1944

by Jay Winik

  And then came a fateful party attended by Heinrich Himmler.

  SCHULTE HIMSELF WAS POSITIONED in the middle of the war effort. The Polish branch of Giesche in Upper Silesia was deemed by Germany to be a “vital military plant,” and so Schulte was immediately elevated in the Nazi ranks. Also, Schulte’s number two man at Giesche, Otto Fitzner, was a fanatical Nazi. Handsome, hard-charging, and hardworking, Fitzner, a trained engineer, was a veteran of World War I and on the fast track in the new German order. Through careful maneuvering, he had a rapid ascent in the Nazi hierarchy: first as a senior commander in the SA, then in the SS, then in an honorary appointment to Heinrich Himmler’s staff, and then as head of the metal industry branch within the Ministry of Economics. After that, he received an all-important appointment as head of the civilian administration overseeing Upper Silesia. Fitzner even once met Adolf Eichmann and was one of the first Germans to learn about the deportations of Jews. Few thought to question his access to some of the most sensitive information in the Third Reich. Yet—though this was unknown to the Nazi high command—Fitzner had at least one weak spot: he was prone to bragging. He also assumed that Schulte was an equally fervent Nazi. Unwittingly, Fitzner became a pipeline of information to Schulte throughout the war.

  Schulte had other sources as well; the governor for Lower Silesia, who later was made head of the SS, was a friend of his, as was a senior executive at Daimler-Benz, which sold Mercedes automobiles. And through Giesche he came to know a number of German generals. In the bustle of wartime Berlin, he maintained contact with several highly placed acquaintances, and in the city’s clubs he backslapped and drank with diplomats and generals. Despite the insistence on secrecy in the Nazi regime, talk was still a common currency in the hubbub of war. For Schulte, separating fact from fiction was the main challenge.

  Schulte’s determination to gather information soon became an obsession, and his obsession soon became a desire for action, and he concocted a dramatic role for himself: to undermine the Nazi regime.

  At great risk, Schulte slowly dribbled out the Nazis’ secrets to the west. On his frequent business trips to Switzerland, he passed on his assessments about conditions and plans in Germany, along with bits of gossip, to a member of the Polish secret service, who in turn passed the information on, via secret radio transmitter or diplomatic mail pouch, to the British. From there, it was relayed to the Americans in Washington.

  How important was this information? Schulte was only one of hundreds, if not thousands, of informants. But the time would soon come when he emerged as one of the most important—if America and the Allies would only listen.

  In Germany, Schulte now regularly turned his radio on and listened to the crackle of the BBC, even though if the Gestapo found out, this was a crime punishable by execution. Under the strain, he became moody and high strung, yet he remained determined. In Switzerland, he passed on information about the fateful Hitler-Molotov-Ribbentrop meeting. He relayed information about the mammoth German preparations for Operation Barbarossa. He provided assessments about the dependence of German industry on raw materials, and made off-the-cuff observations about Hitler’s relationships with his generals.

  But his most stunning information would come, quite by accident, from a dinner party in a remote region of Poland. At stake were the lives of millions and, as he stumbled on this information, his own life.

  ON THE MORNING OF July 17, 1942, Schulte was in his office riffling through a newspaper, mulling over the reports from the front lines. The beloved German general Erwin Rommel was squaring off against British general Bernard Montgomery at El Alamein; German forward units had pushed their way as far east as the Donets River in the Soviet Union; and Franklin Roosevelt had severed relations with Germany’s ally Finland. Schulte was just about to summon his secretary when his deputy, Otto Fitzer, eased his way into the office, bearing startling news. Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and, second only to Hitler, the most feared man in the Third Reich, had “important business” in the area. Schulte stiffened. Himmler was known as a talented organizer; was he coming to inspect the Giesche works? Fitzner reassured him: no. Instead, Himmler was visiting “Auschwitz.” To Schulte, this was puzzling: there was nothing of any significance in Auschwitz.

  The more Schulte thought about it, the less sense it made. True, eastern Upper Silesia teemed with activity. Coal mines, synthetic fuel and rubber factories, and several hundred other military and industrial plants had relocated to the area from Germany, attracted by tax breaks and the ability to increase profits by using slave labor. Giesche itself was a beneficiary. But Auschwitz? Once part of the Holy Roman Empire, Auschwitz was an unremarkable town, now known principally for social misery, wretched economic conditions, and a distillery that dated back to 1804. There was a concentration camp, situated on swampy, malarial ground, but as far as he was aware, this camp consisted primarily of an old Austrian garrison dating back to World War I and now used to house Soviet POWs.

  One significant thing it did have was a railway junction: located between the coal mining area around Kattowitz, and the industrial area of Bielsko, it had rail lines leading directly to Kraków and Vienna. And it had one other benefit: it was easy to close off against the outside world. But either Schulte knew none of this, or he didn’t piece his knowledge together.

  NOR COULD SCHULTE YET know that Himmler, this former chicken farmer who came to control the entire Nazi concentration camp system, would, outside of Hitler and Stalin, be responsible for more European deaths than any other man in history. Self-absorbed, scheming, and provincial, he was anything but the image of Hitler’s ideal Aryan. Pudgy and sickly looking, he had an owl-like face, a recessed chin, bad eyesight, and poor posture. A notorious hypochondriac, he also suffered frequently from stomach cramps, not to mention blinding headaches, for which he took a hodgepodge of alternative medicines.

  He was born in 1900, and his beginnings suggested a far different path in life. His father taught Latin and Greek at the renowned Wilhelm Grammar School in Munich; and Himmler himself was an eager, hardworking student, though he would also retreat to his room and fantasize about great feats of chivalry and crusading knights. Then came World War I. He enthusiastically joined a Bavarian regiment in 1918, wanting to be a part of a war in which each hill, each ridge, each crest frequently had to be stormed with bayonets, and where the battleground was soaked with German blood. But to his lasting chagrin, he never saw action; his division was demobilized first. Equally disappointing, the discredited monarchy, trembling and ineffective, began to disintegrate.

  The postwar era was chaotic, and as inflation and unemployment soared, his father’s finances severely suffered. Himmler was unable to study at Munich University. Instead, he had to settle for earning an agricultural degree that led to a second-rate job as an assistant in an artificial fertilizer factory. He left the job within a year. But then, as Adolf Hitler found his calling, so too did he: as a professional Nazi.

  Jumping at the chance to again wear a uniform—even if only on weekends—he joined the German combat league, the fanatical paramilitary organization that supported Hitler’s abortive Munich putsch in 1923. In the process he had a falling-out with his father, who considered the Nazis “lower-class rowdies.” Nevertheless, when a year later the Nazi Party, now banned, was forced to go underground, Himmler quickly signed up, becoming a courier.

  Meanwhile, he spent his free time patching together a philosophical worldview from a smattering of disparate, often paranoiac sources. He sifted through astrological writings in search of guidance; he absorbed numerous anti-Semitic works; he zealously delved into a study of witchcraft and witchcraft trials. And he fell in love with a radiant, blue-eyed, silky-haired blond nurse, Margarete Boden, who was eight years his senior and whose guiding tenet was “A Jew is always a Jew!” In any other European country, he might have been just another enlightened eccentric, the sort whose ideas fall from penny machines at county fairs—or from lunatic racists. In 1928, he star
ted a small chicken farm on the outskirts of Munich with fifty laying hens, but the project failed from the start. The hens produced barely any eggs, money was tight, and his marriage suffered. He had to struggle to get by on his meager party salary of 200 marks a month. Now deputy director of Nazi propaganda, he despised democracy and was an ardent anti-Semite and an extreme nationalist.

  In 1929, Hitler promoted Himmler to deputy leader of the SS—the so-called protective squads—whose responsibility was to protect the Nazi hierarchy. By this stage in Hitler’s Germany, treachery was everywhere. Himmler would, notoriously, engineer the murder of two Nazi mentors during the Night of the Long Knives: Gregor Strasser and Ernst Röhm, of whom he was once a devoted follower. Seizing his chance, he built the SS into a racially exclusive empire, some 200,000 strong, serving his every whim. Himmler deftly maneuvered his way, through all the dismissals and intrigues, into Hitler’s inner circle. By now, his very glance had come to symbolize the terrifying chill of a knock at the door or, one day, the haunting menace of the gas chamber. He once even boasted that if Hitler asked him to shoot his own mother, he would do it and “be proud of his confidence.” Little wonder that Himmler’s SS men wore a death’s-head badge on their caps.

  Pretentious and imperious, he was also particular. For the Nuremberg rally in 1929, he urged each local SS leader to bring an adequate number of clothes brushes. Cunning and moralistic, he also dabbled in such racial theories as the “hereditary health” of future SS wives, and, using a magnifying glass, he personally scrutinized photographs of every applicant for the SS to identify any dubious racial characteristics. He saw himself not as a monster or a demon, or even as a soulless technocrat, but instead as a heroic patriot and a “decent” person. He was also a fanatical nature worshipper. Though he neglected his wife, daughter, and adopted son—he also fathered two illegitimate children—he always put on the appearance of a warm and devoted father; they affectionately called him “Heinie.” And he insisted that executing Jews was a matter of “total cleansing” for the Fatherland and a duty that could not be avoided. In keeping with this warped credo, he maintained that the SS murdered “decently” as well. Despite his ideological hatred, he nevertheless drew a distinction between killing Jews for “political motives,” which he maintained was valid, and manslaughter or criminal murder for “selfish, sadistic, or sexual” motives, which was not. But whether he was growling to subordinates, or exploding with wrath, the cornerstones of his life were cunning, zeal, burning ambition—and death.

  While Schulte was left to puzzle over why Himmler was at Auschwitz at all, Himmler was busying himself with the industrialized mechanism of genocide.

  FOR HIMMLER, IN THE early weeks of July 1942, the work seemed endless. There were the secret directives about resettlement that he sent from Berlin to the head of the SS and to the lieutenant general who was the leader of the German police forces. There were the meetings with the head of the concentration camp inspectorate and an SS major general, who was a hospital chief, to discuss medical experiments on Jews at Auschwitz, experiments that Himmler warned were “most secret.” There were the appointments he made and still had to make, such as earlier selecting Rudolf Hoess as the commandant of Auschwitz. And there was his visit to the camp itself.

  He had been there once before, on March 1, 1941. At the time, his interest was surprising, given that he had not previously shown the slightest concern about the camp and had called off a visit scheduled for October 1940. Still, he had given orders to expand the camp to accommodate up to thirty thousand inmates, as well as to build the much larger camp that would become Birkenau. For his second visit, on July 17, 1942, a warm sunny day, he swept into Auschwitz in an open black Mercedes, driven by a chauffeur and surrounded by a large entourage. Treated like a visiting head of state, he paused for a moment and smiled, surprised and pleased when the camp orchestra played a famous aria from the Czech opera The Bartered Bride. An inmate was shocked to observe that Himmler moved with the grace and charm that one would expect to see at an English garden party.

  That day, with an air of indifference, his expression vaguely bored and slightly amused, Himmler watched the complete process of gassing, from start to finish. With the pride that an architect shows for his work, he lingered while inspecting the existing gas chamber and the construction site for an expanded set of larger, newer gas chambers and crematoriums—a vast improvement over the old system of burying bodies in huge pits from which, after thaws and rains, the decomposing corpses would often emerge like zombies sprung to life. Then, his rimless glasses glinting in the sunshine, he strode onto the Auschwitz rail platform, where he heard a high-pitched whistle, followed by the arrival of two trains bearing Dutch Jews. He watched as the SS doctors decided the Jews’ fates: the able-bodied women and men were beaten as they trudged off to the barracks; the remainder were slated for death. He watched as naked women’s heads and bodies were methodically shaved and their hair carefully jammed into sacks to be sold as filling for luxury mattresses bound for Germany. He watched as 449 people were crammed into Bunker 2, and the door sealed. And he looked through the observation window as they began to shout, scratch, and vomit, defecate, and urinate on themselves before they died. Himmler watched it all, without saying a word and without giving any sign of remorse. In twenty minutes it was over.

  After that he continued with the rest of his itinerary: he visited the building of a dam, the agricultural laboratories, the farm plantations, the herb gardens, and the experimental plant. He spent time in the hospital block, where he was briefed on the medical experiments that he had, just days before, ordered to be carried out, including the castration of men by X-ray and the sterilization of women by injection. He had a lengthy discussion with camp doctors about the high mortality rates and the continued spread of disease among the prisoners, caused by inadequate sanitation, an insufficient diet, and insufferable crowding; Himmler showed neither interest nor sympathy. He saw the living quarters and kitchens, and even climbed the gate tower to look at the drainage systems. And he toured the IG Farben synthetic rubber and oil plant, Buna.

  That evening, a satisfied Himmler prepared for supper at Auschwitz before making his way to the Giesche Villa.

  AT DINNER IN THE mess, Himmler sat down with Fritz Bracht, the Nazi Party’s chief of Upper Silesia, as well as the camp’s high command. The tables were set with ample quantities of food, and Himmler, in his “best sparkling form,” chatted gaily with the German officers about their careers and their families, as if they all had just come from a sports match rather than the gas chamber. After dessert was served and the final drinks were downed, the party climbed into Mercedes-Benzes and disappeared into a forest of pine and birch trees near Kattowitz, en route to an elegant villa that now served as Bracht’s residence. Owned by Schulte’s firm, Giesche, the villa seemed like a perfumed garden. It had tall, sun-filled windows and an azure swimming pool, as well as a golf course—amenities seldom available in wartime. Inside were drawing rooms, lounges, and dining rooms with dark mahogany paneling and polished floors. The doors were thrown open and the guests entered: the men wore their uniforms and the few women present wore jewels and haute couture. Himmler (who rarely drank) helped himself to a glass of red wine, lit a cigar, and held court. By all accounts, far from being cold or haughty, he was at his most charming, leading a sweeping discourse about everything from pedagogy for children to new styles of houses to his inspections of battle lines.

  There, perhaps for the first time, Himmler openly talked with the guests—it is believed out of earshot of the women—about the plans for a much larger construction at Auschwitz. He and his guests also openly talked about Hitler’s plans to systematically murder all the Jews of Europe and beyond—every last man, woman, and child.

  The next day, back at the camp, Himmler picked his way through the section devoted to sorting the belongings of condemned Jews; later he looked on with a mixture of satisfaction and cold efficiency as a camp prostitute guilty of t
heft was whipped on her bare backside. Delighted with everything he saw, he promoted Hoess to lieutenant colonel, and informed him that he must now expeditiously begin building the enhanced crematorium complexes; more Jews, he warned, would be coming in vast numbers. Indeed there would be no letup—Jews would arrive at Auschwitz from France, Scandinavia, Belgium, the Balkans, and eventually Hungary.

  Before leaving he made sure to exchange a few amiable words with Hoess’s wife and her little children. Back in Berlin the next day, on July 19, he wrote urgently to Friedrich Wilhelm Kruger in Kraków, commanding that the “resettlement of the entire Jewish population” be completed by December 1, 1942. At this stage, 400,000 people were still jammed into the ghetto of Warsaw, an area only two and a half miles long by a mile wide, which had previously housed only 160,000 people; after Himmler’s order, 6,000 a day, every day, were assembled for “deportation” to the east.

  A WEEK AND A HALF later, word about Himmler’s dinner party and the plan to exterminate all of European Jewry filtered through to Schulte. He was stunned. Eliminate them? All of them? The numbers were incomprehensible. Until that time, when Hitler talked about the Jews, Schulte had taken the Führer’s words to mean, for example, that the Jews would be resettled in a place like Madagascar. In any case, although the German nation might be deaf to the cries of Hitler’s victims, Schulte was not.

  It was then that he resolved to board the next train to Zurich and somehow pass the fateful news on to the Allies—and, he hoped, all the way to Franklin Roosevelt—as soon as possible.

  For Schulte, it was a race against time.

  UP TO NOW, IT was almost as if Schulte were in a theater, watching a frightening movie. No longer. On July 29, 1942, he quietly boarded the train at Breslau and eased himself into his first-class compartment; there he stayed, lost in his thoughts, as the train made its way south. Here—unlike in wartime Germany and Poland, where a thousand British planes had devastated Cologne and Allied air attacks had relentlessly struck Danzig—the landscape remained relatively unscathed. The train raced past picturesque whitewashed villages and a forest of tall pines. In Böblingen and Herrenberg, there were groves of trees, orchards, sheep, and pastures. In Ehningen there were churches with delicately shaped onion towers. By Bondorf and Neckarhausen, the train moved parallel to a nearly empty highway, then along the Neckar River.