In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  Chapter THIRTY-TWO

  Auschwitz

  I HAD BEEN IN AUSCHWITZ ONCE BEFORE, AS A RADIO REPORTER IN January 1995, during the memorial services for the fiftieth anniversary of the camp's liberation. I remember getting lost at the end of one dark winter afternoon in the wooded area behind the Birkenau complex. I stumbled upon a hamlet there, like so many in Poland: chickens, geese, a dog on a chain, three old women and a farmer sitting on his wagon. To my right lay the concrete remains of Crematorium III. To the left were the ponds where the ashes were thrown: later on, ashes and bones were dumped all over these woods. A few patches of snow glistened among the trees, and a thin layer of yellowish ice floated on the quiet surface of the ponds.

  Straight ahead of me were the masts of the satellite dishes, cables had been laid across the former gas chambers and bright conversation could be heard from the trailers where the television crews were sitting. When I turned and looked again, I saw a farm that must have been there all those years. The window was brightly lit, through it I saw a living room, a table, a carpet and a stove, outside the house a clothes line and a child's bike lying on its side. From there to the crematorium was no more than 300 metres.

  How much did people know? What did the neighbours, the suppliers, the railway engineers and the civil servants know? And how much could they have known? And how much did they want to know?

  Later, in the camp museum at Majdanek, I came across a letter from the Technisches Büro und Fabrik H. Kori GmbH, Dennewitzstrasse 35, Berlin, specialists in Abfallverbrennungsöfen aller Art. The letter was dated 25 October, 1941, and addressed to SS-Obersturmführer Lenzer in Lublin. The letter deals with plans to build a number of incinerators at the camp, plus an adjacent changing room and disinfection centre. ‘Our drawing on page 2 CJ no. 9079 shows the solution for the problem of accommodating five crematorium ovens, with number 5 in the middle intended as backup installation.’

  It is a letter that will not stop haunting. Like the invoice beside it: addressed to the Paul Reimann firm in Breslau, 100 marks for 200 kilo of human hair at 50 pfennigs a kilo. There is no denying it: thousands of people actively took part in the Holocaust, from a distance. As noted earlier: in thousands of busy offices in Berlin alone, the administration activities went on day in and day out. At SS headquarters, at the finance ministry and the Reichsbank, huge quantities of jewellery, clothing and other personal possessions were registered and redistributed. Dozens of local people at the Prussian mint were involved in melting down gold fillings. Banks and insurance companies transferred Jewish holdings to the state treasury or Nazi accounts. Personal possessions were sent as Christmas gifts to the ethnic German colonists. The homes of Jews were plundered, in the knowledge that their inhabitants would never come back. Everyone ‘knew’ it in their own way.

  At first the existence of the death camps was talked about only in very small circles. By autumn 1943, almost all the highly placed Nazis had been informed. That was for tactical reasons: after receiving that information, no one could bow out by pleading ignorance or innocence; now they were all part of the conspiracy. That, too, is why Himmler, at a closed meeting of Reichsleiter and gauleiter in Poznań on 6 October, 1943, spoke in relatively plain terms about the extermination of the Jews.

  What he said, literally, was: ‘The phrase “the Jews must be destroyed” is easy to say, but the demands it places on those who implement it are among the heaviest and most difficult in the world.’

  Albert Speer's flat denial at Nuremberg saved his life. Along with Goebbels and Göring he was Hitler's closest assistant, and one of the most senior officials in the Third Reich. In his memoirs he mentioned a visit he received in summer 1944 from his mentor, Karl Hanke. The old Nazi was completely beside himself: never, never must Speer accept an invitation to visit a concentration camp in the district of Upper Silesia. This old friend of his had seen things there he was neither allowed nor able to describe. He could only have been referring to Auschwitz. Speer: ‘I didn't enquire any further. I didn't ask Himmler about it, I didn't ask Hitler about it, I did not talk about it with my friends. Nor did I have it investigated: I didn't want to know what was going on.’

  Years later, in her impressive study of Speer, Gitta Sereny demonstrated that he not only could have known much more, but that he actually did know much more. Once the war was over, however, he skilfully repressed that knowledge, as did countless other Germans.

  Primo Levi wrote about a German fellow chemist. Levi and his German colleague performed the same experiments, and both of them worked at the same, huge Buna site. There was one difference between them: in the evening Levi slept inside a barbed-wire enclosure, while his colleague lived on the outside. This Oberingenieur said later that he had known nothing about the gas chambers, and that he had never asked anyone about them. ‘He did not comfort himself with lies,’ Levi wrote, ‘but with lacunae, with blank spots.’

  How many ‘blank spots’ could a person live with between 1940–5? The pamphlet distributed by the students of the White Rose in Munich spoke of ‘the most beastly murder’ of 300,000 Polish Jews. Tucked away in the house on Amsterdam's Prinsengracht, Anne Frank wrote on 9 October, 1942:‘We assume that most of them were murdered. The English radio speaks of gassing. Perhaps that is the fastest way to die.’ One week later, in Dresden, Victor Klemperer referred to the Auschwitz camp as ‘a fast-moving slaughterhouse’. On 27 February, 1943 he said that it was ‘no longer probable that Jews will return alive from Poland’.

  So they knew about it. Were they the only ones with eyes and ears?

  Tens of thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers were involved, directly or indirectly, in the mass executions in Poland. In his classic study of the activities of a typical death squad, Reserve Police Battalion 101, Christopher Browning shows that the battalion was in a state of continual flux: respectable fathers from Hamburg reported for duty, took part in mass executions, then went home to carry on life as usual. One of the commanders, newly married, even took his young bride along: in the market square at Miedzyrzec she was a direct witness to the murder of the local Jews. The stories flew around the country: in letters that escaped the censors’ attention, from soldiers on leave, in photographs sent home from the East. It was only in November 1941 that photographing such executions was forbidden.

  After 1943, anyone in Germany who looked around enough – as I once heard a young German formulate it so inimitably – ‘knew for sure that they didn't want to know more.’ In that same year British and American bombers scattered millions of pamphlets over Germany, containing precise information about the systematic murder of the European Jews, the death camps and the gas chambers. Eric Johnson carried out a survey among older Germans in Cologne and Krefeld concerning their awareness of the Holocaust before 1945. Of those questioned, sixty-six per cent admitted to have been more or less informed.

  Awareness of the Holocaust was reasonably widespread in other parts of Europe as well. Fifty years later, a group of students examined the war diaries of seventy non-Jewish Dutch people. They wanted to determine what the people in the occupied territories knew about the persecution of the Jews, and when they had found out about it. More than a third of the diarists turned out to have come rather quickly to the conclusion that the Jews were being murdered on a massive scale. The wife of a physician wrote on 9 November, 1941: ‘Most of the Jews in our circles, who were taken away so quickly, are already dead – within a few weeks’ time, in other words.’

  On 13 December, an office clerk from Rotterdam wrote: ‘In Poland, the mass murder of Jews continues. They say Himmler wants to kill all the Jews before 1943.’ As from early 1943, the name ‘Auschwitz’ also crops up regularly in the Netherlands. One citizen of Rotterdam wrote, on 14 February, 1943: ‘The execution of Jews and Poles continues: 6,000 a day, in one place; first they are undressed; then … (gas?).’

  All these diarists were extremely indignant, and most certainly believed in the rumours about the use of gas chambers. Yet when the c
amps were opened after the war and it became clear that this unthinkable mass murder really had taken place, the shock was enormous, even among staunch anti-Nazis and resistance fighters. It was as though people knew and did not want to know, all at the same time; as though they knew rationally about the millions of murders, but were unable to accept it in their hearts, even after the war, because it defied imagination. The group of women with their underwear flapping in the wind in the dunes outside the Latvian town of Liepaja had a face. The 1.1 million killed at Auschwitz were merely a number.

  The Allies concentrated on a ‘total victory’, not in retaliation for the Nazi atrocities, but to minimise the risk of individual peace treaties and to keep the mutual ties as close as possible. Only in that way could they, as one British government memorandum put it, ‘solve the entire complex of human problems caused by German domination’. Anything that would distract them from that goal would also harm the Jewish cause. That was the rationale.

  Telling in this regard is the story surrounding the few rare aerial photos of Auschwitz. They were taken on 31 May and 25 August, 1944, by a British reconnaissance plane that had been sent to scout out the nearby I. G. Farben complex for the production of synthetic rubber. Quite by accident, the crew left the camera on as they flew above the death camps. At the end of the roll shot on 25 August there are clear images of the platform at Birkenau, where a train had just arrived. A line of prisoners can be seen, on their way to Crematorium II. The negative was discovered by chance only thirty years later. In 1944, no one on the RAF staff noticed it.

  In addition, the British and the Americans had agreed not to respond to the ‘blackmail politics’ of Germany and its allies. As early as February 1943, the Rumanian government under Ion Antonescu had offered to allow 70,000 Jews to leave for Palestine. The British rejected the offer. Any horse-trading with human lives would, after all, have run counter to their military strategies. Although they admitted that mass murders were taking place – the British House of Commons had even held a minute's silence for the victims on 17 December, 1942 – the restrictive refugee policy remained firmly in place.

  There were instances of courage and resistance everywhere in Europe, even in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. In the grounds of Crematorium III, a series of handwritten notes in Yiddish was dug up in summer 1952. Probably left there by a Jewish member of a Sonderkommando, they documented a whole series of incidents. In late 1943, for example, almost 200 Polish partisans were taken to the gas chambers, along with a few hundred Dutch Jews. When they were all completely undressed, a young Polish woman held an impassioned speech, closing with the words: ‘We will not die now, the history of our people will make us immortal, our will and our spirit will live on and blossom.’ She also addressed the Jews of the Sonderkommando who were standing around: ‘Tell our brothers, our people, that we are going to our death in full awareness and full of pride.’ Then they sang the Polish national anthem, the Jews sang the ‘Hatikva’, and together they sang the ‘Internationale’. ‘While they were still singing, the car from the Red Cross [in which the Zyklon B was transported] arrived and the gas was tossed into the room, and they all gave up the ghost in song and ecstasy, dreaming of brotherhood and a better world.’

  A little less than a year later, on 7 October, 1944, a massive uprising took place. A large group of prisoners tried to escape, but despite careful preparations, the plan failed. Four SS guards were killed, 12 were wounded, 455 prisoners were machine-gunned. As late as January 1945, four women were hanged for having smuggled explosives from the Union factory into the camp.

  Today a distinction is drawn between active resistance and ‘resistiveness’, that is to say, the widespread resistance to deportation and other forms of Nazi terror within a normal society. Often – as in the cases, for example, of France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy – the measure of resistiveness was at least as essential to the Jews’ chances of survival as outright resistance.

  In Germany, courageous cells of communists and Christians continued to work underground, and several pockets of resistance arose within the Wehrmacht as well. The scope of this covert resistance should not be underestimated: an indication of it is found in the sheer number of German political prisoners who died in the concentration camps, well over 100,000 in all. The actual number of Germans who sabotaged the regime, in one way or another, must have been many times that.

  Yet in Germany there was no massive, grass roots popular resistance. Despite the success of the women's uprising on Berlin's Rosenstrasse, it remained the only demonstration of its kind there. The merciless Gestapo reprisals, especially after 1941, no doubt had something to do with it: the students of the White Rose were beheaded for passing out a few pamphlets. On the other hand, the Berlin policeman Wilhelm Krützfeld, who courageously defended the Great Berlin Synagogue against the SA during Kristallnacht, was never touched: five years later he retired at his own request, ‘with the Führer's thanks for service rendered’. Striking, too, was the attitude towards dissidents within Reserve Police Battalion 101. Approximately twenty per cent of the battalion refused to take part in the first mass murders in Poland. Those dissidents received, at most, extra sentry duty or unpleasant kitchen-police tasks, but otherwise ran no risk whatsoever. Christopher Browning has emphasised, as have others, that ‘not a single case has been documented of severe punishment for Germans who refused to kill unarmed citizens’. This means that the Germans who did take part in the mass murders must, for the most part, have done so voluntarily. That compliance was probably based in part on peer pressure, partly on typical German discipline, and partly on antiSemitism – although Battalion 101 also showed few scruples, for example, when ordered to destroy villages around Zamość populated only by Poles.

  Eric Johnson interviewed forty-five Jewish survivors from Krefeld. When asked whether they had received significant assistance or support from the local population, almost ninety per cent of them said they had not. The lack of systematic resistance is also evident from Victor Klemperer's diary; he did, however, make note of individual signs of sympathy – a handshake in public, for example – when he walked down the street wearing his Star of David. In the factory where he was forced to work from 1943, Klemperer detected not the slightest trace of anti-Semitism among the German workers. According to him, every Jew who survived ‘had an Aryan angel somewhere’.

  In other parts of Europe, the resistiveness of civilian society was much more pronounced. Resistance was seen in many circles as something normal, often even as one's civic duty, no matter how great the risks. At Auschwitz, Witold Pilecki, a courageous officer in the Polish underground resistance, succeeded in infiltrating the camp as early as September 1940, and organised resistance cells for a period of two years until his escape in 1943. In Amsterdam, the communist Piet Nak openly declared the February Strike. The bankers Walraven and Gijs van Hall carried out the biggest banking fraud in Dutch history: with the proceeds, their organisation was able to keep alive for years tens of thousands of resistance people and those in hiding.

  In Marseille, the American Varian Fry helped in the escape of hundreds of prominent European intellectuals. The 3,000 inhabitants of the isolated French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (Haute-Loire), led by Pastor André Trocmé and his wife Magda, provided shelter throughout the war years for more than 5,000 Jews. In Vilnius, Anton Schmidt, a sergeant major in the Wehrmacht, saved thousands of Jews from the firing squad. At Kaunas, Japanese consul Sempo Sugihara allowed at least 1,600 Jewish refugees to escape by giving them transit visas for Japan. In Krakow, the industrialist Oskar Schindler was able to save most of his Jewish workers. Something similar was achieved at the Skoda plant in the Czech town of Plzeń by Albert Göring, the brother of Hitler's right-hand man.

  In October 1943, most of Denmark's Jews were able to escape to Sweden on a few fishing boats, aided by the police, the churches, the Danish coastguard and countless unsung Danes. Almost all 50,000 of Bulgaria's Jews were left in peace unti
l the end of the war, thanks to the outspoken public opinion against deportations expressed in the newspapers, the pulpits and at public meetings, a popular will which the Nazis did not dare to defy. Jews generally received protection in the areas under Italian control as well; the Italian officers considered the anti-Semitic politics of the Germans ‘incompatible with the honour of the Italian Army’.

  In Hungary, the Red Cross representative Friedrich Born, along with the diplomats Carl Lutz (of Switzerland) and Raoul Wallenberg (of Sweden), was able to save the lives of many tens of thousands of Jews by means of a highly dangerous ruse involving Swedish passports and British immigration permits for Palestine. Wallenberg came from a rich and famous family of Swedish bankers and industrialists. During his activities in Hungary he was in constant contact with Nazis and Western leaders. For the perpetually paranoid agents of the NKVD, that was enough to label him a spy. Immediately after the Russians occupied the country in January 1945, he and his chauffeur were arrested. Within the Soviet Gulag camp system he was registered as a ‘prisoner of war’; in the years that followed, there were regular rumours of his having been seen here or there by recently released prisoners. Those rumours were never confirmed. In 1957, the Soviets came up with a document dated 17 July, 1947 in which it was stated that ‘the prisoner Wallenberg, well known to you, died last night in his cell’. It was signed by Smoltsov, former director of the infirmary at Moscow's Lubyanka prison. Wallenberg, it was claimed, had died of ‘coronary failure’. In November 2000, the chairman of a new Russian investigation committee admitted in a footnote to his report that the diplomat had probably been executed in 1947. The motive for his abduction was purely commercial: the Soviet government had hoped in this way to force the Wallenbergs to provide them with some politically sensitive supplies.