Auschwitz (29 page)

Karmi and the other resistance fighters sought out what weapons they could and gathered furniture together to construct makeshift defensive positions; others in the ghetto population dug underground bunkers as hideouts. Despite all this extensive preparation, however, no one was under any illusion that the Germans could be defeated. “We never thought of being victorious,” says Karmi. “This was all only not to get on the trains when they said we should. If we succeeded for one day, then we would try another day.”

Karmi took a position, along with half a dozen or so of his comrades,
on the third floor of a house that overlooked the ghetto wall. He clasped a German P38 pistol in his hand and waited for the Nazis. The rumor was that the Germans had promised to clear the ghetto by April 20, Hitler's birthday, as a present for their Führer. And it was on Hitler's birthday that Karmi's unit first went into action: “We heard the sound of three hundred Germans marching towards us—as if they were marching to the front, to Stalingrad or somewhere. They came exactly in front of our position.”

At that moment, the leader of his group threw two grenades in quick succession towards the Germans as a signal for Karmi and the others to start firing.

The Germans, under the overall command of SS General Jürgen Stroop, quickly realized that they were facing tougher resistance than they had initially expected. Tens of thousands of Jews were in hiding, the vast majority underground. The streets of the ghetto were all but deserted, and there were scarcely any Jews available to deport. So the Germans decided on a simple and brutal solution to their problem—they would burn the Jews out. Street by street, block by block, they set fire to the ghetto. Faced with overwhelming force in front of them and flaming buildings all around, Ahron Karmi and his comrades retreated to the sewers. From there he managed to crawl out, under the ghetto wire, and reach the outskirts of Warsaw—
where his life scarcely became much safer: “After two years, from this group of eighty people who went out to the forest only eleven people were left.”

According to Stroop's report of the action, which is the major contemporary written source of information on the ghetto uprising, 56,065 Jews were eventually captured. Stroop further claimed that about 7,000 Jews were killed in the fighting inside the ghetto for the loss of fewer than twenty German soldiers—figures that clearly minimize the German losses while exaggerating the Jewish dead.

Regardless of how Stroop tried to spin events in the Warsaw ghetto, the reality of the action did not escape Himmler. The uprising represented a dangerous precedent—evidence for the first time of large-scale, coordinated resistance by the Jewish population. It would have confirmed Himmler in his view that the ghettos were potentially uncontrollable. They were, to him, part of a necessary solution to a problem that was past. For Himmler the future “management” of the “Final Solution” lay elsewhere—specifically at Auschwitz.

In March 1943, just a few weeks before the Warsaw ghetto uprising, an event of huge significance took place at Auschwitz: The first crematorium opened at Birkenau. This installation had a long and checkered history. Originally conceived in October 1941, it had been intended to replace the old crematorium in the main camp but its proposed location was subsequently moved to Birkenau.

During 1942, the crucial turning point in the planning stage came when the facility's function was changed by SS architect Walter Dejaco. The basement rooms—designed originally as mortuaries—were adapted to perform two separate functions. One underground room would be a large undressing area and the second, at right-angles to the first, would be a gas chamber. Zyklon B canisters would be introduced into the gas chamber from above by means of hatches on the roof. On the ground floor was a large crematorium with three mufflers capable of burning five corpses in each. Bodies were to be transferred from the gas chamber in the basement to the crematorium by means of a small lift.

No one knows the exact date on which the SS leadership ordered the transformation of the building. But the subsequent shift in function can be traced via a variety of orders from the Auschwitz construction office—for
example, the alteration of the doors to the gas chamber so that they contained a “spy hole” and opened outwards rather than, as originally planned, inwards (a change necessitated by the knowledge that the doors would be blocked by dead bodies after the gassing had taken place). Other changes included the removal of a corpse chute and the insertion of additional stairs down to the basement—an obvious reference to the fact that more people would now walk, rather than be carried, into what had been originally designed as a mortuary.

At the outset, just one crematorium had been planned, but in parallel with this change in function came the decision to order several more similar installations. By early summer 1943, a total of four combination crematoria–gas chambers were in operation at Auschwitz–Birkenau. Two (crematoria 2 and 3) were built according to the modified original plan with the gas chambers in the basement, and they were situated less than 100 meters from what was planned as the new arrival area or “ramp” within Birkenau (which was not finally completed until late spring 1944).

Two more (crematoria 4 and 5) were placed in a remote area of Birkenau near the original improvised gas chambers of “The Little Red House” and “The Little White House.” These had their gas chambers not in the basement but on the same level as the cremation ovens on the ground floor. For the Nazi planners this represented an obvious design “improvement,” because it meant that bodies no longer needed to be transported from the basement to the ground floor. Crematoria 4 and 5 each had one large oven with eight separate furnace doors. In total, these four crematoria had the capacity to murder about 4,400 people every day and then dispose of the bodies. Auschwitz, by the summer of 1943, therefore had the capacity to kill more than 120,000 people a month.

The solid brick buildings of the Auschwitz crematoria represent in physical terms the particular horror of the Nazi's “Final Solution.” No longer was the killing to take place in adapted cottages; now it would be conducted in factory-like installations that were capable of extermination on an industrial scale. The “hot-blooded” massacre of women and children has occurred at various times throughout history, but this killing seems something entirely new—the careful creation of places where human beings were to be murdered in an entirely cold-blooded manner. The calm, dispassionate,
systematic nature of the process finds tangible expression in the neat red brick structure of the crematoria of Birkenau.

In one respect, however, the emphasis placed on the Auschwitz–Birkenau crematoria, though understandable, is misleading. The crematoria, which did not commence operation until spring 1943, were not the first solid killing installations of the Nazis' “Final Solution.” Much more improvised, gas chambers were in use at the Operation Reinhard death camps the previous year—indeed, by December 1942, the original gas chamber complex at Treblinka had already been replaced by a much more robust larger one. Furthermore, the crematoria of Auschwitz came into operation well after the peak of the killing. Approximately 2.7 million Jews were murdered in 1942 (about 200,000 of them in Auschwitz, 1.65 million in the Operation Reinhard camps, and 850,000 shot by mobile killing squads in the East); while in 1943 a total of approximately 500,000 Jews were killed, around half of this number at Auschwitz.

Nonetheless, Auschwitz was of growing importance in the Nazi state. For years, there had been tensions between those Nazis who believed that the Jews should be made to work for the Reich and those who believed that they should be murdered. At the January 1942 Wannsee conference, Reinhard Heydrich articulated how these two seemingly contradictory notions could be combined by a policy of working the Jews to death. In practice, however, especially following Himmler's order that the Jews of the General Government were to be murdered, the two policies were often in conflict. As Lieutenant Battle witnessed at Przemyśl, Jews capable of work were still ordered to be sent to their deaths at Bełźec.

By spring 1943, it was obvious to men like Himmler that the only installation in the Nazi empire capable of satisfactorily uniting the twin goals of work and murder was Auschwitz. Thus, the crematoria/gas chambers of Birkenau were to be the hub of a huge semi-industrial complex. Here, selected Jews could first be sent to work at one of a large number of sub-camps nearby, and then, when they were deemed no longer fit to work after months of appalling mistreatment, they could be transported a few miles to the extermination facilities of Auschwitz–Birkenau.

Both ideologically and practically, Auschwitz fitted perfectly into Himmler's plans. He would have perceived flexibility within the system—depending
on the need for labor, the standard used to judge “fitness for work” could be altered. And, perhaps more importantly to him in the light of events in Warsaw, he would have realized that the SS could exercise a level of security within the Auschwitz Zone of Interest that was impossible within the ghettos.

Eventually, there were twenty-eight
⁴
Auschwitz sub-camps in operation close to various industrial facilities throughout Upper Silesia—from the Goleszów cement works to the Eintrachthütte armaments factory, from the Energie-Versorgung Oberschlesien power plant to the giant camp at Monowitz built to service the I.G. Farben Buna works. About 10,000 Auschwitz prisoners (including the Italian scientist and writer Primo Levi, whose post-war books sought to comprehend the brutality of the Nazi regime) would eventually be based at Monowitz, and by 1944 a total of more than 40,000
⁵
inmates were working as slave labor at the various industrial plants around Upper Silesia. It is estimated that Auschwitz eventually generated approximately 30 million marks
⁶
of pure profit for the Nazi state by selling this forced labor to private concerns.

Conditions in these sub-camps could be just as bad as at Auschwitz main camp or Auschwitz–Birkenau. One of the most notorious was Fürstengrube, built near a coal mine, and it was to Fürstengrube that Benjamin Jacobs
⁷
was sent in the early autumn of 1943. Normally this was tantamount to a sentence of death—life expectancy in the coal mines around Auschwitz could be measured in weeks. But Jacobs had a skill that saved him—he had some training as a dentist—and his experience demonstrates the level of cynicism the Nazis had reached in their desire to exploit the Jews before—and even after—death.

As a result of his knowledge of dentistry, Jacobs first began to look after the inmates and then the Nazis in authority at the camp.

The “only time” that Benjamin Jacobs “regretted” his role as a dentist at the work camp was when he was ordered to extract gold teeth from the mouths of those inmates who had died. He had to walk into the room that contained the corpses of prisoners who had been shot at work or died in the mines. He thought “the people looked grotesque” and he “saw things” that he “could never believe.” He had to kneel close to the bodies and “open the mouth forcibly by an instrument” that separated the upper jaw from the lower jaw. As it did so it made “the sound of cracking.” Once the mouth of the dead body was held open Jacobs extracted the gold teeth: “It wasn't something that I can be proud of. I was emotionless at the time. I wanted to survive. Even so this life wasn't very acceptable, but life is still something that you want to hang on to.”

The gold taken from the mouths of the dead workers was melted down so that it could be used to fashion jewelry, in a process that exemplified the overall Nazi vision for the whole of the Auschwitz complex. Nothing—no matter how intimate—that belonged to the inmates was to be wasted. This was an attitude that found further expression both in Auschwitz main camp and Auschwitz–Birkenau in the sorting areas known as “Canada.”

Linda Breder,
⁸
only nineteen years old when she began working in “Canada” in the main camp in 1943, had arrived in Auschwitz the year before on one of the first women's transports from Slovakia. After an initial period in a tough commando working in the fields, she had been selected for the comparatively less strenuous task of sorting the belongings stolen from the arriving prisoners: “Actually, working in ‘Canada' saved my life because we had food, we got water and we could take a shower there.” The work that Linda Breder was forced to do may have been less gruesome than Benjamin Jacobs', but it was conceptually similar—ensuring that the Nazis obtained the greatest possible economic benefit from those whom they destroyed.