Auschwitz (14 page)

Other Jews sold diamond rings or other jewelry for food. As a result, Poles and ethnic Germans living on the other side of the wire could make a fortune. “If I got something in my hand for 100 Marks and it was worth 5,000 Marks, then I'd be stupid not to buy it,” says Egon Zielke,
¹⁵
an ethnic German living in Łódź who confesses to having made huge profits from his dealings with the inhabitants of the ghetto. “They [the Jews] couldn't nibble on a ring, but if they could get a piece of bread for it, then they could survive for a day or two. You don't have to be a businessman—that's what life's about.”

By August 1940 it was clear to the Nazis that the Jews trapped in the Łódź ghetto were “hoarding” no longer, for they had begun to starve. Pursuing typical Nazi short-term thinking, the local German authorities had not prepared for this inevitable crisis. They now faced a moment of decision. Should they let the Jews starve or should they allow them to work? The German Chief of Ghetto Administration, Hans Biebow, favored employing the Jews, while his deputy Alexander Palfinger thought—in direct contradiction of the evidence around him—that the Jews might still be hoarding money and should therefore be denied food. If he was wrong and they no longer had the means to pay for their own sustenance, then “a rapid dying out of the Jews is for us a matter of total indifference.”
¹⁶

Biebow won the argument and workshops were established within the
ghetto, eventually nearly a hundred of them, most producing textiles. Those who had jobs were given more food than those who did not, establishing the principle—before it became commonplace among Nazi administrators—of a strict delineation between those Jews whom the Germans considered “productive” and those thought to be “useless eaters.” The Nazis allowed the Jewish Council of the Łódź ghetto (called the Ältestenrat or Council of Elders), under its chairman Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, considerable latitude in the running of the place. The Ältestenrat organized the factories, the food distribution, the ghetto police, and a host of other services. In the process the members did not make themselves popular with the rest of the Jews in the ghetto. “They got a special ration,” says Jacob Zylberstein. “They had special shops to go to and pick up their food which was very nice—enough to live quite comfortably. I was very angry that a selective part of people in the ghetto was supplied [that way] and the rest just ignored.”

This, then, was the world that Lucille Eichengreen, her sister, and her mother walked into in October 1941—an overcrowded, disease-ridden place where most of the inhabitants were hungry and some lived much better than others. Late and unwanted arrivals as they were, the incoming German Jews were forced to live wherever they could find any space. “We had to sleep on the floor of a classroom,” says Lucille. “There were no cots, no straw, nothing. And once a day we would get soup and a little piece of bread.”

Jacob Zylberstein remembers the arrival of the German Jews saying:

The German Jews started to sell their belongings to the Polish Jews to acquire extra food or better living conditions. Lucille Eichengreen was fortunate—because her family was of Polish descent, bartering was easier for them.

The German Jews quickly realized that, to stand the best chance of survival, they had to get jobs within the ghetto. Getting employment was difficult, however, not least because there was an element of friction between the German and Polish Jews. “The very first [German] transport were very critical of the way things were done in the ghetto,” says Lucille. “And there were remarks: ‘This is not official ... this is not correct ... we will teach them.' Well, you can't walk into somebody else's house and rearrange the furniture, and this is what they were trying to do.”

But the greatest problem the German Jews faced was lack of “connections” within the ghetto. “It was basically a fairly corrupt system,” says Lucille.

If resentment was felt by the existing population of the ghetto over the arrival of the German Jews, their presence also caused anger amongst the
Nazi leadership of the Warthegau. Protests had begun as soon as the figure of 60,000 Jews to be deported from the “Old Reich” to Łódź had been proposed by Himmler. As a result, the number was reduced to 20,000 Jews and 5,000 gypsies. But even this influx still presented major difficulties for the Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser. Together with Wilhelm Koppe, the Higher SS and Police Leader for the region, Greiser sought a solution to the problem of overcrowding in the ghetto. It is hardly surprising, given that ever since the summer of 1941 murder had been the preferred answer in the East to this kind of crisis, that their minds turned to methods of killing. They called upon the services of SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Herbert Lange, who had been in command of a special unit charged with murdering the disabled in East Prussia and the surrounding area. For some of the killing he and his team had used a “gas van” with a hermetically sealed rear compartment into which bottled carbon monoxide gas was pumped, and such vans were now seen by local Nazis as the most appropriate response to the sudden overcrowding in the Łódź ghetto.

According to his SS driver, Walter Burmeister, late that autumn Lange hit upon a suitable site for his gas vans in the Warthegau. “To make it plain from the start,” Lange told his driver, “absolute secrecy is crucial. I have orders to form a special commando in Chełmno. Other staff from Posen and from the state police in Litzmannstadt [the German name for Łódź are going to join us. We have a tough but important job to do.”
¹⁷
At the small village of Chełmno, some eighty kilometers northwest of Łódź, Lange and his team prepared a country house—the “Schloss”—for the “tough but important job” of mass murder. Chełmno, not Auschwitz, was about to become the first location for the killing of selected Jews from the Łódź ghetto.

Chełmno was not the only extermination facility under construction towards the end of 1941. On November 1, work began on a camp at Bełźec in the Lublin district in eastern Poland. Most of the personnel for Bełźec, including the first commandant of the camp, SS Captain Christian Wirth, were taken from the adult euthanasia program. Deep in the General Government, Bełzec seems to have been established—like Chełmno—with the intention of creating a place to kill “unproductive” Jews from the local area. But, unlike Chełmno, it was the first camp to be planned from the start to contain stationary gas chambers linked to engines producing carbon
monoxide gas. As such, it was the logical conclusion of the gassing experiments conducted by Widmann in the East in September 1941.

Meanwhile, the deportation of Jews from the Old Reich continued. Between October 1941 and February 1942 a total of 58,000 Jews were sent East to a variety of destinations including the Łódź ghetto. Everywhere they were sent, the local Nazi authorities had to improvise a solution to deal with their arrival—acting sometimes on the authority of Berlin, sometimes on their own initiative. About 7,000 Jews from Hamburg were sent to Minsk, where they were found shelter in a part of the ghetto that had recently been cleared for them—by shooting the nearly 12,000 Soviet Jews who lived there. Jews from Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, and other German cities were sent to Kaunas in Lithuania, where approximately 5,000 of them were shot dead by members of Einsatzkommando 3. They were the first German Jews to be murdered on arrival as a result of being transported East. Another transport from Berlin reached Riga in Latvia on November 30, and all aboard were also killed as soon as they arrived. But this action was against Himmler's wishes—he had previously rung Heydrich with the message: “Jewish transport from Berlin. No liquidation.” Friedrich Jeckeln, the SS commander who had ordered the execution, was subsequently reprimanded by Himmler.

As these events demonstrate, during the autumn of 1941 there was little consistency of policy regarding the fate of the Reich Jews: Himmler protested at the shootings in Riga, but did not object to those in Kaunas. Nonetheless, despite these confused indicators there is plenty of evidence that the decision to send the Reich Jews to the East was a watershed moment. In October, talking after dinner, Hitler remarked, “No one can say to me we can't send them [the Jews] into the swamp! Who then cares about our people? It is good if the fear that we are exterminating the Jews goes before us.”
¹⁸

It also is clear that discussions were taking place among the Nazi leadership that autumn to send to the East
all
the Jews under German control. In France, Reinhard Heydrich justified the burning of Paris synagogues by saying that he had given the action his approval “only at the point where the Jews were identified on the highest authority and most vehemently as being those responsible for setting Europe alight, and who must ultimately disappear from Europe.”
¹⁹
That same month, November 1941, Hitler, in a discussion
with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who had fled to Berlin, said that he wanted all Jews, even those not under German control, “to be destroyed.”
²⁰

By deciding to deport the Reich Jews, Hitler had begun a chain of causation that would eventually lead to their extermination. In the Soviet Union, Jewish men, women, and children already were being shot by the killing squads. By sending many of the Reich Jews into this exact area, what else did Hitler think would happen to them? The line between killing local Jews to provide room for the arriving Reich Jews, and killing the arriving Reich Jews instead, was a thin one from the first—as Jeckeln's actions in Riga demonstrate. That distinction became even more blurred for the Nazi leadership of the General Government once Galicia, in the far east of Poland and bordering the killing fields of the Soviet Union, came under its control as the war progressed. The Einsatzgruppe had been killing Galician Jews for weeks, and it would be hard for the local authorities to hold to a position that Jews could be shot in one part of the General Government but not in another.

This does not mean, however, that Hitler and the other leading Nazis made a firm decision in the autumn of 1941 to murder all the Jews under German control. In the first place, there simply was not yet the capacity to commit such a crime. The only killing installations under construction in November 1941 were a gas van facility at Chełmno and a small, fixed gas chamber installation at Bełźec. An order was also placed around this time with a German firm for a large thirty-two-chamber furnace crematorium to be built at Mogilev in Belarussia, which some see as evidence of an intention—never fulfilled—to build another extermination center far in the East.

All of these initiatives also can be explained, however, by the desire of the local authorities to have the capacity either to kill the indigenous Jews to make space for the arriving Reich Jews, or to murder those Jews in their control incapable of work whom they believed were no longer “useful” to them. Crucially, at Auschwitz in the autumn of 1941 no plans were being made to increase the killing capacity at the camp. A new crematorium was being designed, to be sure, but that was simply to replace the old one in the main camp.

This confused state of affairs was to be clarified, with disastrous consequences for the fate of the Jews, by events that took place halfway around the world. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. On
December 11, as allies of the Japanese, the Germans declared war on the United States. For Hitler all this was “proof” that international Jewry had orchestrated a world conflict, and in a radio broadcast to the German people immediately after the declaration of war he explicitly stated that “the Jews” were manipulating President Roosevelt just as they were his other great enemy, Josef Stalin.

Hitler went still further in a speech he gave to the Nazi leadership—both Gauleiter and Reichleiter—the following day. He now linked the outbreak of this “world war” with his prophecy uttered in the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, in which he had threatened that “if the Jews succeed in causing world war” the result would be the “extermination of the Jews of Europe.” On December 13th, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: