Heydrich’s emphasis on “legality” was crucial to the social psychology of the extermination program and to its functioning on a practical level. For Adolf Eichmann, the Wannsee decisions dispelled his lingering doubts about the propriety of mass murder. “Here now, during this conference, the most prominent people had spoken, the Popes of the Third Reich,” Eichmann said. “Not only Hitler, not only Heydrich, or [Gestapo chief] Müller, or the SS, or the Party, but the elite of the Civil Service had registered their support.… At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I was free of all guilt,” Eichmann testified at his later trial for crimes against humanity. “Who was I to judge? Who was I to have my own thoughts in this matter?’”12
On an operational level, each German government ministry took responsibility for only part of the overall program—the registration of Jews, the seizure of their property, physical transportation across Europe, and so on—and each part had an easy appearance of legality, of sanction by the state and even of a certain sort of normality. Each act of the extermination program, except for the actual gassing, came complete with a more or less reasonable explanation available to the perpetrators and to the world at large. The government was deporting Jews as a security measure and to put them to work, the story went. This would benefit German society and perhaps even benefit the Jewish deportees (as in the case of aged Jews who were to be sent to a special ghetto at Theresienstadt).
By dividing up responsibility for extermination into explicable, functional parts, the Nazi party and SS enlisted and united the German state and most of German society in the countless little tasks necessary to conduct mass murder. They openly promoted the slogan “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” as a rallying cry in the Nazi-controlled press.13 Knowledge of the true meaning of the phrase seeped slowly through the informal networks of the governmental, business, and police elites.
Note that even at Wannsee the truth that millions of Jews were to be gassed and shot rather than worked to death was not openly discussed. Almost all of the Jews were said to be “eliminated by natural causes,” as Heydrich put it, rather than simply killed.14 This simple deceit can be traced to the police security surrounding the gassing installations and to the psychological need of most people to evade open complicity in murder.
The SS did not fool German bureaucrats into cooperation. Rather, the Wannsee conference illustrates how Nazi-dominated society created a social consciousness that both facilitated the extermination program and denied its existence. The “legalization” established at Wannsee (and in related laws and decrees) achieved a relatively smooth linkage between the surface world of wartime life and the officially denied world of mass extermination. Many more people knew of (or suspected) the extermination program than could directly acknowledge it, in part because this was a classified government program during wartime. Yet, widespread possession of unofficial or “denied” knowledge became crucial to the success of the extermination effort; without it, the Third Reich would have failed to coordinate its constantly squabbling ministries well enough to carry out the massive effort.
Preparations for a blitzkrieg-style attack on Jews in the occupied areas of Western Europe had been under way for some months by the time of the Wannsee gathering. The SS had begun tests of Zyklon-B poison gas for mass killings of Soviet prisoners of war and Jews at Auschwitz at least as early as September 1941, and the following month there were similar experimental executions at the Sachsenhausen camp. This new technique was extraordinarily effective, from the Nazis’ point of view, and they immediately built centers devoted exclusively to murder by gassing at Belzec (near the Lublin Jewish reservation) and at Chelmno (near the Lodz ghetto). They gassed about 5,000 Romanis at Chelmno at just about the same time that Heydrich was meeting with the leaders of the civil service at Wannsee in mid-January.15
The previous October, Hitler had ordered that virtually all Jews remaining in Germany were to be deported to the East, supposedly as a security measure. The Nazi occupation governments in France, Belgium, Holland, Slovakia, and Greece soon issued similar decrees. They hit the so-called stateless, or refugee, Jews first; most of those people were deported to Auschwitz and killed there. In mid-July, French collaborationist police captured almost 13,000 stateless Jews in Paris and deported 9,000 of them—including about 4,000 children—to a transit camp at Drancy, from which they went on to Auschwitz. Vichy France then began rounding up French Jews, deporting at least 7,000 of them during August. The collaborationist governments in Belgium and the Netherlands cooperated in similar deportations. Mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka death camp began on July 22. Surviving SS records show that the Nazis murdered more than 200,000 people during the last two weeks of August 1942 alone at the death camps at Treblinka, Belzec, and Chelmno. Comparable killings were then under way at Auschwitz and Sobibor.16
Business channels—the information pathways of day-to-day commerce in German society—proved to be one of the most important sources of information about the extermination campaign. Officially, the gassings and mass murders were a German state secret of the highest order. But this information could not be fully concealed from the corporate community because many enterprises were closely intertwined with the murder effort. At Auschwitz, “The great extent of industrial activity in this camp resulted in a constant stream of incoming and outgoing corporation officials, engineers, construction men and other temporary personnel, all excellent carriers of gossip to the farthest corners of the Reich,” Raul Hilberg reports. He recounts a revealing incident that took place in January 1942—only weeks after the initiation of mass gassings of prisoners at the camp—involving an IG Farben official, Ernst A. Struss. Returning by train to Breslau after a short visit to IG Farben’s factory at the camp, Struss “overheard a [German] worker remarking in a loud voice that in Auschwitz large numbers of people were being burnt, that the cremations were being carried out in crematories and on stakes, and that the air in the IG Farben factory in Auschwitz was putrid with the smell of corpses.
“Struss jumped up and shouted, ‘These are lies; you should not spread such lies!’
“The man answered, ‘No, these are not lies; in Auschwitz there are 10,000 workers and all know it.’” Similarly, executives in the central insurance department at IG Farben were uncertain over how to process the reports of mass deaths among laborers at Auschwitz and other IG Farben facilities.17
The evidence shows that, despite later denials, much of the corporate elite of Germany was well aware of the Nazis’ extermination programs. Thousands of German corporate directors and senior managers knowingly contributed to murders carried out by their institutions, in many cases even after they had become disenchanted with Hitler and knew that the war was lost. The SS and the Nazi party could at least point to their ideology as an explanation of sorts for their participation in crime. But the business elite could not make even that claim. For them, cooperation in years of genocide became simply a matter of doing business.
One clear indicator that corporate executives did often have detailed knowledge of the Nazi genocide campaigns is the record of a handful of businessmen who became spies for the Allies during the conflict. Significantly, these agents were not members of the Nazi inner circle; they were simply prosperous businessmen who broke with their government out of political or moral disgust. These spies were relatively isolated within German society, and their sources of information concerning the exterminations were limited to the usual business and social contacts typical of persons of their class. Nevertheless, within weeks after the gassings began, these men were able to report accurately on the existence and on many operational details of the supposedly highly secret mass murder programs.
Industrialist Eduard Schulte, for example, owned strategically important zinc mines and other real estate near what had once been the German-Polish border. He was a conservative Christian Democrat and a committed anti-Nazi who repeatedly risked his life and fortune to spy on the N
azis on behalf of the Polish, Swiss, and eventually U.S. intelligence services.18
Schulte picked up most of his information by listening to the political gossip of German industrialists, through family ties (his cousin was an Abwehr officer), and through talking with the local Nazi district leader, with whom he met because of his mining operations. Such sources consistently knew more of Germany’s most secret affairs than they were officially supposed to know, and with a little prodding from Schulte, they showed off their knowledge in casual conversation. The results of this simple espionage were impressive: Schulte provided early warning to the Allies of the German invasion of Poland in 1939, of the USSR in 1941, and perhaps—though the evidence is less certain on this point—of Belgium, Holland, Norway, and Denmark as well. He passed on dozens of bits of information concerning German military campaigns, petroleum stocks, and resource shortages.19 Though his information was sometimes incorrect, the Allied agents who handled him from Zurich had little doubt that Schulte was on the whole a reliable and effective secret agent.
As early as July 1942—less than six months after the Wannsee conference—Schulte reported the essential facts of the Final Solution in an urgent message to a representative of the World Jewish Congress in Zurich. The details were sketchy, but Schulte accurately reported that Hitler had decided to kill all Jewish deportees as quickly as was practical; that “3½ to 4 million” people in the territories then in German hands were already scheduled for extermination; and that the killings were to be carried out through gassings involving prussic acid.20
There was, of course, much more to the story than Schulte knew, and Polish intelligence had already pieced together a grim, horrifying study of Nazi crimes in Poland that was more detailed than Schulte’s account*.21 The point here, however, is that this relatively minor industrialist, working on his own and without access to secret SS or Nazi party messages, had succeeded in piecing together the essential fact that an intentional campaign of genocide was under way.
Hans Deichmann, a junior executive at IG Farben during the early 1940s, reports a similar experience. In March 1942, Deichmann’s work as a manager of Italian contract labor took him to the IG Farben plant at Auschwitz, where many of the Italian workers he had enlisted were working. Even at that early date, Deichmann says, “no one could have approached the IG Farben works without becoming horribly, fearfully aware of what was happening nearby.” The stink of burning flesh hung in the air, and work columns from “the world of the dead” could be seen on the roads leading from the nearby concentration camp to the IG Farben factory. “I went to Auschwitz ten times between March 1942 and November 1944, each time for one day, and everyone I met spoke of almost nothing but the concentration camp and the systematic extermination,” Deichmann recalls. “‘My’ Italians, who in theory couldn’t understand the people around them, quickly managed to learn even more of the ghastly details than the others knew.”22
The fact that anti-Nazi “outsiders” such as Schulte and Deichmann learned of the extermination programs within weeks after they began does not prove that every other industrialist also knew, of course. But it does establish that such information was readily available through business channels for those individuals with the moral conscience necessary to confront it. Schulte and Deichmann’s experiences strongly suggest that the postwar denials by many industrialists that their decisions during 1943, 1944, and early 1945 were made in ignorance of the ongoing extermination campaigns cannot be taken seriously.
IG Farben appears to have been the first company to fully integrate concentration camp labor into modern industrial production, and it eventually became known in Germany as a model enterprise for this new technique. Farben executives even provided advice and training on the large-scale use of forced labor for executives from Volkswagen, Messerschmitt, Heinkel, and other major companies.23
Hans Deichmann recalls a lunch he attended for senior IG Farben managers in the autumn of 1940, shortly after the fall of France and before the mass gassings of concentration camp prisoners had begun. “The Four Year Plan’s administrators had given IG Farben the job of building a giant synthetic rubber factory in Upper Silesia, but a site had not yet been chosen,” Deichmann recalled recently in an interview with journalist Harvey Sachs. “It would have to be near an area with an abundance either of essential natural resources—coal, for instance—or of manpower. The IG’s commercial and technical directors, Georg von Schnitzler and Fritz ter Meer, assumed that the other people present at the lunch knew that Hitler’s largest camp for enemies of the regime was at Auschwitz, and they referred to it as the only sure source of manpower.
“The sole inconvenient aspect [they said] was the probable necessity of occasionally but suddenly having to replace carefully trained ‘personnel’ with people who were not yet ready for the task,” Deichmann continued. “Although this was over a year before the implementation of the Final Solution—before the gas chambers and cremetoriums were put into action—Auschwitz was already known to these industrialists as a place where thousands of the regime’s opponents were being murdered. Yet they made their decision [to build the plant at Auschwitz] without a hint of criticism or displeasure or remorse, while sipping their soup.”24
In the beginning, the SS intended to create its own factories for manufacturing war material right inside the concentration camps. This was strongly opposed by most of the German industrial elite, however, and by Albert Speer’s Ministry for Armaments and War Production. Industrialists complained bitterly that the SS had ambitions of competing with private industry and eventually supplanting it altogether in some National Socialist millennium to come. Furthermore, the critics continued, building new factories inside the concentration camps would only aggravate the acute shortages of labor and materials at existing production centers.
If the factories would not come to the camps, German industrial leaders contended, then let the camps come to the factories. The SS could supply forced laborers to industry for their mutual profit—and with relatively little reorganization of either the camps or the companies. “Concentration camp prisoners could be of valuable assistance in the factories already existing in the industrial sector,” Albert Speer wrote. “These factories would merely have to be expanded by means of more buildings and additional machines. An experienced stock of specialists and engineers was already available.… This argument for private business instantly won Hitler over,” Speer remembered.25
From mid-1942 on, the SS became a major provider of slave labor to industry. German corporate leaders assiduously courted the SS to obtain labor, contracts, and influence. Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess confirms this; his affidavit during his trial for crimes against humanity states that “[t]he concentration camps have at no time offered labor to the industry. On the contrary, prisoners were sent to enterprises only after the enterprises had made a request for concentration camp prisoners. In their letters of request the enterprises had to state in detail which measures had been taken by them, even before the arrival of the prisoners, to guard them, quarter them, etc. I visited officially many such establishments to verify such statements.… During my official trips I was constantly told by executives of the enterprises that they want more prisoners.”26 Similarly, Oswald Pohl, the SS’s chief of the entire slave labor program, testified that “nearly all arms producers came to my department to get labor from the concentration camps. Those who already employed such labor forces usually asked for an increase in their amount of prisoners.”27
Members of the boards of directors at IG Farben, Siemens, Krupp, Volkswagen, and other major companies that desired large numbers of forced laborers personally took on the task of high-level liaison with the SS on labor matters. According to Pohl, senior corporate leaders with whom he personally negotiated for distribution of prisoners included IG Farben directors Otto Ambros and Fritz ter Meer, Siemens director Rudolf Bingel, and Volkswagen’s Ferdinand Porsche.28 Pohl’s assistant, Karl Sommer, who was responsible for many of the day-
to-day details of SS negotiations with corporate customers, left a similar affidavit. Sommer recalled SS agreements for provision of concentration camp inmates negotiated with Porsche of Volkswagen, director Paul Plieger of the giant Salzgitter steelworks and Reichswerke Hermann Göring, Fritz Kranefuss of the Dresdner Bank and the BRABAG energy syndicate, Siemens officer Friedrich Lueschen, and others.29
By the middle of the war, Germany had become dependent on forced labor in almost every important sector of its economy. Some 19.7 percent of the entire workforce in Germany was made up of forced laborers, later studies found. Most of them were concentrated in industry, where they made up almost a third of the workforce. Almost 40 percent of IG Farben’s workers were forced laborers, including tens of thousands of inmates from Auschwitz and other concentration camps. At the Reich’s vast holding company for aircraft and arms production, the Reichswerke Hermann Goering, no less than 58 percent of the employees were forced laborers.*30
These numbers reveal German industry’s pervasive participation in human suffering on a massive scale. German business fed on forced labor throughout the war, exploiting the SS extermination-through-work programs to fulfill military production contracts. Contrary to postwar claims, the initiative for these programs came from industry, not from the Nazi state.
Private industry’s quotas for steel production, aircraft, weapons, and other war materiel—and the labor requisitions necessary to produce these items—were determined through government/industry consultation—not by Nazi fiat.31 There were frictions, of course, and there was no shortage of Nazi bluster about the war emergency as the joint government/industry committees hammered out production schedules. In mid-1942, Hitler gave Albert Speer the task of coordinating German war production. “Realizing that he was no expert in industrial management, [Speer] personally went about selecting persons in industry who were considered experts by their peers,” writes Edward Zilbert, author of the RAND Corporation’s analysis of Speer’s military production techniques. “The men were not made civil servants, but instead were recognized as honorary members of the Ministry, in a fashion analogous to the drafting of prominent industrial leaders in the United States for war production and attaching them to the government as ‘dollar-a-year’ men.… At the same time, [Speer] permitted these experts the greatest possible latitude in the operation of their particular specialities. This policy was given the name of self-regulation or self-administration of industry. That is, the responsibility for production programs rested on the individuals concerned with the actual production …” and not with the SS, the armaments, ministry or other German government agencies.32
The Splendid Blond Beast Page 10
