Army of Evil: A History of the SS (58 page)

Estimates for the total number of Hungarian Jews murdered range from 180,000 to 550,000. The true figure is probably around 400,000. And it should be remembered that all of these murders were committed at a time when the perpetrators knew that the war was as good as lost. This, perhaps more than any other SS atrocity, illustrates the murderous ferocity of the ideology that Himmler instilled in his “order,” because his men stuck to their task even as Germany spiralled towards inevitable military collapse. Meanwhile, Himmler himself was prepared to barter the lives of National Socialism’s supposed mortal enemies for tea, coffee, trucks and soap.

O
N 22
N
OVEMBER
1943, Höss had left Auschwitz to take up the post of Deputy Inspector of Concentration Camps at WVHA headquarters.
³⁸
Thereafter, Auschwitz was split into three administratively distinct camps. The main camp, Auschwitz I, was placed under the command of SS-Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Liebehenschel; Birkenau, which comprised the extermination camp and an agricultural sub-camp, was commanded by SS-Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Hartjenstein; while the industrial sub-camps, which included the IG Farben Buna plant and a growing number of other concerns, became Auschwitz III under SS-Captain Heinrich Schwarz. Liebehenschel subsequently took command of the Majdanek concentration camp in May 1944; SS-Major Richard Baer took his place at Auschwitz. At the same time, Hartjenstein handed command of Birkenau to SS-Captain Josef Kramer.
³⁹

Two months later, the advancing Soviet armies were within 150 miles of the Auschwitz complex and the process of evacuating prisoner workers began. At this time, there were some 155,000 prisoners within Auschwitz, Birkenau and the industrial sub-camps; about half of them had been evacuated by the beginning of October. Nevertheless, in
some respects, business carried on as usual within the camps. New buildings were erected and there were plans almost to double the size of the already vast Birkenau compound.

However, with the war clearly lost, both the SS and the remaining prisoners in the camp were becoming increasingly anxious about the future. In particular, the Jewish special units who worked within the gas chambers and crematoria knew that their days were numbered. Consequently, on 7 October, the special unit in Birkenau’s Crematorium IV staged a revolt during which they attempted to destroy the crematorium and the gas chamber with explosives smuggled in from one of Auschwitz III’s factories. The rebellion spread to several other crematoria, three SS men were killed and twelve wounded, and a number of special unit prisoners managed to break out of the camp and hide in the surrounding woodland. But any hopes that a general uprising would follow were soon dashed. Once the rebellion had been quelled, 425 members of the special units were killed, along with the women who had smuggled in the explosives. Crematorium IV was damaged beyond repair, but the remaining extermination facilities remained fully operational. Throughout October, some forty thousand people were murdered at Auschwitz–Birkenau.
⁴⁰

Himmler finally ordered the cessation of the extermination project the following month. The surviving members of the special units were now put to work eliminating all traces of the crimes that had been committed at Auschwitz. The ovens and the ventilation equipment from the gas chambers were dismantled and taken to other concentration camps; the corpse-burning pits were filled in and covered with turf; the chimneys and ducts in the gas chambers through which the Zyklon B had been introduced were blocked.
⁴¹

On 12 January 1945, a sudden Soviet advance threatened the Auschwitz complex directly. Within a few days, the Red Army was so close that the prisoners could hear their artillery; and, on the 17th, the decision was taken to evacuate the camp rather than leave the remaining prisoners to be found by the Soviets. By this stage, there were 68,000
prisoners within the whole complex. The intention was to march the prisoners to railheads at Rybnik and Gleiwitz, from where they would be transported on trains to concentration camps in the “old” Reich.
⁴²

The weather conditions were horrific and, of course, the prisoners were severely malnourished, weak and dressed only in their thin camp uniforms. Each was issued with just a small lump of bread for the march. Inevitably, many of the weaker prisoners could not keep up with the marching columns and were shot by the SS guards; many others died from exhaustion or exposure. Those who reached Gleiwitz were temporarily abandoned by the SS when a rumour circulated that the Soviets were in the area, and a few prisoners escaped into the countryside. However, most were too apathetic, scared or exhausted to make the break, and when the SS returned they were loaded into open wagons for the move westwards.
⁴³

Meanwhile, back within the Auschwitz complex, the remaining SS personnel attempted to cover their tracks. Much of the camp’s archive was destroyed on bonfires, and the remaining gas chamber buildings were blown up with explosives. The last of the extermination facilities, Crematorium V, was destroyed on 25–26 January, and the storage area for the possessions of Birkenau’s victims, known as “Canada” in the camp vernacular, was torched by the SS. The resultant inferno also destroyed many of the camp’s wooden huts.
⁴⁴

The Red Army arrived at Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. They found some six hundred corpses and around seven thousand living prisoners—those who had been too weak to take part in the evacuation. A significant number of them would die over the next few weeks.

The 43,000 surviving evacuees were now being distributed around other concentration camps. The regime in these camps was little different to that in Auschwitz: the prisoners continued to be worked to death, brutalised, starved and murdered by their new SS gaolers. A typical example was the Bergen–Belsen camp.
*
Originally used as a
holding camp for special Jewish prisoners, it was now a dumping ground for those evacuated from the East. The huge influx of prisoners completely overwhelmed existing supplies and medical provision, and the camp descended into chaos, with thousands dying from rampaging epidemics and starvation. Desperate prisoners both here and elsewhere were forced to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. In the last weeks of the war, Himmler finally allowed the Red Cross to distribute food and medicine within the camps; but this pathetic gesture, designed entirely to save his own skin, was far too little, far too late.

As the German military collapse continued in the spring of 1945, further evacuations from the camps took place, with marching columns of prisoners in their striped clothes becoming a common sight on Germany’s roads. At the end of April, approximately ten thousand prisoners from Neuengamme, Stutthof and Dora-Mittelbau—many of them former Auschwitz inmates—were loaded aboard the former cruise liners
Cap Arcona
and
Deutschland
and the smaller vessels
Thielbek
and
Athen
off the port of Lübeck on the Baltic coast. The Regional Leader of Hamburg at the time later claimed that the ships were going to take the prisoners to neutral Sweden; the former Gestapo chief of Lübeck said that they were going to be scuttled in the sea to kill all the prisoners. We shall never know the truth, because the German authorities did not get the chance to display either their compassion or their brutality. On 3 May, three days after Hitler’s suicide in Berlin, the ships were attacked by rocket-firing fighter-bombers of the RAF. The
Cap Arcona
and the
Thielbek
were severely damaged, set on fire and sunk. Between them, they had held approximately 6,500 prisoners; no more than 500 survived.
⁴⁵

S
INCE THE LIBERATION
of Auschwitz, many estimates have been made regarding the total number of murders committed there. As early as May 1945, the Soviet Army released a press statement which suggested that four million prisoners had perished in the camp. This figure was reached by estimating the crematoria’s full capacity and then assuming that the camp had operated flat out for more than two and a half years; but it was picked up and quoted in the world’s media, as well as at the post-war Nuremberg trials. For many years, it was also the “official” number quoted by the Auschwitz memorial.

Rudolf Höss, the former commandant, came up with an estimate of three million, with 500,000 prisoners dying from disease or malnutrition, rather than gassing. The latest scholarship suggests that around 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, with 960,000 of them Jewish, approximately 75,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and between 10,000 and 15,000 from other nations. Up to 200,000 others died of disease or malnutrition.
⁴⁶

The Auschwitz extermination complex was a place of industrial savagery unparalleled in human history. It was also the inevitable consequence of SS ideology.

*
Martin Bormann was also implicated in this crime, and served a year in prison for his part in it.

*
The first adjutant at Auschwitz was Josef Kramer, who subsequently commanded the Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace, the Birkenau camp at Auschwitz and finally Bergen–Belsen, where he was captured by the British Army.

*
However, the latest evidence (cited in Steinbacher,
Auschwitz
, p. 90) is that Höss misremembered this at his post-war trial: it seems the order was actually given on 26 September 1941.

*
Höss might have got this wrong, too. Eichmann denied this version of events at his trial in Israel, and Höss seems to have conflated a series of meetings or conversations that actually took place over several years.

*
Blobel was possibly given this onerous task as punishment for his alcoholism.

*
It has often been suggested that transporting Jews to the death camps seriously undermined the German war effort. In reality, even at the height of the transports, no more than a handful of trains were assigned to this task each day.

*
This seems to have been the only SS detachment which operated outside continental Europe.

*
The two men had fallen out in the first half of 1939 over the roles of the Sipo and SD within the state.

*
Others were Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Gross-Rosen and Sachsenhausen.

T
he SS ended with a whimper. By the summer of 1944, the Third Reich was beleaguered on all fronts and the vast military machine that Hitler and his generals had assembled was crumbling. The tide of the war had been decisively turned by the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–43, and ultimately by the failure of the German Kursk offensive in July 1943. Thereafter, despite the best efforts of ordinary German soldiers and airmen, as well as the workers on the home front who attempted to sustain them, the German armed forces could do little more than fight a series of increasingly futile holding actions against the overwhelming strength of the Red Army. In September 1943, Italy—Germany’s principal European ally—surrendered. Nine months later, the Germans’ inability to repulse the Allied landings in northern France merely confirmed that the war was already irretrievably lost.

This fact was not lost on Himmler and the senior officers of the SS. Walter Schellenberg had succeeded Heinz Jost as chief of Office VI of the RSHA in 1943,
¹
and he had also become Himmler’s closest professional confidant since the death of Heydrich. Through his access to
foreign intelligence, Schellenberg was in no doubt that Germany was heading for defeat, and indeed had been so ever since the United States had joined the war in December 1941. By his own account, he had proposed seeking peace with the Western Allies to Himmler as early as the summer of 1942. Himmler was too nervous and indecisive to plot against Hitler at that time, but he had not dismissed the idea out of hand.
²

Schellenberg knew that the West would not countenance an armistice while Hitler remained in control, and he hoped to convince Himmler of that reality, too. Throughout 1943, he used Office VI’s network of contacts in neutral countries to float the idea of the removal of Hitler as a prelude to peace negotiations with a number of potential intermediaries. But all of this came to nothing: Schellenberg was unable to obtain any meaningful guidance or support from the Western Allies, who remained implacably committed to a policy of unconditional surrender. Without this, Himmler continued to lack the strength of will to act against Hitler.