Auschwitz (37 page)

Nor should the knowledge that Best's Machiavellian mind intended all along to allow large numbers of Danish Jews to escape change our judgment about the moral worth of the actions of the rest of the Danish population—for, importantly, when the Danes rose up in solidarity against the deportations, no one knew what was in Best's mind. Everyone who helped the Jews believed at the time that they were acting directly against the wishes of the Germans, and at great personal risk. So it remains difficult to disagree with Knud Dyby that “[W]hat the Danish people did, they did out of their own heart and their own friendliness. It was a simple feeling of humanity. It was simply goodness and decency. And that was what everybody—all over Europe—should have done.” There could be no starker contrast with the heroic action of the Danes than what was about to occur in another European country during the spring and summer of 1944—the year of greatest killing in the history of Auschwitz.

A
uschwitz became the site of the largest mass murder in history as a result of the events of 1944. Up until the spring of that year, the death toll at the camp remained several hundred thousand below that of Treblinka. But in the spring and early summer of 1944, Auschwitz was stretched to capacity and beyond by the most horrific and frenzied killing spree the camp would ever see. The Jews who were to suffer and die during this terrible time came almost exclusively from one country—Hungary.

The reasons why so many Hungarian Jews suddenly found themselves on trains to Auschwitz as the war neared its end are complex. The Hungarians had always tried to play a sophisticated political game with the Nazis, wavering between two powerful and contradictory emotions. On the one hand, they had a traditional fear of German power, and on the other they wanted to cooperate with the winning side–especially if it meant gaining territory at the expense of their eastern neighbor, Romania.

It was not until October 1940 that the Hungarians finally made their minds up and allied themselves completely with the Axis powers by joining the Tripartite Pact. By then, an agreement had been reached, brokered by Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, which transferred northern Transylvania to Hungary from Romania. Bribed by this territory, which they had long coveted, and betting on the Nazis winning the war (which was the “smart” position to take in the summer and early autumn of 1940), the Hungarians moved politically and strategically closer to their giant neighbor.

In spring 1941, the Hungarians joined Hitler in his invasion of Yugoslavia and then, in June, Hungary sent troops to take part in the Nazis' attempted conquest of the Soviet Union. As the promised Blitzkrieg defeat of Stalin failed to materialize and the war dragged on much longer than expected, however, Hungary began to realize it had backed the wrong side. In January 1943. the Red Army smashed through Hungarian forces on the Eastern Front, causing catastrophic losses—approximately 150,000 Hungarian troops were killed, wounded, or captured. The new “smart” position, the Hungarian authorities thought, was to distance Hungary from the Nazis. Talks were held during 1943 with the Western Allies, and an arrangement was reached that the Hungarians would change sides once Hungarian territory was under threat from the Allied advance.

In the spring of 1944 Hitler decided to move on his fair-weather friend. In traditional historiography, this decision is characterized as the act of a man driven by considerations of ideology rather than practical strategy. Recent scholarly research
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shows the opposite, however. Rather than being motivated by a simple desire to punish his ally for fickleness, Hitler and the Nazis were acting relatively rationally. Hungary was one of the few countries in eastern Europe that they had not yet plundered. It was a place of enormous wealth, and now, judged Hitler, was the time for the Nazis to snatch it.

It was, of course, the Jews who were to be the Nazis' particular target. There were more than 725,000 Hungarian Jews—nearly 5 percent of the population. More importantly, although they had suffered the effects of anti-Semitic legislation, the majority of their communities—and much of their wealth—were still largely intact. Hungarian Jews of military age had been sent to work in labor gangs on the Eastern Front where many thousands had died, but there was still hope among the rest of the Jewish community that they might escape crippling persecution; hope, that is, until the Nazis occupied their country.

The German army drove into Hungary on March 19, 1944, and, the very next day, SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann followed with the task of expropriating everything possible from the Jews of Hungary and then deporting them. Typically, one of the first objects Eichmann expropriated from the Hungarian Jews was something for himself—the luxurious Aschner Villa in the smart Rose Mount area of Budapest.

By now, the Nazis' “Final Solution” had evolved into a new phase. Eichmann was charged not with organizing simple extermination, as his colleagues in the General Government in Poland had been in 1942. Given the dire military situation and the increased need for forced labor, more effort was to be made by the Nazis to separate those Jews who could serve the German war effort through work from those who served no useful purpose for the Third Reich—who were to be killed at once. Auschwitz, from the Nazi perspective, therefore was the perfect destination for the Hungarian Jews—because, by now, Dr. Mengele and his colleagues had considerable experience of exactly this kind of selection. Auschwitz could thus become the conduit—a kind of giant human sieve—through which selected Hungarians could reach the slave labor factories of the Reich.

In the beginning, Eichmann's initiatives in Hungary seemed to conform to the all-too-familiar pattern of Nazi anti-Jewish action. He successfully negotiated the cooperation of the Hungarian police for the impending deportations, and he helped organize the ghettoization of the Jewish population outside Budapest. The Germans had initially demanded that 100,000 Hungarian Jews be sent “to the Reich” but, following the ghettoization of the Jews, the Hungarian authorities volunteered the rest of the country's Jews. Just as others—notably the Slovakians—had found before them, once the status quo was disturbed and breadwinners removed from Jewish families the “easiest” way forward was to encourage the Nazis to take everyone. This was something Eichmann was all too happy to do.

Parallel with these predictable developments, however, Eichmann was about to pursue another course. On April 25, 1944, Joel Brand—a Hungarian Jew who was a leading figure in the Relief and Rescue Committee, an organization committed to helping Jews escape from Nazi control—came to the Hotel Majestic in Budapest to meet Eichmann. Brand had already attended previous meetings with him and other SS officers in an attempt to bribe them to allow a number of Jews out of Hungary. Now Eichmann said to him:

Brand, not surprisingly, was astonished by Eichmann's offer. He protested that he could not be put into a position of deciding who should live and who should die. But Eichmann replied, “I can't sell you all the Jews of Europe. But I could let one million go. We are interested in goods, not in money. Travel abroad and liaise directly with your international authorities and with the Allies. And then come back with a concrete offer.”
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It was an extraordinary moment in the history of the Nazis' “Final Solution.” What caused the man whose career had been closely tied to the extermination of the Jews for so many years to make a proposal that was so seemingly out-of-character? A clue lies in the confused political situation in which Eichmann found himself. For, upon his arrival in Budapest, Eichmann had discovered that he was not the only SS officer charged with special tasks in Hungary—two others, Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) Gerhard Clages and Obersturmbannführer Kurt Becher, were also in town. Clages was pursuing various “intelligence” tasks, while Becher was trying to blackmail the Weiss family, owners of the biggest industrial conglomerate in Hungary, into giving its shares in the company to the SS in return for safe passage out of the country. It was obvious to Eichmann that the duties of his SS colleagues—who were all of similar rank to him—crossed over into what he had previously considered his exclusive area of control. The riches of Hungary lay like a piece of prime raw meat in front of all of these jackals, and Eichmann realized he would have to fight to gain the upper hand.

By the time of his meeting with Brand, Eichmann knew that his rival Becher had successfully arranged for shares in the Manfred-Weiss works to be transferred to the Nazis; in return, about fifty members of the Weiss family were allowed to leave and head for neutral countries. Becher's career seemed to be on the ascendancy and he had moved into a villa—even grander than Eichmann's—left vacant by one of the Weisses. Eichmann, in a typical piece of self-serving testimony in 1961, claimed in court during his prosecution for war crimes that he had wanted Brand to succeed in negotiating with the Allies, but it seems likely that his motivation for the April 25
offer was more venal and straightforward—he was seeking to regain the initiative from Becher. If his boss, Himmler, was permitting this new development in Jewish policy then he, Eichmann, would not be left behind, even if it did go against his instincts.

Eichmann also must have strongly suspected that the chances of the deal succeeding, and of the Allies actually handing over material to the Nazis that they could use against the Red Army in the East, were never very high. By going along with the Brand mission, he could show Himmler that he was willing to adapt to changing circumstances, gain ground on Becher, and still—almost certainly—be able to pursue the selection and extermination program to which he had become committed.

During the next two meetings between Eichmann and Brand the deal took shape. Brand was to be dispatched to Istanbul, where he would try and arrange for the Allies to hand over 10,000 trucks equipped for winter operations against Soviet forces; in exchange the Nazis would give up one million Jews. Brand argued for some Jews to be released in advance to show Eichmann's “good faith,” and made reference to 600 emigration passes that the Relief and Rescue committee had managed to obtain. These were certificates that—in theory at least—allowed the bearer to emigrate to Palestine. Eichmann, however, not only rejected Brand's proposal but insisted that his wife, Hansi, be moved to the Hotel Majestic as a hostage.

At the final meeting at the Hotel Majestic, Clages, Becher, and several other Nazis were also present. It seemed that every German agency in town now wanted a piece of this mission. Clages was particularly keen that a mysterious individual called Bandi Grosz accompany Brand to Istanbul. Grosz had been an agent of the Abwehr, the Germany intelligence agency whose work had recently been wound up in Hungary and was superseded by Clages' intelligence operation.

Grosz was leaving on an altogether different mission from Brand's—one that would only become clear in the succeeding months. At dusk on May 17, 1944, the two men were driven across the border to Austria to catch a plane to Istanbul. Brand remembers looking across at Grosz, who sat next to him scruffy and unshaven, furtively trying to memorize the contents of a page and a half of typewritten instructions.
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It was an inauspicious and
mysterious beginning to what would turn out to be an inauspicious and mysterious mission.

The possible existence of any “Jews for trucks” deal made no difference either to Eichmann's immediate timetable to deport the Hungarian Jews or to the special arrangements that were being made at Auschwitz to receive them. In preparation for the massive influx expected at the camp there were changes in the SS leadership. Arthur Liebehenschel, who had taken over as commandant of the camp in November 1943, was relieved of his command and transferred to the more minor job of commandant of Majdanek in the Lublin district. A new appointment was made as commander of the overall SS garrison at Auschwitz—none other than Rudolf Höss. The commandants of both Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz–Birkenau were now answerable to him. Höss had returned with a vengeance; any of his past alleged misdemeanors were now forgotten by the SS leadership in the face of the huge task that lay ahead.

Just one day after returning to the camp, on May 9, Höss ordered preparations for the arrival of the Hungarian Jews to be accelerated. Gossip at Auschwitz had characterized Liebehenschel's reign as one of inefficiency and lack of true SS “hardness,” and Höss was determined to change all that. It was only now that the railway spur from the main line about two kilometers away was finally completed so that transports could be delivered into the heart of Birkenau, arriving at a new “ramp” 100 meters away from twin crematoria 2 and 3. Höss also ordered the immediate repair of the furnaces of crematorium 5 and five pits to be dug nearby for the burning of corpses.
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Höss knew from his previous experience during 1942 that actually murdering the Jews would present him and his SS colleagues with little difficulty; the challenge would be disposing of so many hundreds of thousands of bodies at one time.

It is worth noting in passing that Höss showed every sign of being keen to return to Auschwitz. Indeed, he had refused to sever all his ties with the camp when he left at the end of 1943, and his family had remained in the commandant's house on the edge of Auschwitz main camp while he had been working in Berlin (perhaps conscious of the fact that it was a good deal safer for a German family to live in southern Poland than the Nazi capital, the target of Allied bombing raids). Now he threw himself with great
energy into his new, more senior role. One's intuitive position—that running Auschwitz probably would be the worst job in the world—is therefore proved wrong in Höss's case. Not only did he fight to keep the post before it was taken from him in November 1943, but he relished returning to it six months later.