The Final Solution

The Wannsee Conference proposed an alternative method to exterminate the Jews in part because of the moral and psychological toll these atrocities were taking on some of the men perpetrating them. Many had begun to drink heavily and some had had breakdowns because of the internal stress that the outright murder of civilians caused. Over 1941 more and more men were sent to Berlin for sick leave as they succumbed to the pressures of recurrent nightmares, for example, of thousands of persons being gunned down and buried in mass graves. At first Himmler condemned these men for “succumbing to weakness” but as incidents of their disturbance grew, it became clear that another methodology was needed. The gassing of large groups had been considered and experimented with for some time. Used even before the outbreak of war at the “euthanasia institute” at Bernberg, a city south of Berlin, its purpose was to rid the area of mentally or physically infirm Germans considered pollutants of the desired Aryan “race.” Groups of people forced into lorries were driven about while the trucks’ exhaust fumes, fed into the body of the vehicles, would suffocate the passengers. Their deaths would be an agonizing scramble as in their panic they struggled with one another for any breath of air.

Between the April, 1941 German occupation of Belgrade and August, 1941 this method of killing was copied. Following the deportation of 15,000 Jews to a concentration camp at Zemun, the deportees had been systematically killed in mobile gas units -- trucks falsely labelled Red Cross vans. A report was sent to Berlin that the “Jewish problem” was totally solved: 20,000 of Serbia’s 23,000 Jews had by that time been murdered. Interest grew over the year in this method of killing Jews and some experiments were taken to judge its merit. In November a group of 1200 inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp were transported to Bernberg to be gassed.

Two weeks later another mass gassing at Chelmno, a town west of Warsaw claimed close to 4500 lives. Jewish villagers in the area were rounded up and taken by train to a station near Chelmno. Here they were locked overnight in an abandoned mill without food or water. The next morning they were loaded into one of five lorries which had a total capacity of about 650 people. Exhaust fumes killed them as they were driven to woods nearby. There the bodies were thrown into deep pits while the lorries returned to the station area to gather more victims. Gilbert mentions that Adolf Eichmann, in charge of transportation to the death camps from this period into 1945, was present at Chelmno to witness the effectiveness of the gassing method. He and other Nazi leaders were experimenting with the idea of using large scale gassing camps as a way of eradicating Jews, an efficient method which also limited the moral and psychological damage being inflicted on their personnel. At these death camps it was planned that some Jewish prisoners would be used to carry out the preparation of the new arrivals for the gas chambers as well as the disposal of corpses. At a later date they themselves would join the ranks of victims. At Wannsee these decisions were presented and plans were formed for the most systematic methods of their achievement.

Much thought had already gone into the presentation given there. Numbers had been tabulated showing the estimated populations of Jews in countries already controlled by the Germans as well as ones for countries that Hitler planned to take over. These people were the targets of what now was called “The Final Solution” of the Jewish question, a solution which entailed slave labour for able-bodied Jews and mass deportation to extermination camps for all others. The numbers given were:

1)Under German control: Occupied France: 165,000; Vichy France (and French North Africa): 700,000; Belgium: 43,000; Holland: 160,800; Norway: 1,300; Denmark: 5,600; Germany: 131,800; Bohemia and Moravia: 74,200; Austria: 43,700; Italy: 58,000; Slovakia: 88,000; Hungary: 742,800; General Government (an area of conquered Poland): 2,284,000; the Bialystok District: 400,000; the Eastern Territories of Poland: 420,000; Latvia: 3,500; Lithuania: 34,000; Byelorussia: 446,484; Ukraine: 2,994,684; Rumania: 342,000; Croatia: 40,000; Serbia: 10,000; Bulgaria: 48,000; Albania: 200; and, Greece: 69,600.

2)Under envisioned future German control: Great Britain: 330,000; Ireland: 4,000; Portugal: 3,000; Spain: 6,000; Switzerland: 18,000; Sweden: 8,000; Finland: 2,300; and, European Turkey: 55,000.

Before the Wannsee Conference deportations from smaller towns and rural villages had been aimed at gathering all Jews into large-scale ghettos. In these thousands died from starvation, brutality, and illnesses brought on by overcrowding in poorly heated and ventilated, generally unhygienic conditions. Ghettos already established were maintained for some time while other groups of Jews were rounded up and transported by trains to three new extermination camps already being prepared by March, 1941. The slave labourers used to build the facilities were among the first to be sacrificed to its purpose. The new camps were at Belzec in south eastern Poland, Sobibor, further north, and at Treblinka, about forty miles north and east of Warsaw. With these camps in operation hundreds of thousands of Jews from Poland, Germany, and western and southern Europe were marshalled for deportation eastward by train. Deportees were told that they were being taken to places for resettlement. Most were taken directly to the camps to be murdered on arrival.

In the next blog I will write about the development of Auschwitz as a central hub of the Holocaust. We will visit there as well as Birkenau, its nearby slave labour camp, during our visit to Cracow.