Clear priorities in the early development
of facilities at Auschwitz, as at other concentration camps, were to establish
a punishment block wherein to torture and/or kill resistant prisoners, and, a
crematorium to dispose of their bodies. Auschwitz’ Block 11 was organized into
large holding cells with three-tiered bunks placed close together, each room
housing over a hundred men. In the basement were smaller, dark cells with no
windows and little ventilation. Four of the cells allowed only standing room;
up to four men could be wedged into one of these at a time: anyone who had attempted
to escape from the camp would be left there to die; others being punished for a
particular offense would languish for a given period. Food, water, and toilet
facilities were not provided. In the first of my two September 23, 2013 posts,
entitled “Auschwitz” I described the processes of execution daily conducted in
the courtyard between blocks 10 and 11. Each body was carried to the entrance
of this yard and dumped there as the next condemned person was led out from the
side exit. The bodies were then loaded onto carts and taken along the road to
the crematorium at the end of that row of blocks. Aside from prisoners murdered
in this fashion, others died from starvation, disease, or from the brutality of
their guards. As the numbers of victims escalated, the initial crematorium oven
was insufficient for its purpose.
The first incinerator had been installed in
June, 1940. It had a capacity of two corpses at a time, or up to 70 in a
twenty-four hour period. Within a few months the head of the building office at
Auschwitz requested a second incinerator. A year later in November, 1941, a
third was urgently requested. Another function for Auschwitz had emerged from
Germany’s invasion of the USSR that summer: the processing and murder of Soviet
prisoners of war, in particular those who were communist functionaries. In
October, of the 9,908 Soviet prisoners who arrived at the camp, 1,255 were
executed that month; a further 1,238 were condemned in the first five days of
November. As well, Polish resisters, men and women, from all over Eastern
Silesia were sent to Auschwitz for interrogation (with torture), conviction,
and execution. These people were not registered as prisoners with the camp.
They were “outsiders,” channelled into Auschwitz because of its location and
its ever-increasing facilities for killing.
The crematorium had been installed in one
section of the former ammunition depot at the end of one row of barracks. A
room adjacent to it was transformed into a mortuary. As the numbers being
executed in the courtyard at block 11 rose, the more convenient mortuary was
converted for use as a killing site. Prisoners in a line would be led into the
space, stepping close to the corpses of others who had preceded them. The SS
officer in charge would shoot each in the back of the neck in his turn.
Prisoners employed in the facility would pull the executed over to the crematorium
door where others would load their bodies onto cast-iron “trucks” for distribution
into the incinerators. On pages 179-180, Dwork and Van Pelt’s “Auschwitz” reproduces
a detailed description of this process given by Filip Muller, one of the few
slave labourers employed in the facility to survive.
Even before the outbreak of war, Nazi
eugenics policies had been made operational through the murder of the disabled
and mentally ill. The most convenient method found through various experiments
was with carbon monoxide directly piped into the sealed compartment of a moving
truck filled with victims. It was an
effective but relatively slow process given the numbers of whom the Nazis now
envisioned disposing. In September of 1941 Rudolf Hoess’ suggested that his second
in command experiment with the use of Zyklone B, an agent used to control the
spread of lice. His first attempt held in just one of the basement cells of
Block 11, was successful. It led quickly to a more ambitious slaughter: the
killing of over a thousand Soviet prisoners of war and Polish dissidents
crammed into the whole of the basement. An effective method had been discovered
to allow the rapid murder of thousands in a day! Block 11 could not, however,
be used for this function on a regular basis. Other uses of the building were
disrupted for the several days it took to kill the prisoners, remove their
bodies, and to air out the facility.
The other on-going difficulty in pursuing
this course lay in the disposal of bodies. An area about three kilometres from
Auschwitz at the village of Birkenau, was already being designed and prepared
as an extension of the original camp, to be known as Auschwitz-Birkenau or
Auschwitz 2. An existing cottage on the site was to be refurbished to house two
new gas chambers and a crematorium. In the meantime the former morgue, former
killing-by-bullet-to-the-back-of-the-head site beside the crematoria at
Auschwitz 1, was reconstituted a gas chamber. Its first use was on September
16, 1941. Nine hundred Soviet prisoners of war were crammed within. Three
square portholes had been cut into the roof of the room, then covered with
tightly fitting wooden lids. Once the prisoners were locked within, pellets of Zyklon
B were dropped into the room. Screams of the men were heard as they realized
their fate and strained hopelessly to break down the restraining doors. A few
hours later the powerful fan system that had been installed earlier to clear
the room of odours accumulated by shooting executions, were turned on to rid
the space of gas.
Before the invasion of Russia by German
forces on June 22, 1941 no specific plans for the mass murder of Jews had been
put into effect. Ghettos were used as places of concentration of Jews until
they could be deported further east in the “cleansing” of Reich territories.
With the army speeding onto Russian soil came Himmler’s special Einsatzgruppen
forces, specifically charged by him with the identification and execution of
political leaders, and, importantly, the murder of Jews. This shift is an
example of Hitler’s officers taking initiatives that moved policies in more
radical directions than those previously envisioned, albeit toward options that
would not displease their leader.
Initially the Einsatzgruppen did not openly murder local Jews, but
rather relied upon others in the community to turn upon their neighbours. (See my August 20, 2013 post for more
information about the Einsatzgruppen.)
A conviction
that the invasion of Russia would occupy but a few summer months led to an
ambitious effort to stream German and Czech Jews from their homelands toward
the east. In September Himmler informed the administration in charge of the
Lodz ghetto that he was sending 60,000 Jews there, using that spot as a
temporary transition point before the Jews were settled in Russia. In less than
two months over 20,000 people were housed in the already vastly overcrowded
ghetto. But the war was not concluded and clearly would not end soon. The
crisis in overcrowding at Lodz, stemming directly from the Nazis’ miscalculation
of Russian resistance and from difficulties related to the vast terrain they
were attempting to conquer, triggered the first dedicated use of a death
location for Jews. Seeking relief from the overcrowding at Lodz, the
administrative head of the district, Gauleiter Greiser, (also on his own
initiative,) turned to a higher SS and police official, Wilhelm Koppe. Koppe
called in Herbert Lange, an orchestrator of previous T4 programs, murder
through carbon monoxide.
The village of
Chelmno was chosen as a site to relieve Lodz’ overcrowding. A suitable house
surrounded by a large fence became a reception point. Groups of Jews from the
Lodz ghetto were transported there with the promise that they would be taken to
places of settlement where they would be given work and good food. These enticements
prompted some of the transported to volunteer. At their destination they were
told to remove their clothing for disinfection and to go for a bath. The
hallway toward “the bath” led directly into a truck wedged tightly to a basement
door of the building. Told they were being driven a short distance to the
bathing location, the 100-150 detainees were loaded aboard, the truck was
locked and driven into the forest. Carbon monoxide pumped into the body of the
truck suffocated all within on their journey. Once in the forest their bodies
were removed and thrown into a pre-arranged mass grave. In the meantime another
truck load from Lodz had arrived at the reception centre. Between December 8,
1941 and April 9, 1943 when the Chelmo facility was blown up by an SS
detachment attempting to hide evidence of atrocities, about 150,000 Jews were
murdered there. Only two survived.
In my next post
I will give an example of the early involvement of the Einsatzgruppen in villages
mainly composed of Jews.
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