27 January 2010 was the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz–Birkenau.
In loving memory of my paternal aunts, Hindi and Neni, their husbands and their children. They were taken from Balassagyarmat to be murdered in Auschwitz.
“One does not have dealings with pests and parasites; one does not rear and cherish them; one destroys them as speedily and thoroughly as possible.”
Paul Anton de Lagarde
19th-century German nationalist, on Jews; 1881
The Rise of Rudolf Höss
On the 22nd of March 1933, just six weeks after Hitler came to power, on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the medieval town of Dachau, the first concentration camp in Nazi Germany opened to intern opponents of the new Nazi regime.
On 1st of August 1934, Rudolf Höss, a young, dedicated Nazi, joined the SS at Dachau, as a guard. In Dachau, the system of Kapos was developed and later spread throughout the Nazi concentration camp system. The word ‘Kapos’ may mean ‘foreman’ from the French Caporal (Corporal) or maybe from the Italian capo (head). These trustees carried out the will of the Nazi camp commandants and guards, and were as brutal as the SS. Even Jewish Kapos inflicted harsh treatment on their fellow prisoners.
In 1938, Höss was transferred as an adjutant to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Rudolf Höss, 1947
Source: Wikipedia
On 30th of April 1940, Hauptstrumführer Rudolf Höss, at the age of 39, after 6 years’ service in the SS (he was fast rising in the ranks), was appointed commandant of a new concentration camp to be set up in an old Army barracks near Oœwiêcim, a town annexed by Nazi Germany and renamed Auschwitz. Auschwitz was situated in an ideal location for the Germans, secluded yet near a major railway junction, easily accessible from all over Europe, and where the Nazis could operate in total secrecy.
Höss’ first assignment was to create a facility capable to house 10,000 prisoners, but as he later wrote in his memoirs,
“The task wasn't easy. In the shortest possible time, I had to create a camp for 10,000 prisoners using the existing complex of buildings, which were well constructed but were completely run down and swarming with vermin.”
Auschwitz was set up to incarcerate, punish and work to death Polish dissidents and intellectuals whom the Nazis wished to eliminate. Höss adopted the now famous motto of Dachau to Auschwitz: ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘Work Sets You Free’), which he prominently displayed above Auschwitz ‘s main gate.
Entrance gate to Auschwitz.
Source: USHMM
Building of the Camp
Because coal, water, lime and cheap slave labour were plentiful in the area, I.G. Farben, the German industrial giant, decided to set up a factory in Auschwitz for the production of synthetic rubber (Buna), a commodity necessary for the war effort. Suddenly this minor camp became potentially very important. To accommodate industry and agriculture based on slave labour, as well as for security reasons, Höss established an Auschwitz ‘Zone of Interest’, taking up 40 km of land, with 5,000 acres of prime farmland. SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, decided to place this huge farm under SS ownership, where about 10,000 inmates, mostly women, would be working. An agricultural experimental station was also to be set up to assist German farmers expected to settle there. Himmler, “the chicken farmer”, held a degree in agriculture, which may explain this interest in farming.
On a visit on 1st of March 1941, Himmler ordered the camp’s capacity to be tripled. Auschwitz was destined to become the largest concentration camp in the Reich. Höss objected on the grounds of lack of building materials, staff shortages and shortness of time. Himmler’s answer was,
“I want to hear no more about difficulties. For an SS officer there are no difficulties! When they come up it is your job to get rid of them. How you do it is your business, not mine.”
Höss understood this to be a carte blanche to pilfer, steal and confiscate building and other materials from anywhere in occupied Poland.
Soviet Prisoners of War
On 22nd of June 1941, along a 1,800 miles front, over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR (Operation Barbarossa). Right behind the invading armies, followed the Einsatzgruppen (Special Task Forces, mobile SS paramilitary units), established before the invasion of the Soviet Union for the purpose of “liquidating” Jews and Communists. According to the Barbarossa decree, the commissars (Soviet political army officers) were to be executed on capture. Several hundred of the Russian POWs were taken to Auschwitz. The Soviet prisoners were treated even harsher than the other inmates. For those prisoners who the SS deemed guilty of some infringement, there were blocks 10 and 11. Located inside a walled enclosure, here some inmates were made to spend nights in “standing-cells”. These cells were about 16 ft, and four men would be placed inside them; they could do nothing but stand, and in the morning, they were forced to carry on working with the other prisoners. A favourite punishment was to tie the hands of inmates behind their backs and hang them suspended by their wrists. In the basement the “starvation cells” were located; prisoners locked in here were given neither food nor water until they were dead. In the courtyard of block 11, at the Black Wall there were executions directly after convictions in the courtroom that was also located in Block 11.
At this early stage, the majority of the inmates were Polish, but that was about to change. As Höss recalled,
“in the summer of 1941, Himmler called for me and explained: The Führer has ordered the Final Solution of the Jewish question – and we have to carry out this task. For reasons of transport and isolation, I have picked Auschwitz for this”.
(There were other camps too, like the Operation Reinhard death camps of Sobibor, Belzek and Treblinka, set up specifically for murdering Jews, but Auschwitz was by far the biggest).
Rudolf Höss found that gassing by carbon monoxide, the usual method, was inefficient, so his deputy, Fritzsch, started experimenting to find a more suitable way to commit mass murder. While Höss was away on an official journey in late August 1941, Fritzsch tried out Zyklon B (a cyanide-based gas used for vermin control) on Soviet POWs, who were, for this purpose, locked up in the basement of block 11. In the following days, Fritzsch repeated this test with the gas on further victims in the presence of his superior, Höss. Thus, the future method for the mass murders in Auschwitz was devised. In the autumn of 1941, a gas chamber was put into operation in the mortuary of the crematorium. The last killings in this facility were in December 1942; some 60,000 people perished therein.
Nazi interrogation of Soviet Prisoners of War, Poland 1941
Source: USHMM
To accommodate Himmler’s wish to house about 100,000 Russian prisoners of war, Auschwitz had to undergo a further major expansion. On the 26th of Sept 1941, an order was issued to construct a completely new camp, Auschwitz 2, about two miles from the main camp, on swampy grounds replacing the village of Birkenau. In addition, a new, more efficient gas chamber/crematorium was to be built in Auschwitz 1, the main camp. In the autumn of 1941, another 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war were brought in to construct the new camp. Of this 10,000, hardly any survived to see the spring of ‘42. Birkenau, the first sub-camp of Auschwitz, was much bigger than the parent camp. To accommodate the needs of I.G. Farben, a third camp was set up near the factory. Auschwitz 3 (Monovitz) housed the slave labourers working for the chemical giant. To provide for the different companies attracted there by free labour, over 47 other sub-camps were dotted about in the ‘Zone of Interest’.
Mass Murder of Jews
In January 1942, Himmler announced the arrival of the first batch of Jews to Auschwitz, numbering some 150,000, a third of them women. By 1943, Auschwitz-Birkenau became a major centre for killing Jews. The first temporary gas chamber in Birkenau was established, probably in May 1942, in an abandoned farmhouse with red brickwork exterior, called the ‘Red House’. Sometimes the SS referred to it as ‘Bunker 1’. A second temporary gas chamber, not far from the first, was soon established. The ‘White House’ or ‘Bunker 2’ was a whitewashed building. The trains of overcrowded cattle trucks bringing Jews from all over occupied Europe, travelling for days without food or water under appalling sanitary conditions, stopped in an open field about 2.5 miles from the bunkers. Those who survived this journey disembarked as the SS were screaming, creating confusion, while showering them with heavy blows. Separated according to sex, they had to file past SS doctors and other functionaries in columns of five for selection. A few fit and young people could be chosen for work, but the vast majority walked to the White or Red House. Under the pretext of having a shower, they were made to strip naked before entering the gas chambers. The Red House had a capacity of about 800 and the White House of 1,200 people at a time. When the room was full, the SS locked the airtight doors and through an opening at the side, poured the Zyklon B crystals in. There was always a doctor on hand to make sure that the SS men administering the gas did not accidentally poison themselves. The corpses were then taken to either Auschwitz 1 for cremation or were thrown in to a mass grave with lime scattered over them. The Germans used Jewish prisoners, the Sonderkommando, to do the gruesome work of dragging out and disposing of the corpses. The Sonderkommando members’ life span was short. In order to keep their activities secret, the SS periodically killed them and selected new ones.
With the advent of summer, heat set in accelerating the decomposition of corpses, causing an unpleasant liquid to seep out of the mass graves. To rectify the matter, in September 1942, the Sonderkommando had to dig up the victims to incinerate them in open ditches.
In July 1942, the purpose-built Crematorium 2 (with a gas chamber attached, of course) came in to operation in Birkenau, making the bunkers redundant. In the spring of 1943, gassing in the two bunkers stopped, and the Red House was demolished (the White House was left standing. It would be brought back in service during the 1944 peak, when the gas chambers could not cope with the large numbers of killings). Crematorium 3 was built as a mirror image of Crematorium 2 on the opposite side of the street. Crematoria 4 and 5 were also mirror images of each other. The last two were erected in a wooded part of the camp; the SS called them the ‘Forest Crematoria’ Each crematorium/gas chamber consisted of a ‘changing room’ (with notices in German, French, Greek and Hungarian, showing the way to the ‘bathroom’ or ‘disinfection room’), a gas chamber and the crematorium. Before cremation, gold teeth were prised out of the jaws of the dead and melted into ingots destined for the Reichsbank. Women’s hair was sheared off to be used for felt or for the war industry. In addition, spectacles, prosthetic limbs and clothing were collected for the use of the German Volk. Even the ashes of the victims were utilised as fertiliser or filling material in road building.
Sketch of Auschwitz I (left) and Auschwitz II (right),
taken from the Vrba–Wetzler report in the 'Auschwitz Protocols'.
Source: Wikipedia
Medical Experiments
Auschwitz gave the SS doctors a unique opportunity to perform the kind of experiments on human beings (Jews) which no civilised person would do on guinea pigs. For example, Professor Dr Carl Clauberg and Dr Horst Schumann experimented with sterilisation. They developed a method of non-surgical mass sterilisation, which involved introducing a specially prepared chemical irritant into the female reproductive organs that produced inflammation. The experiments killed some of the subjects, and others were murdered so that autopsies could be performed on them.
The infamous Dr Josef Mengele studied the phenomenon of twins, as well as the physiology and pathology of dwarfism. He was also interested in people with different-coloured irises. Mengele subjected twins and people with physical handicaps to special medical examinations whilst alive. Then he ordered them to be killed by phenol injection so that he could do comparative analysis of internal organs at autopsy.
Dr Johann Paul Kremer, professor at the University of Münster, specialised in changes that occur in the human organism as a result of starvation. Kremer selected prisoners whom he thought were good experimental material, and questioned them as they lay on the autopsy table awaiting the lethal phenol injection.
SS camp physicians, Friedrich Entress, Helmuth Vetter, and Eduard Wirths, carried out clinical trials on new drugs for I.G. Farben, and the pharmaceutical giant, Bayer. All experimentation was carried out without the use of anaesthetics or painkillers.
The Fate of the Living
Those who were selected to die by overwork and undernourishment with maltreatment, were sold for slave labour by the SS to outside companies, or were used inside the camps. Those selected to work in quarries, building sites or anywhere in the open, had a life expectancy of only a few days. All activities had to be done in a hurry without the possibility of slackening, under the lashes of the Kapo and SS. However, if one were lucky enough to have an indoors assignment, there was some chance of survival. If you were detailed to work in the kitchens or in the warehouses, like ‘Canada’ where the SS collected the personal belongings of the victims, you were indeed ‘lucky’. You had adequate food and had an opportunity to ‘organise’, that is to steal, from the SS loot, but the risk of being caught was great and the punishment was inevitably a horrible death.
On 17th and 18th of July 1942, Himmler came to Auschwitz for an inspection. He visited the agricultural estate, a project close to his heart, and approved some building projects. However the main event was the stage-by-stage performance of the gassing and cremation, which he observed through specially created observation peepholes. Himmler was so satisfied with what he had seen that he promoted commandant Höss to SS-Oberstrumbannfürer.
Liquidation of the Jews of Hungary
In the summer of 1944, day after day, up to 10,000 Hungarian Jews arrived in Birkenau, destined directly for the gas chambers. My cousins, aunts, uncles, and countless relations perished there and if it were not for my mother’s quick thinking, she, my brother and I would have gone up the chimney in smoke too. (We were ordered to a sports ground to be deported from there. When, through a loud speaker, the Arrow Cross (the Hungarian Nazis) had announced that mothers with babes in arm were allowed to return to their homes, my mother took my younger brother of 4 in her arm and instructed me to grab hold of her skirt and simply sauntered out. No one stopped us.)
Höss was transferred to Berlin, but was recalled to oversee the extermination of Hungary’s Jewry. For his affords he was awarded the War Merit Cross first and second-class for services to the Reich. On 29th July 1944, he returned to Berlin.
Apart from Jews, there were Russians, Poles and other inmates in Auschwitz-Birkenau too. Gypsies and Sinti also suffered tremendously. Homosexuals, J-hovah’s Witnesses, political prisoners and others were also imprisoned and often murdered there. However, there was one important difference, if they repudiated their beliefs, after signing a secrecy undertaking, for them, there was a chance of release.
Roma ("Gypsies") prisoners at Bełżec
Source: USHMM
Sonderkommando Uprising
On 7th of October 1944, the Sonderkommando staged a rebellion, blowing up Crematorium 4 and killing a few of their German guards. Before the uprising, the Sonderkommando contacted the international resistance (Communist) that had lain dormant in Auschwitz and sought to launch a joint uprising. When they refused, the Sonderkommando decided to go it alone. All the participants in the uprising died in combat. Afterwards, the Germans discovered that the explosives used had been smuggled in by a group of young Jewish women from elsewhere in Auschwitz. On 6th of January 1945, four of these women were executed.
The Beginning of the End
In July 1944, Soviet troops entered Galicia and South Poland. Majdanek was liberated and they were marching on to Auschwitz. The Germans began a systematic dismantling of the camp. They transported to the ‘Old Reich’ whatever loot, building materials and equipment they could. In November 1944, on Himmler’s orders, all gassing were halted. It was the Sonderkommando’s job to dismantle the killing mechanism and remove all signs of the crimes committed there. Crematorium 1 was turned into an air-raid shelter. The chimney was taken down and the hole for introducing Zyklon-B disappeared. Crematorium 4, the one that was badly damaged by the Sonderkommando uprising, was pulled down. All usable parts such as the ovens and fans were taken away.
In the face of Soviet advances, the Germans decided to move the inmates to other camps. In formations of columns of five, they were forced to march under the watchful eyes of their SS guards. Later some would board open goods railway trucks. On 17th of January 1945, some 58,000 prisoners were evacuated, 20,000 from the main camp and the rest from the auxiliary camps. They set out in the freezing Polish winter, inadequately dressed in flimsy prisoner garbs, bare foot or wearing the uniform wooden clogs. Anyone unable to keep up was shot and left at the roadside. The open railways goods wagons provided for part of the journey, afforded them no protection against the bitterly cold wind; people froze or starved to death. About 43,000 survived this journey. As the Soviets advanced, some of the prisoners were made to march on further and further.
Liberation
On 20th January 1945, the SS removed the sentries from the watchtowers, but the killings carried on. Within a week, 7,000 inmates were murdered in the sub-camps. In Crematorium 5, executions were taking place until the very last moment. On the night of 26-27th January 1945, this last installation was also blown up. On Saturday 27th January 1945, the First Ukrainian Front of the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau and its sub-camps. The liberators found at least 600 corpses. There were some 7,000 people barely alive. In the warehouses, they came across, among other things, 370,000 men’s suits, 837,000 women’s coats, 440,000 pairs of shoes, and 7.7 tonnes of human hair packed ready for transport.
The liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp by the Red Army, 1945
Source: Wikipedia
Holocaust Denials
As I am writing this, the world is remembering the 70th anniversary of the German attack on Poland, unleashing a 6-year frenzy of murder and mayhem the world over. Over 30 million people, civilians and soldiers lost their lives. Most nations suffered, but none as much as the Jews of Europe. There is not a single Jewish family originating from the continent that has not lost loved ones. Nevertheless, there are a growing number of people, despite eyewitness accounts, doubting that the Holocaust ever happened. After the War, a new breed of anti-Semite emerged, the Holocaust denier. As early as 1947-8 Maurice Bardèche, Paul Rassiner, Robert Faurisson and Austin J. App disputed the existence of the gas chambers in Auschwitz and concluded in their publication that the high fatality was due to malnutrition and disease, not extermination. The number of victims was also disputed and these “historians” claimed that the Holocaust was an invention of the Jewish-controlled West in order to blackmail the Federal German Government both financially and politically. Some of these people claimed that Auschwitz was some compulsory holiday camp with swimming pools and diving boards. The Fire Brigade of Auschwitz-Birkenau, made up of privileged Reich Deutsche prisoners, did make a pool for firefighting purposes and they did put up a diving board there, but it was for their own use only. A Jew had no access to adequate drinking water, never mind a swimming pool!
Today, streams of people visit the site of Auschwitz to pay tribute to the dead and to learn from the past. One can only hope that Auschwitz will be a stark reminder of the depth of depravity people can sink to.
Recommended further readings:
Laurence Rees – Auschwitz: The Nazis & the ‘Final Solution’
BBC Books, 2005
Sybille Steinbacher – Auschwitz: A History
Penguin UK, 2005
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