Auschwitz

The most infamous of the death camps, Auschwitz, had been opened in the summer of 1940 for Polish intelligentsia. By 1942 it had been restructured. Its gas chambers and crematoria began to function that May. In the following year it was extended to include another extermination camp, Birkenau, and a slave labour camp, Monowitz. Deaths incurred at all three sites were usually registered under the name of Auschwitz. From 1942-5 over 2,000,000 Jews were put to death there, along with large numbers of gypsies, Poles, prisoners of war, and other so-called “undesirables.”

Despite the German focus on killing Jews in extermination camps during and after 1942, other means such as shooting civilians on the spot or rounding them up into larger groups for mass executions by machine gun continued unabated, especially in the east as the German army moved further and further into Soviet-held territories. In already controlled lands the starvation of ghettoized populations, and the murderous brutality inflicted upon labour camp inmates, accounted for many tens of thousands of deaths. But Hitler’s determination to eradicate all vestiges of European Jewry led to the development and extension of rail lines and cars for the sole purpose of transporting Jews to concentration camps, thus diverting immense resources from the war effort.

Martin Gilbert’s maps show in detail the origins and numbers of Jews deported from areas throughout Europe in each of the months of 1942. Early on most came from Poland and were directed to Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka. But as the facilities at Auschwitz were extended, they became the preferred termination point for trains originating in France, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Croatia. Within all of the conquered areas efforts were escalated to further refine the capture of Jews, garnering information from government documents or from informants about those who had evaded early detection.

Reading through the pages that accompany Gilbert’s 316 maps is a harrowing experience that over and over again brings the true horror of the Holocaust into perspective. His detail breaks down the overall numbers into particular incidents, locales, and even individuals. In some cases Gilbert includes names and ages of, for example, some of the children as young as four deported to their deaths without parents to accompany them. He gives the birth places and names of people born in North Africa, Uzbekistan, Mexico, the United States and others who had migrated to Paris before the war in order to begin new lives, only to be swept up by the SS and transported to Auschwitz to their deaths. He includes many instances of resistance or revolt among groups or by individuals attempting to save themselves, as well as the outcomes of these attempts. Overriding all of this detail though, is the inexorable fact of the unremitting activity of the forces dedicated to the destruction of the Jews. The deportations throughout the whole of 1942 and the numbers murdered at the death camps or in large scale massacres show the determination and the deadly organization of the SS. Reporting to their masters in Berlin entailed an exactitude of numbers and dates of deportations and murders. It is from the records of the Germans themselves that Gilbert was in great part able to assemble such a detailed picture of their atrocities.

Throughout the summer and autumn of 1942 the gathering and deportation of Jews from western Europe to Auschwitz and from central and eastern Poland to Treblinka, Chelmno, and Sobibor continued apace. At Treblinka in the last two weeks of October, for example, over 80,000 Polish Jews were sent to the gas chambers. Further east Jews continued to be murdered in the streets or in large scale massacres in woods and quarries. In the town of Luboml in the Ukraine 10,000 were machine gunned on October 1. People living for some time in camps or ghettos which had been established as holding areas such as Sachsenhausen near Berlin, Buchenwald in central Germany, and Theresiendstadt close to Prague, were now taken by train to Auschwitz to be gassed. In October the SS also effected its first deportation of Jews from Norway, sending 209 men and boys over the age of 16 by steamer to Stettin, Germany and from there by train to Auschwitz. In November 531 women and children were taken by the same route.

In my next post I will write about another specific "racial" group marked out by the SS for eradication: the Gypsies.