presented to the German Leader on the eve of his fifty-fourth birthday, on 19 April 1943.263 Modern estimates put the total number killed at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka at around 1,700,000.264

  III

  The conquest of Poland and the victory over France, with the re-annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, had led to the creation of new concentration camps in the incorporated territories at Stutthof, near Danzig in September 1939 (locally run until January 1942), Natzweiler in Alsace in June 1940, and Gross-Rosen in Silesia in August 1940 (initially as a sub-camp of Sachsenhausen). Another camp was set up in April 1940 in an old collection centre for migrant labourers near the town of Oswiecim, known in German as Auschwitz, now part of the German Reich. It was built to house Polish political prisoners. On 4 May 1940 the former Free Corps fighter and camp officer in Dachau and Sachsenhausen, Rudolf Ḧss, was appointed as commandant. In his memoirs Ḧss complained about the poor quality of the staff he was given, and the lack of supplies and building materials. Not without a touch of pride, he recorded that when he was unable to obtain enough barbed wire to seal the camp off, he pilfered it from other sites; he got steel from old field fortifications; and he had to ‘organize’ the trucks and lorries he needed. He had to drive 90 kilometres to acquire cooking-pots for the kitchen. In the meantime prisoners had started to turn up; on 14 June 1940 the first batch arrived to be sorted, to serve a period of quarantine, and then to be sent on to other camps. Most of them were drafted into construction work while they were in Auschwitz. But Auschwitz soon became a permanent centre for the Polish political prisoners, of whom there were to be up to 10,000 in the camp. Over the entrance, Ḧss placed a wrought-iron archway with the words Arbeit macht frei, ‘work liberates’, a slogan he had learned in Dachau.265