THE MECHANICS OF MURDER Jason Michael McCann Auschwitz-Birkenau has rightly entered our cultural consciousness as the place of the single largest crime against humanity perpetrated in the whole history of civilisation. As an instrument of the Third Reich it was a key element in the execution of the and so the chief weapon against the Jews of German occupied Europe. Yet, and to engender a completely artificial distinction between the Holocaust (representing the totality of victims systematically murdered by the Nazis) and the (the crime against the Jewish people – the vast majority of the victims of the Reich), Jews were not the only people brutalised and murdered at Auschwitz. Too easily we forget the Gypsies, political and religious dissenters, intellectuals, prisoners of war, homosexuals, the mentally ill, Freemasons, prostitutes and a vast array of others deemed ‘ ’ by Nazi ideology. The purpose of this paper certainly is not to ignore or otherwise assist in the ! " of all these other individuals and groups; rather it is to examine the machinery of Auschwitz-Birkenau as a killing centre, and at no time were these mechanisms so efficient in their destructiveness as in the eight weeks of 1944 when the Jews of Hungary were ‘ # .’ Between May and July of that year around 437,000 Jewish men, women and children were transported to Auschwitz, and most to their deaths; in an that would raise the death count at the extermination centre higher than any other such death camp under SS control. In such numbers were the Hungarian Jews immolated during this short time that by the end of the war one third of all the people murdered at Auschwitz were Jews from Hungary. This is their story. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the construction of a new $ (KZ1 Auschwitz) near the ancient town of Oświęcim in Upper Silesia; a territory recently annexed to the German Reich from Poland. The site of the new transit camp had had a number of incarnations. It was built originally as a military barracks in the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but latterly; before the German invasion of Poland (September 1939) it had functioned as a % hostelry (for Germany-bound seasonal migrant labourers). Oświęcim was ideally located, in terms of its easy accessibility by rail, for the SS administration. Further to this it had the added advantage of being easily isolated. To oversee the refurbishment of this dilapidated complex of redbrick chalets and stables and its transformation into a state transit and labour camp Himmler appointed & ' (SS Captain) Rudolf Höß2 on May 4th 1940 to be the first camp Commandant of Auschwitz; a role which placed him at the head of the SS in the region. Höß was a man of quite some experience in camp structures and governance before this appointment; he had been a ' (that is a ‘detention block leader’) at Dachau before being promoted to the postion of ' (‘head of protective custody’) at Sachenhausen. It was most likely he who introduced the cynical ‘ 1 2 ’ maxim to the gate of the Auschwitz main camp, as this KZ is pronounced ‘ ’ according to the sounds of the German alphabet. Variably written ‘Hoss’ or ‘Hoess.’ © Jason Michael McCann, 2012 () phrase had already been on prominent display at the gated entrances of Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg and the women’s prison Ravensbrück. On his arrival Höß quickly set about quarantining the area of the camp by expelling the inhabitants of neighbouring villages and hamlets and requisitioning local farms and forests to create an ‘SS Zone of Interest.’ This area was closed off to all unauthorised persons and surrounded by high parallel razor-wire fences, high tension electrified fences and wooden guard towers. The area could be brightly flood-lit throughout the night. KZ Auschwitz went into operation as a quarantine and transit camp on June 14th 1940 charged with the task of centrally processing Polish political prisoners before they could be sent to (‘labour camps’). From its inception Auschwitz was not, nor was it intended to be, a place for the systematic murder of Jews or any other human population. Yet it was even at this point a & place of cruelty, dehumanisation and murder as Sybille Steinbacher comments, “! & * + * * .” From the outset it was conceived of as a place to ‘discipline’ and ‘re-educate’ those whom the German invaders deemed to be their political opponents in Poland. The first of such political prisoners were members of Polish political parties and cultural organisations, intellectuals, university students and schoolchildren. According to the of Nazi racial ideology Polish education was seen as something to be feared; Himmler himself directed that the Poles were to be a subject people and slave population, and thus required only rudimentary schooling. What did make KZ Auschwitz peculiar in relation to other concentration camps was its capacity. At a time when the combined capacity of all other Reich concentration camps was somewhere in the region of twenty-five thousand, Auschwitz alone could support a population of ten thousand prisoners. It would be proper then to speak of this earliest period as the ‘Polish phase’ of the camp’s existence; a situation which remained unchanged until the middle of 1942. During this time there were Jews held in the camp, but they constituted only a minority of the prisoner population and were mostly arrested and interned for political reasons. On arrival each prisoner underwent a registration procedure wherein they were given a prison number which from henceforth would replace their name for the purposes of identification. All of their personal property and civilian clothes were taken from them and kept in storage for the duration of their incarceration. These effects were returned to prisoners on their release; that is with the marked exception of valuables. Once relieved of their personal effects and clothing the prisoners was then harassed and beaten towards the showers, after which their head was shaved and they were issued with a coarse prison uniform and a pair of wooden clogs. Each prisoner had his or her prison number stamped on patches which were attached both to their jacket and trouser leg together with a triangular patch known as a , ; the colour of which denoted the category of the inmate. Most common was the red triangle for the political prisoner, following this were habitual criminals (kept in ‘preventative custody’) with a green tag, so-called antisocial types, including prostitutes, Roma and other Gypsies such as Sinti were marked by black, and homosexuals were identified by pink triangles. Jehovah’s Witnesses, known as (‘Bible-researchers’), the only prisoners who were at least theoretically free to leave on condition they renounce their religious beliefs (very few ever did), 2 wore a purple , , and any Jewish prisoners had to wear two; an upward facing yellow triangle surmounted by the colour denoting the reason for their internment – thus forming a Star of David. Each morning the camp discipline was such that the inmates were woken and hurried to the latrines at four o’clock before the ordeal of the && or roll-call. Even the bodies of those who had died through the night were brought out and lined up for counting before they were taken to the crematorium in roll-calls which frequently lasted for hours. As these were conducted by $ & (‘prisoner overseers’); male and female prisoners – usually criminals – noted for their cruelty and sadism the roll-call had to last at least until seven when the SS arrived on duty. As soon as this was over any corpses were removed and the living began their ten hour day of forced labour. Outside work details, in all weather conditions, were rightly considered the most deadly. In consideration of the high rate of fatalities outdoors most prisoners tried desperately to find work ‘under a roof.’ In the régime of the concentration camp this distinction was the difference between life and death. For breakfast, if that is what one can call it, the prisoners were given a single cup of unsweetened ersatz coffee or a weak herbal tea. At lunch they were given a bowl of thin vegetable stock without meat, and a single piece of bread at supper which had to last until breakfast. Without any protein whatsoever this was a starvation diet designed to reduce human beings over a four to six week period; the average life expectancy in Auschwitz for the lowest category prisoners. After six weeks, if the prisoner had survived, he was nothing more than skin and bone, and when such spectres began to lose their minds (as inevitably they would) they were avoided by the other prisoners and spoken of, in the jargon of the camp, as % (‘Muslims’). Escape, no doubt a constant thought in the minds of many, was not tolerated and punished in the most brutal fashion. Prisoners who escaped faced a summary execution, if caught, along with ten to twelve selected prisoners from the same barrack. The recaptured prisoner was paraded before his fellow inmates wearing placard declaring: “Hurray I’m back,” at the next && – during which he and a number of others would be shot. Prisoners ‘fortunate enough’ to make good their escape would later discover that the SS or the Gestapo (the - & or ‘Secret State Police’) had rounded up their families and had them transported to the camps. Moreover, ten or twelve other prisoners from the escapee’s barrack were shot in reprisal to discourage any other escape attempts. Naturally this created an environment of suspicion within the prisoner population which seriously discouraged more organised escape attempts. Owing largely to its size and capacity, and the changing circumstances of the war, Auschwitz was by no means singular in its functionality; whilst it was a transit and labour camp for the reeducation and disciplining of Polish dissidents, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union (codenamed ‘Operation Barbarossa,’ June 1941) it was thought ideal for the expected flood of Soviet prisoners of war (September 26th 1941). It was not until, in the aftermath of the Battle of Stalingrad (from February 1942), the influx of POWs diminished greatly that new uses were to be found for Auschwitz. As an it provided the SS with the perfect opportunity to go into business. To this end the monopoly of Buna (a synthetic rubber) production was granted to I G Farben; the Reich’s 3 largest chemical enterprise headquartered at Frankfurt am Main. It was the prospect of cheap labour costs and the . / (December 1940), granting German industries complete exemption from tax, that finally persuaded such companies to commence production in the East; thus beginning the ‘Germanisation’ of the district. One result of this mutually beneficial SS-industrial relationship was the construction of the Monowitz sub-camp; some seven kilometres from the main camp. SS administration profited from this enterprise in slave labour to the tune of 4 Reichsmarks per hour for skilled workers, 3 Reichsmarks for unskilled and 50 Pfennigs for children. The directors and managers of these factories acted in full collaboration with the SS in their brutal and inhumane treatment of prisoners; ultimately sending inmates too weak to work to their deaths “nach Birkenau (‘to Birkenau’)” in the euphemistic language of the companies’ record books. Cold economic principles of labour efficiency led to the development of the on-going selection process; whereby those incapable of work were murdered. In time this work selection became the principle determining factor of life and death with all incoming transports. It was the construction of the Monowitz site that instigated the first overt racial measures at KZ Auschwitz; at the direction of Himmler the Jewish communities of Oświęcim and Brzezinka were expelled, thus bringing to an end seven hundred years of Jewish culture in the town. The remaining Polish population was then used as forced labour to build, along with the prisoners, the I G Farben factory and its Monowitz sub-camp. Simultaneously, as a result of the March 1st 1941 visit by Himmler, the concentration camp underwent its first significant expansion. These reforms saw the parent camp, Auschwitz I, enlarged to a capacity of 30,000 with the allocation of 10,000 forced labourers to the Monowitz camp. Towards the end of the same year and into the beginning of 1942 the notorious Birkenau camp (Auschwitz II) was constructed over the demolished Polish village of Brzezinka. Over the period that the proportion of Jewish prisoners began to increase the life expectancy at Monowitz was calculated to be between a couple of weeks and three months, and yet this was not considered a serious problem for production by either the directors of I G Farben or the SS Economic Office as there was an ever increasing volume of Jewish transports between 1943 and 1944. Naturally the fear of being sent spurred the workers on. It is nothing more than a bittersweet consolation that, (Sybille Steinbacher) Selection according to ‘economic usefulness’ was practiced sporadically at Auschwitz until July 4th 1942 when it became normative with the first large transports of Slovakian Jews. From this moment on it would become the responsibility of SS doctors and other ‘medical’ functionaries to determine who from each transport would live and who would die. The rationale behind this connection between murder and medicine was succinctly outlined by Doctor Robert Servatius (Adolf * Eichmann’s defence lawyer during his 1961 Jerusalem trial): “0 & & & + * 4 * * 1” The victims; those excluded from labour deployment due to their physical condition (children, pregnant women, women with infants, the elderly, the sick and the handicapped) constituted the vast majority of every transport. At the very most only twenty per cent of any transport was selected for labour detail; a term which had become synonymous with a slower death. In a memorandum to Himmler, dated September 18th 1942, the Reich Justice Minister, Otto Georg Thierack, coined the phrase ‘extermination through work’ for these selections. From mid-1942 prisoners selected for (‘work details’) were registered into the camp and had their prison number tattooed quickly and skilfully onto their left forearm with an instrument which, as recalled by Miklós Nyiszli (whose prison number was A-8450), “ & & .” This registration procedure, from the spring of 1943, applied to all categories of prisoner except re-education prisoners and ethnic Germans. The majority of new Jewish arrivals; from eighty to an hundred per cent of the transport, determined to be 2 (‘a waste of space’ or ‘dead weight’), were murdered directly on arrival and not registered into the camp and therefore received no tattoo. By not registering these people into the camp many families have been frustrated in their attempts to discover the final movements of their loved-ones. By November 1942 the earliest Slovakian arrivals, including those selected for forced labour, were all dead. KZ Auschwitz or Auschwitz-Birkenau had turned a corner which would lead to its full transition into a ( (that is an ‘extermination camp’). Birkenau, what had once been the picturesque hamlet of Brzezinka, lay a little over two kilometres from Auschwitz I, and was built in anticipation of the influx of Soviet POWs captures on the Eastern Front. The initial capacity of 50,000 was rapidly increased to 150,000 inmates and then to 200,000 by 1944. During October 1941 over ten thousand Soviet combatants were interned at Birkenau where they found brick-built barracks and uniformly cobbled-together stables capable of billeting a hundred and eighty prisoners each. Characteristically the SS crammed seven hundred prisoners into each stable; thus creating quickly deteriorating and squalid living conditions. Compounding this situation was the absence of fresh running water and latrines; a predicament that only became a problem for the camp administration when a catastrophic outbreak of typhus affected even the SS quarters. In the disturbing logic of the Nazi state these prisoners of war, who should have been protected under the protocols of the Geneva Conventions (1864, 1906 and 1929), were left to starve for ‘economic reasons.’ Two million such prisoners had died by February 1942, and of the 5.7 million Soviet POWs sent to Birkenau 3.3 million had perished by liberation. In a horrific episode of dark irony, the Red Army, under the orders of General Secretary Joseph Stalin, treated all ‘liberated’ Soviet prisoners of war as traitors to the USSR and had them deported to Gulags in Siberia where many more died. January 1942 saw the first large transports of Jews; mainly from the women’s camp of Ravensbrück north of Berlin. Now, with the tide of the Eastern Front turning, Jews would become the largest single category of prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau. As notorious as Birkenau has become in the popular imagination, it certainly was not a place of systematic extermination before 1943; by which time the 3 death camps of Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka, and the killing centre of Majdanek had already been decommissioned. This is not to say that before this time KZ Auschwitz-Birkenau was not a place of this 5 (‘this gassing business’ as described by Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1961)3 and murder; in early July 1940 the old munitions bunker at Auschwitz I (the parent camp) was converted into a crematorium with adjoining gas chamber which came to be known later as $ 0. The first gassing experiments on prisoners, however, were conducted by SS-Haupsturmführer Karl Fritzsche on Soviet prisoners of war within the punishment cells in the basement of Block 11 at the end of August 1941. To the north-west end of Birkenau camp two farmhouses were expropriated from ‘resettled’ Polish farmers for the purposes of provisional gas chambers. In the early spring of 1942 the first of these was put into operation; this was known as the ‘Little Red House (or Bunker I)’ on account of its redbrick architecture. It was decommissioned in 1943, demolished and the ground ploughed over in an attempt to erase the evidence of the site’s ghastly nature. The second was the ‘White House (or Bunker II)’ which remained in use until the summer of 1943,4 but was reopened at the height of the Hungarian transports in 1944 to deal with the massive increase in the incoming volume. Victims’ bodies from these provisional killing stations were dragged by members of the to mass graves in the neighbouring fields; the same fields where there would later be open air burning pits, the smoke and flames from which were visible over the length of the camp. All other interim solutions to the wholly invented ‘problem’ of the Jewry of Europe and North Africa were terminated on January 20th 1942 in Berlin at the Wannsee Conference with ! . ) (‘The Final Solution of the Jewish Question’). From this point on the ultimate objective of the Third Reich was the extermination by gas and . && firing squads of all Jews in German occupied Europe. Yet at this point Auschwitz was not the principle theatre of this crime. Gassing at Birkenau was haphazard and considered grossly inefficient; people were brought to the camp in overcrowded rail-freight cattle wagons (the expense of which and the cut the SS received was paid by the victims themselves) to the railway station two kilometres away. Immediately after the selection those rejected for work detail were walked under armed SS guard, and harried by vicious guard dogs, to the two makeshift gas chambers. Here they were ordered to strip naked, men, women and children together, before being ushered inside. ‘Liquidation’ occurred when the SS threw canisters of crystallised cyanide gas through vents on the sides of the buildings. During the earliest phases of this process the bodies of the murdered victims were carted to $ 0 in the Auschwitz main camp or simply cast into nearby pits and salted with lime. Once it became obvious to the Reich authorities in Berlin that the tide of war had turned in the East the directive was issued to dispose of the evidence of the mass killings. To this end the SS' 1005 under the command of Paul Blobel was charged with the odious task of exhuming and burning the tens of thousands of bodies interred at the 4 mass graves.5 Even this process of open-air cremation was time consuming and inefficient.6 3 Hannah Arendt, ! " #$% & ! (London: Penguin Classics, 2006), 107. Bunker I had a capacity of about 800 hundred people, and Bunker II had a capacity of 1,200. See Sybille Steinbacher, $ '# $ ( (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 97. 5 “) ( * )) + & ! * ( * .” – Rudolf Hoess, , + (New York and London: Overlook Duckworth, 2012), 77. 6 Hoess, , + , 80. 4 6 Increasing demand for more effective modes of murder and incineration, and with the methods employed at Bunkers I and II now obsolete, the SS calculated that larger, more effective, complexes were required for the task of extermination. One must realise that this was the apex of a 5 Euthanasia Program learning curve in the execution of genocide; one begun with the (September 1939 – August 1941) targeting the mentally ill and other handicapped persons considered by the Nazis to be / / (‘life unworthy of life’), and perfected through the killing 3 centres of Chełmno and Majdanek, the death camps and the disorganised early gassings at Birkenau. In response to this new requirement $ 00 was built and brought into use in July 1942. This ‘state of the art’ facility was composed of four processing units on two levels. Below ground there was an undressing room, some two hundred metres long and seven metres wide, leading into hermetically sealed gas chambers (thirty meters by seven meters). These chambers were fitted with decoy shower-heads to give the impression that nothing untoward was about to happen. Something that the SS had learned during the development of the gas chambers was that it was easier to exterminate larger numbers in less time when the victims were lulled into a false sense of security. At the other end of these chambers were the / (‘mortuaries’). Adjacent to these processing units there were a number of mechanical hoists, known as ‘corpse lifts,’ that transported between twenty and twenty-five bodies to the upper level (at ground level) crematory complex (or ‘the grey zone’). By August of the same year the killing capability of the crematoria complex was doubled with the completion of $ 000; a geometric inversion of the same architectural plans of $ hundred meters away. Two further and similar crematoria were built far into 1943 ($ 00, one 0( and (). These were to become known as ‘the forest crematoria’ on account of their location behind a small wooded area; hiding them from view along with shrubs and a parallel barbed-wire cordon. These four crematoria constituted a singular killing complex and were hidden from the regular prison population; which knew of their existence only by rumour. Such secrets were not easily kept in KZ Auschwitz. According to the estimates of the Polish state museum ( )$ hour period. ! 00 and 000 were able to burn 1,440 human beings in every twenty-four $ ($ 0) was thus superseded and finally decommissioned in July 1943. All four crematoria; the killing complex in its entirety by 1944 (relying on the estimates of the manufacturers and the SS), were able to cremate 4,756 people daily. Notwithstanding this colossal killing power, by the beginning of spring 1944 the death-count at Auschwitz-Birkenau remained several hundred thousand less than that of Treblinka. All this was to change, of course, and establish Auschwitz as the location of the single largest crime in the history of the human race. This was the frenzied killing triggered by the arrival of Hungary’s Jews after March 1944. This period is of great interest, albeit darkly, in that it provides a harrowing glimpse into the effectiveness of the mechanisms (perfected by experience and improvement since 1939) of calculated and cold-blooded mass murder. There were approximately 760,000 Jews living in Hungary at the start of 1944; a significant minority, constituting just over five per cent of the Hungarian population. As an ally of the Third Reich Hungary exercised complete autonomy over its own Jewish population and whilst there was 7 serious anti-Semitic legislation introduced, including the forced labour of Jewish men of military age where thousands died, most Jewish communities remained intact. Yet there was a cautious hope that they would escape the severest persecution already being suffered by the Jews of Nazi occupied Europe. Such a hope evaporated the moment German forced crossed the Hungarian frontier. Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya, the regent of the Kingdom of Hungary, had thought to play a tactically clever game with the Germans. Naturally Hungary was afraid of growing German power and expansion and thus sought an alliance with the Reich to pre-empt any German plans to overrun her borders. In October 1940 Hungary signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany, Italy and the Empire of Japan and was almost immediately rewards with the Ribbentrop brokered Romanian ‘hand-over’ of northern Transylvania. Consequently Hungarian troops were deployed alongside the , in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union; a relationship that was to have disastrous results for the Royal Hungarian Army. On the Eastern Front the Second Hungarian Army’s losses were enormous; of the original 200,000 at the beginning of the Russian campaign 100,000 were dead, 35,000 wounded and over 60,000 had been captured by the Red Army by January 1944. Realising the certainty of the Axis’ defeat, and understandably fearful of a Soviet invasion, Nagybánya entered into capitulatory negotiations with the Western Allies. Coded correspondences were intercepted and deciphered by German intelligence and thus invaded. It is interesting that the Reich Chancellery in Berlin did not move against its fair-weather friend with a desire to exact revenge. Rather, to the eyes of Germany, Hungary was the last remaining European power yet to be plundered; and Hungary was a small kingdom of considerable wealth. The German army crossed into Hungary on March 19th 1944; beginning what, for the Jews of the kingdom, would become a nightmare beyond all imagining. Following in the wake of the invasion 6 ' Adolf Eichmann and a number of other senior SS were charged with the task of expropriating everything possible from the Jewish community before having it deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination centre. Eichmann, now with unquestioned power over life and death, had the perfect chance to stay this execution; Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler was at this point of the war seeking avenues to negotiate a respectable and conditional surrender to the Western Allies and bringing to an end this policy of wholesale murder. Ultimately confirming his own guilt, Eichmann was ‘ .’ Nagybánya, as regent, was permitted to remain in office on condition that he appoint a new pro-German Prime Minister and government; a condition to which he acquiesced – effectively rendering the Kingdom of Hungary a puppet or client state of the Reich. Immediately the Jews of the nation were ghettoised and obliged by law to be identified by the yellow star. When on April 9th the new pro-German Prime Minister, General Döme Sztójay, complied with the Reich’s order to deport 300,000 Hungarian Jews into Germany as slave labour decisions were made in Budapest that would have Hungary follow the same deportation policy which Slovakia had employed under similar circumstances.7 The removal of so many able-bodied men left hundreds of thousands of Jewish families without a breadwinner; a reality that would threaten the economic # of the Hungarian state apropos the welfare of these Jewish families. Sztójay’s 7 government simply requested that the Germans ‘ 7 Arendt, ! " , 202-205. 8 ;’ a request readily accepted by Eichmann who by now was among the last remaining ideological adherents to the . Five days later the schedule for the deportation of the Hungarian Jews was put into full operation. From May 15th 1944 until July 9th, with the eager participation of the Hungarian state and , 12,000 Jews were transported daily directly to KZ Auschwitz; that was approximately 3,000 people per train (crammed into cattle wagons) and four trains every day. Miklós Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish doctor recruited as a medical assistant to Doctor Mengele under the ruse that there was a hospital in the camp, provides a doleful reminisce of his visit to the Hungarian women’s camp at Sector C [BIIc]. There were so many people packed into this particular camp that when the order was given for its liquidation it took more than ten days to gas and incinerate everyone. In his memoirs Nyiszli tells how it was that these women, now nothing more than skeletal ghosts, had gotten to where they were: , $ , $ $ ' The change from relative affluence and security to genocide and horror happened more rapidly in Hungary than in any other country in occupied Europe. Alice Lok Cahana, who was fifteen years old in 1944, was living an ordinary life with her family in her hometown of Sàrvàr near the Austrian border when the Germans came. Her grandfather’s carpet weaving factory was sold for a single dollar to a man known to her as Mr. Krüger, before she and her family, with thousands of other Jews, were forced to board trains which were to ‘ 8 ’ them to Auschwitz ‘ . .’ Under armed guard all the Jews of the town were filed through the streets towards the railway station. Alice recalls passing the home she had grown up in and seeing Mr. Krüger through the window with a gleeful expression on his face. She remembers her shock when she saw the cattle wagons at the station, for she could not believe that they could possibly have been for all these people.8 Yet they were, and once locked inside the wagons they had to endure the ordeal of a four day journey in almost complete darkness, without food or water, and nothing more than a pale in the corner to be used as a toilet. All too soon the crowded wagon began to stink of sweat, urine and excrement. The elderly and infirm, including her grandfather, did everything they could to make themselves comfortable on the piles of luggage that littered the filthy floor. Prior to the arrival of such an unprecedented number of prisoners efforts had to be made at Birkenau to maximise the ‘absorptive capacity’ of the camp. Rudolf Höß was returned as Commandant on May 9th to replace the reputedly disorganised Obersturmbannführer SS Arthur Liebehenschel (a senior ! 8 7 Laurence Rees, $ officer) who had only been promoted to the oversight of Auschwitz-Birkenau at '# , . ' / 0 ) * (London: BBC Books, 2005), 285. 9 the end of the previous year. Höß set about the speedy adaption of the camp to massive absorption capability; the railway spur, until now over a mile from the crematoria complex, was brought to within one hundred meters of $ 00 and 000 with the construction of the ‘ &.’9 He wished to capitalise on the considerable expertise gained by Doctor Josef Mengele and his subordinate SS doctors in the execution of selection by locating the new off-loading siding and ramp where the SS doctors could more effectively process the incoming traffic. Further to this Höß ordered the repair of the blast furnaces in $ ( and the excavation of a further five burning pits at the 4 and the re-opened ‘The White House (Bunker II)’ to supplement the absorptive capacity of the four crematoria.10 The decision was finally made over July 11th and 12th 1944, when it had become obvious that Birkenau’s rate of absorption was incapable of full and immediate liquidation of the Hungarian transports, to register some of these Jews into the prison population; a catastrophic aboutturn for the 12,000 Jews in the so-called Czech camp who were sent to the ovens to make way for the new arrivals.11 As a new arrival Alice’s first experience was the unbolting of her carriage and the raised voices of soldiers calling ‘3 (get out quickly),’ as the confused and frightened people did their best to get out of the wagons. Men in prison uniforms were waiting at the ramp to assist with the old and the disabled. Once off the train the process of selection began; where men were separated from women and children. Edith, Alice’s older sister, thinking that the Germans ( 8 & & ) would treat the children better than they would the adults, told Alice to join the children’s line. This was a column of children under the age of twelve and infants in the hands of their mothers. From previous experience the SS had learned that it was less trouble to keep children with their mothers; thus foregoing the ‘ ’ of these young women in order to save the delays caused at selection by women fighting for their daughters and sons. In this manner mothers and their young children were murdered together. Alice, absolutely incognisant of the peril she was in, but tall for her age was briskly interrogated by Doctor Mengele who sent her back over to the line of adult women; an encounter with one of the most notorious characters of KZ Auschwitz that saved her life. Soon her column walked off slowly to the ‘ ’ where each person was relieved of the last remaining possessions they had, including wedding rings and family photographs. Together men and women, young and old, were ordered to strip naked in order that their entire bodies could be shaved; head, armpits and genitals. Here also each prisoner was given their prisoner number as a tattoo on their left forearm and a set of ragged prison clothes (many of which had ‘ ’). Alice remembers that her prison uniform was about three sizes too large for her. 9 Arendt, ! " , 200. Miklós Nyiszli records what operations were like at this killing area when he was instructed to go there in order to collect medicines and other things to be brought to 1 for sorting. It is important to note that Nyiszli numbers the crematoria one to four (not including 1 at the parent camp) rather than the now standardised two to five at Birkenau. See Miklós Nyiszli, * $ (Oświęcim: Frap Books, 2001), 64-66. 11 Nyiszli, * $ , 68. Here the author provides another insight into the mentality of the SS in attempting to cover up the true nature of their murders. He writes that the document which provides the reason for the slaughter of the Czech camp said: “2 +' $ ' .” 10 10 At the Jewish ramp Miklós Nyiszli, who had arrived together with and was separated from his wife and daughter, was fascinated by the redbrick two storey building not too far from where he and his fellow deportees were standing. He wrote later that at first he thought it to be some sort of factory. It had a tapered brickwork chimney that was ferociously belching out fire and thick plumes of acrid black smoke. He smelt the stench of , and as a physician he knew this to be the product of burning flesh and hair. He now knew that this building was not a factory but a crematorium. Just over the tops of the trees he could see another such stack and so imagined that he had arrived in someplace approximating Dante’s 0 . Allaying people’s fears were a number of Red Cross vans assembled close to the ramp; giving the impression that all was well, but this was nothing more than a cynical trick to keep people calm. Prisoners already in prison uniform lifted people; the elderly, the very sick, the infirm and the mentally handicapped, onto the vehicles of this motorised column. First to move away, after the selection, were these Red Cross trucks, followed by the slow moving train of humanity; the old, children, infants, mothers and pregnant women (all considered ‘economic dead weight’), toward the crematoria complex and their death. According to Nyiszli this whole spectacle lasted no more than thirty minutes, and the entire siding was empty and awaiting the next arrival. When the number of prisoners allocated for ‘ & ’ at $ 00 and 000 (nearest the Jewish ramp) had reached its limit, the rest of the people were walked further north along the path that divides the central bathhouse (the ‘ ’ as mentioned above) and the barracks of $ lightly forested set of enclosures known as ‘the Little Wood’ compounds where $ to a 0( and ( were hidden from view. As this line of people, arranged five abreast, wound its way in through the doors to the anteroom of the gas chamber the camp orchestra would play on the rooftop above them. It is difficult to say how much this ‘calmed’ those being led like lambs to the slaughter, but it served two other purposes beneficial to the SS; it gratified their more sadistic inclinations and drowned out the sound of those screaming as they were poisoned. In order to keep the victims fooled and compliant for as long as possible they were continually reminded that they had arrived at a work camp and that they were on their way presently to be showered, disinfected and de-loused. Often the SS guards and members of the Jewish would recite aphorisms like ‘ ‘ ’ or ’ to maintain this deception. Questions were answered calmly and politely by the SS; , , $ Going down the concrete steps into the undressing room there were large signs written in German, French, Greek and Hungarian informing the readers that this was a showering and disinfecting facility. Such lies reassured not only those people who suspected nothing at all (if indeed there were any) but also those who had arrived expecting the worst. Witnesses to these events have often commented that the anxious new arrivals looked relieved, and descended to their deaths with a sense of joy. Members of the would on some occasions distribute towels and bars of soap with the instructions that people should take care to wash well. The pretence of the 11 shower was maintained right up until everyone was inside the gas chamber (complete with dummy shower-heads) and the heavy wooden doors were slammed behind them. On descending the stairs and entering in through the outside doors the victims (about 3,ooo men, women and children at a time) were greeted by a brightly lit and whitewashed room; a long room with centre-aisle supporting pillars and wooden benches at their bases and all around the walls. Over the benches were numbered hooks. Similar notices as were visible on the exterior were dotted around the walls in a number of languages informing people to leave their clothing in neat bundles and to tie their shoe laces together. The men of the , milling about the crowded room, instructed people to memorise the bench number where their clothes were left; to save unnecessary confusion later. Some of the victims were even heard to remark things like, ‘ - 9’ with admiration for this particular Germanic trait. At this point in the proceedings the SS guards would enter the undressing room, behaving somewhat more menacingly than before, to hurry things along. Now the nervous, embarrassed, prudish and otherwise hesitant were ordered to strip naked and to hang their clothes, as they had already been told, tie their laces together and to do all of this quickly. No one would reclaim their clothes; the reason for this was simply to ensure that these last remaining personal belongings might be gathered and delivered to the storerooms of $ easily by the (Canada was popularly thought a place of wealth and plenty) where they would be sorted and sent back to Germany for resale. When everyone was naked everyone was then ushered into another set of rooms (the gas chambers) at the other end of the undressing room. The last instruction given to the humiliated and de-humanised people was that they were to breathe deeply; giving the false impressing that there was some sort of therapeutic vapour in the ‘showering’ area to fight against the many bronchial and respiratory diseases people had fallen sick from in the overcrowded ghettoes they had been brought from. Naturally this was yet another lie, and a trick to ensure that people died quickly. Each gas chamber (being a fraction of the area of the undressing room) had a claustrophobic effect on everyone, and took from them their last chance to put up any resistance. Up to and often exceeding (especially during the two months of the Hungarian transports) a thousand people were packed into a single gas chamber. When all of the intended victims were in and every member of the was safely outside, the heavy doors were banged closed; trapping the people within in a hermetically sealed killing zone. At this point the lights were turned out, plunging the victims into darkness, confusion and panic. By the time all of this had been accomplished a deluxe Red Cross ambulance had arrived and was waiting outside the crematorium with two SS officers; one of whom was a member of the % (an SS auxiliary health officer) with the four green tins of Zyklon-B required for the killing. Rather astutely the KZ administration did not store these canisters at the crematoria where they might fall into the hands of .12 The gas chambers of $ the Jewish 00 and 000 were subterranean and so the actual gassing was straightforward. On the roof a small detachment of SS protected by gasmasks would open up hatches which led down into the hollow, latticed pillars in the crowded chamber below 12 Nyiszli, - * $ , 37. 12 and pour in the Zyklon-B; a crystallised hydrogen-cyanide (prussic acid). Almost immediately these crystals would begin to vaporise due to the heat in the room below (the manufacturers installed heaters to assist with this vaporisation in cold weather). Originally Zyklon-B, marketed since the 1920s as : % , was used as an insecticide around the camp, but its toxic nature soon found it this new use. It was an odourless and colourless crystallised liquid that boiled at 26 °C; just above room temperature. From the moment the poisonous crystals were poured into the chamber the screams of the dying within could be heard. In desperate and vain attempts to escape the suffering people rattled and thumped on the door and tried to claw their way through the walls. Others still, in an equally futile attempt to get a gasp of fresh air or merely avoid the rising cloud of gas, clambered over other people to reach the ducts on the ceiling; resulting in macabre pyramids of corpses. The gas first spread at ground level and in the heat began to rise. The diabolical result of this was that people instinctively began to climb on top of others to avoid inhaling it. The effect was always the same. Babies and infants lay at the bottom, older children were strewn over these, and above the children were the old the sick and the women. At the top of the heap of dead were always the strongest men who had managed only to escape death for a few seconds more than their children, mothers, sisters and wives. After all the screaming had fallen silent the SS murderers on the roof would wait a few minutes to ensure that they had executed their orders before lighting up their cigarettes (almost to a man the SS and the members of the were heavy smokers and drinkers). Soon thereafter high powered industrial extractor fans were activated to remove any remaining gas from the space; allowing the to enter the room and remove the dead. This whole gassing business, described so nonchalantly by Eichmann in 1961 as ‘- ,’ from the entrance of thousands of people into the undressing room where they were stripped completely naked to when their bodies were dragged from the place of their death took no more than thirty minutes – a truly - . One of the last surviving witnesses to these atrocities, Dario Gabbai (born 1922), a Sephardi Jew from Thessalonica conscripted into the , speaks of the four crematoria at Birkenau working twenty-four hours a day to deal with the sheer volume of new Hungarian arrivals. He recalls as many as 2,500 human beings, even women holding new-born babies, being crushed into a gas chamber with a maximum capacity of 500. So crushed were they that they were all still standing even when they were dead. Many years later, in his new home in southern California, he is still haunted by the lifeless faces; ‘ ’ from the gas. At every stage of the development of the , from the earliest forced emigrations, through the ghetto administrations to the burning of bodies the Reich depended on Jewish complicity. Jews in the % (‘Jewish councils’ in the ghettoes) drew up lists for the Germans indicating who could be deported to the East. Such was the self-serving corruption of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (head of the ; as the was known in Łódź ghetto) that he might be considered no different from a Nazi collaborator. The ghettoes themselves were policed by the ' - (the ‘Jewish Police Force’) which was trusted by the Germans to follow orders and assisted in the brutal round-ups of Jews for deportation. These were occasions which caused embarrassment in 13 the Jerusalem District Court during the Eichmann trial. Yet even the delegates of the Zionist organisations from Palestine who were involved in on-going negotiations with Eichmann before the Reich’s policy of outright murder was actualised demonstrated certain ideological similarities13 with the Nazis in their search for ‘suitable Jewish candidates’ for emigration to British controlled Palestine; a sad sequence of events which bear out Hannah Arendt’s assertion that moral collapse during such a catastrophe spreads far and deep.14 As the heroic resistance of Jews and non-Jews alike in the student strikes in the Netherlands and the palace and government led national resistance in Denmark show, without the active compliance of victims in their own victimisation it is unlikely that the would have claimed quite as many lives as it did. The fact then that it was Jewish men, so intimately related to the processes of mass murder in the exterminations camps, in the inconsistent with the & is not of the SS in general. Jewish men selected from transports to form the ‘special work detail’ of the had the most gruesome occupation in the death camp. It was members of the who met the new arrivals at the railway sidings, assisted them in climbing down from the cattle trucks, and guided and reassured them as they made their way to the crematoria. After the gassing this same work detail was responsible for processing the dead, incineration and preparing the undressing room and gas chambers for the next transport. Typically, the men of the were well-fed (taking what food was brought to the camp by recent arrivals) and permitted to wear their own civilian clothes or clothes taken from the $ storerooms. Having, as they did, almost free access to the storerooms these men were able to procure certain luxuries including alcohol and cigarettes, silverware for dining areas and soft furnishings and linens for their sleeping quarters.15 With their significantly more comfortable living conditions than the main body of the prisoner population, and their access to the treasure troves of $ , members of the were able to smuggle items of food, medication and little luxuries to outside work detail prisoners who came close enough to the fences enclosing the areas of the crematoria. Great risks and small acts of kindness and heroism as these undoubtedly lessened the misery of conditions at KZ Auschwitz for many people. In light of the fact that these men knew the greatest and most despicable secret of the Third Reich; right down to the tiniest details, meant that every three to four months the men of every were murdered and replaced by a new unit from the next transport. The first task of each unit was to cremate their family and friends along with their predecessors from the previous Along with this . 7 & of the SS killing machine the Germans called for skilled volunteers; especially physicians, dentists, barbers and goldsmiths for whom there was work in the camp. Dario Gabbai (arrived at Auschwitz II in April 1944), who had been a barber at home in Greece, volunteered himself and his cousin, Morris Venezia, under the assumption that there would be regular work, and 13 Eugenics, an applied science aimed at improving the genetic make-up of human populations, was a popular scientific field of research in the early decades of the twentieth century. The first International Congress of Eugenics (1912) was attended by many of the scientific lights of the time. 14 Arendt, ! " , 58-61. 15 Rees, $ ', 294. 14 therefore security, for them in Birkenau. Without any prior warning they were led by a $ & and shown into a room, which they would later discover to be a gas chamber, and greeted by a mountain of naked corpses. Their $ & scrambled immediately on top of the bodies and started to cut the hair of dead women; showing Dario and Morris what he expected of them. The shocked cousins were then beaten with a truncheon by the same $ & until they too were working at a pace of which he approved. Morris tells of this first day how Dario was so terrified when one dead woman let out a long groan as the air was expelled from her lungs when he inadvertently stood on her stomach. The economic division of the SS had ordered in August 1942 that all hair, longer than a couple of centimetres, was to be cut and collected that it might be spun into thread. Among the uses they had for this processed human hair was the manufacture of felt socks for U-boat crews, hoses for the fire brigade and the railway, and the fabrication of explosive detonators.16 During the period of the Hungarian transports there were eight dentists (asked to volunteer at selection by Mengele under the pretence that there was a dental facility) who, with crude pliers and chisels, were made to hurriedly remove the entire bridgework of mouths to get access to gold teeth. A large reverse vice was employed to break open and hold the upper and lower jaw while this ‘extraction’ was taking place. Extracted gold teeth were then put in a pale of hydrochloric acid which melted away any remaining flesh and bone. Every orifice of every victim was searched for other precious metals and valuables. All such items were inserted through a small opening on the top of a sealed wooden box before they were moved on for further processing. Depending on the origin of each transport there might be as much as ten kilograms of gold collected from a gas chamber daily. The Reich had profited from everything its victims had owned, and now from their mortal remains it was determined to pillage everything it for its economic value; hair, prostheses, hidden valuables and gold teeth. Bodies were unceremoniously dragged with long metal grips from the gas chamber to the adjoining mortuary where this final and most ugly theft would take place. The SS camp administration had a gold smelting workshop set up in $ 000 to melt down all the precious metals retrieved from the victims for transport back to the old Reich. Gold was recast into 140 gram discs (worth approximately €5,790 today – July 2012). When the entire killing complex of four crematoria and Bunker II were in operation the gold intake could reach in excess of thirty-five kilograms each day (€1,447,360 today). While the National Socialist (or ‘Nazi’) Party had asserted that 3 ‘ ,’17 the facts of ‘special treatment’ showed this to be nothing more than a lie; everything the Nazis did in the inhuman treatment of people was, at bottom, about theft. The tiled floors of the gas chambers and the mortuaries were soaking with water from the hoses being used to cool the oven mechanisms on the floor above; water that was discoloured with the blood and gore of the victims. One result of the cyanide gas was that bodies came from the gas 16 The wetness of dryness of hair does not change the rate at which it burns; a fact that ensured the exact timing of an explosive detonation. 17 Nyiszli, * $ , 39. 15 chamber bleeding and oozing mucous from their mouths and nostrils;18 a state compounded by the procedures in the mortuary. It was in this condition that bodies were dragged by the head, arms or thighs through the processing area and on to the crematoria proper above. Between twenty and twenty-five bodies were put on the ‘corpse lift’ at a time for elevation to the men known as ‘stokers’ in the crematoria. As soon as every victim had been conveyed to the upper ‘grey zone’ powerful hoses were then used to wash down the walls and the floors of the rooms and chambers below. The walls, pillars and floor were covered in blood, vomit, urine and excrement (an effect of prussic acid asphyxiation which soiled the bodies of the dead). Detached fingernails had to be pulled from the plasterwork on the gas chamber walls; a harrowing reminder of people’s last fight for survival. Once the rooms and chambers were washed down a fresh coat of paint was daubed over the walls in preparation for the next transport. At the height of the Hungarian transports members of the the (the members of who were first to enter the gas chamber after a gassing) sought the help of Miklós Nyiszli with a ‘delicate matter.’ A young woman had been discovered to have survived the gassing and the SS had not yet discovered her. Nothing of this nature was known to have happened before or since. In the mortuary changing room Nyiszli revived the girl, whom he guessed to be no more than fifteen or sixteen and administered a number of injections. He comments that everyone wanted to save her as though she were their own daughter, and as she continued to shake convulsively the men covered her in as many warm blankets as they could find and gave her tea and some morsels of food. She could remember the order to undress and being herded into the ‘showers,’ and the fact that she had lost her parents in the chaos and confusion of the gassing. When the lights were turned out she spoke of the burning in her throat and lungs, but after this she could remember nothing else. Nyiszli considers that she must have fallen into a pocket of wet air, where the gas would not have worked well. In time, however, she was discovered by the SS. They would not allow her to enter the main prison population on the grounds that she might tell the other prisoners of her experience, and so they shot her. What appears here as yet another heartrending tale from the Holocaust clearly shows that the men of the were ‘not murderers;’ that even in the atrocious work they were forced to do they were capable – possibly even more so – of appreciating the sanctity of human life. For them this was a glimmer of hope, and the world of the crematorium was not a place where there were many signs of hope. This ‘miracle’ is dramatized in Tim Blake Nelson’s 2001 film – a film about the 1944 - : XII revolt. On the ground level of the crematoria it was the job of the ‘stokers’ of the to cremate the remains of the murdered. Each crematorium had fifteen functioning ovens, and the fact that it took an estimated twenty minutes to reduce a victim to ash meant that each facility had the capability of cremating 5,000 human beings every twenty-four hours.19 With all four crematoria operating with Bunker II this figure approached 25,000. On those occasions when transports were particularly small (less than 500 persons) the victims were simple shot in the back of the neck with a 18 19 Nyiszli, Nyiszli, - * $ * $ , 39. , 39. 16 low calibre handgun; making as little noise as possible. In an effort to keep up the secrecy in June and July 1944 thousands of postcards were handed out to inmates with the instruction that they were to write to their relatives and friends ensuring them that all was well; that they had been ‘resettled’ and that they had work. Miklós Nyiszli later wrote of how bags of replies were brought directly to the crematorium to be burned – this did not matter, however, as their intended recipients had already been burned. There was no one left to read them. 17 BIBLIOGRAPHY Arendt, Hannah, . Classics, 1963 and 2006. < 3 & .8 . London: Penguin .8 < = Harries, Richard, 1 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. = Hoess, Rudolf, . New York and London: Overlook Duckworth, 2012 , Holmes, Richard, , < / 6 8 > & 8 1 London: Ebury Press (Randon House), 2007 and 2008. Nyiszli, Miklós, 0 , ! 7 < . Oświęcim: Frap Books, 2001. < Rees, Laurence, 4 ? @ 17 London: BBC Books (Random House), 2005. Rose, Jacqueline, Steinbacher, Sybille, A : < © Jason Michael McCann, 2012 1 Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. . London: Penguin Books, 2005.