Auschwitz (9 page)

As a result of the invasion, twenty-seven million Soviet citizens would
die—greater losses than any nation in history has ever sustained as a consequence of a single conflict. And the war would also provide the context for the implementation of the Nazis' “Final Solution”—the extermination of the Jews. It is thus impossible to understand the way in which Auschwitz was now to develop without setting the changes at the camp in the context of both the planning for Operation Barbarossa and the course of the war in the summer and autumn of 1941. Indeed, from this point until Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, the progress—or lack of it—of the war in the East would dominate Nazi thinking.

The Nazis believed this was not a war against the “civilized” nations of the West, but a fight to the death against Judeo-Bolshevik “subhumans.” As a consequence, Franz Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff, recorded in his diary on March 17, 1941, that in Russia “force must be used in its most brutal form” and “the intelligentsia put in by Stalin must be exterminated.” This attitude meant that it was possible for economic planners to come up with a devastating solution to the problem of feeding the German army during its advance into the Soviet Union.

A document of May 2, 1941, from the Wehrmacht's central economic agency states that “the entire German army” would have to “be fed at the expense of Russia.” The consequence of this was clear: “Thereby tens of millions of men will undoubtedly starve to death if we take away all we need from the country.”
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Three weeks later, on May 23rd, another even more radical document was produced by the same agency. Entitled “Political-Economic Guidelines for the Economic Organization East,” it stated that the goal now was to use Russian resources not just for feeding the German army, but also for supplying Nazi-controlled Europe. As a consequence, thirty million people in the northern part of the Soviet Union might die of starvation.
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Recent research has demonstrated that such shocking documents do not represent a thought process that was merely expedient; there existed a strand of intellectual thinking within the Nazi movement that saw such population reduction as economically justified. Working to a theory of “optimum population size,” Nazi economic planners could examine any area and work out—simply from the number of people living there—whether the land would produce a profit or a loss. For example, German economist
Helmut Meinhold of the Institute for German Development Work in the East calculated in 1941 that 5.83 million Poles (including old people and children) were “surplus” to requirements.
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The existence of this surplus population meant “an actual erosion of capital.” The people who constituted this excess population were “Ballastexistenzen”—a “waste of space.” At this stage, such economists had not followed their own logic through—they were not calling for the physical extermination of these Ballastexistenzen in Poland. But these planners did note how Stalin had dealt with similar overpopulation in the Soviet Union. In the Ukraine during the 1930s, a policy of deportation of the kulak (rich peasant) class and collectivization of the remainder had led to the deaths of about nine million people.

Such thinking also gave an intellectual underpinning to the civilian deaths which were expected to result from the German invasion of the Soviet Union. To the Nazi planners, the fact that “thirty million people” might die of starvation would not only be of immediate benefit to the advancing German army, it would also have a long-term benefit for the German people. Fewer people to feed in the Soviet Union would not only mean that more food could be transported west for the citizens of Munich or Hamburg, it would also facilitate the swift Germanization of the occupied territories. Himmler had already noted that most Polish farms were too small to support a German family and now, he no doubt believed, mass starvation would ease the creation of great German estates in the Soviet Union. Just before the invasion was launched Himmler spoke frankly to his colleagues at a weekend party: “The purpose of the Russian campaign [is] to decimate the Slavic population by 30 million.”
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The prospect of war against the Soviet Union clearly unleashed the most radical ideas imaginable in the minds of leading Nazis. When Hitler wrote to Mussolini to tell him of his decision to invade the Soviet Union, he confessed that now he felt “spiritually free”; and that “spiritual freedom” consisted of the ability to act during this conflict in any way he liked. As Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief, wrote in his diary on June 16, 1941, “The Führer says that we must gain the victory, no matter whether we do right or wrong. We have so much to answer for anyhow ...”

It was also clear from this planning stage of the war that the Jews of the Soviet Union were to suffer grievously. In a speech to the Reichstag on January
30, 1939, Hitler had made an explicit connection between any future world war and the elimination of the Jews:

Hitler used the term “bolshevization” specifically to emphasize the linkage in Nazi racial theory between Communism and Judaism. In his mind, the Soviet Union was the home of a Bolshevik–Jewish conspiracy. It mattered not that Stalin himself had clear anti-Semitic tendencies. The Nazi fantasy was that Jews secretly pulled the strings throughout Stalin's empire.

To deal with the perceived threat from the Jews of the Soviet Union, four Einsatzgruppen were formed. Similar operational squads of the Security Service (part of the SS) and Security Police had previously functioned in the wake of both the Anschluss in Austria and the invasion of Poland. Their task, operating just behind the front line, had been to root out “enemies of the state.” In Poland, the Einsatzgruppen had conducted terror operations in which about 15,000 Poles—mostly Jews or members of the intelligentsia—had been killed. That total was to be dwarfed by the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union.

The murderous effect of these units was, initially, to be out of all proportion to their size. Einsatzgruppe A, attached to Army Group North, was the largest with a complement of 1,000 men. The remaining three (B, C, and D), attached to the other army groups, each contained between 600 and 700 soldiers. Just before the invasion, the leaders of these Einsatzgruppen were briefed by Heydrich on their tasks. The orders he issued were later compiled in a directive of June 2, 1941, which stated that the Einsatzgruppen were charged with killing Communist politicians, political commissars, and “Jews in the service of the party or the state.” The Nazis' obsession with the link between Judaism and Communism is thus made explicit in Heydrich's directive.

During the early days of the invasion the Einsatzgruppen moved into the Soviet Union behind the German army. Progress was swift and by June
23rd—just one day into the attack—Einsatzgruppe A, under the command of Police General and SS Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Stahlecker, reached Kaunas in Lithuania. Immediately after they arrived, the Einsatzgruppe incited pogroms against the Jews of the town. Significantly, Heydrich's directive had contained the words: “No steps will be taken to interfere with any purges that may be initiated by anti-Communist or anti-Jewish elements in the newly occupied territories. On the contrary, these are to be secretly encouraged.” What this instruction demonstrates is that killing “Jews in the service of the party or the state” constituted the bare minimum that was expected of the Einsatzgruppen. As Stahlecker wrote in a subsequent report: “The task of the security police was to set these purges in motion and put them on the right track so as to ensure that the liquidation goals that had been set might be achieved in the shortest time.”
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In Kaunas, under the benign gaze of Einsatzgruppe A, Lithuanians who had just been released from prison clubbed Jews to death in the street. Some of the large crowd that gathered to watch the killings shouted out, “Beat the Jews!” to encourage the murderers. After the killing was over, one of the murderers climbed on top of the bodies, took out an accordion and played the Lithuanian national anthem. This, no doubt, was exactly the kind of action Heydrich wished his men to “secretly encourage.”

Mostly away from the main towns, the Einsatzgruppen carried out their work of selecting “Jews in the service of the party or the state” and killing them. In practice, this often meant that all male Jews in a village would be shot. After all, according to Nazi theory, which male Jew in the Soviet Union was not implicitly “in the service of the party or the state”?

As the Einsatzgruppen and associated SS units continued killing Soviet Jews, the regular German army also participated in war crimes. Under the infamous Barbarossa decree and commissar order, partisan fighters were shot out of hand, collective reprisals against whole communities were ordered, and Soviet political officers—the commissars—were killed even after being captured as prisoners of war. And it was because of the Nazi attitude towards these commissars that Auschwitz was to become involved in the conflict. Under an agreement with the SS, the German army allowed Heydrich's men into the POW camps to weed out any commissars who had slipped through the initial selection of prisoners on the front line. The
question then was: Where should these commissars be taken? It was clearly not ideal, from the Nazi point of view, to murder them in front of their comrades—which is why, in July 1941, several hundred commissars who had been found in the ordinary POW camps were shipped to Auschwitz.

From the moment of their arrival these prisoners were treated differently from the other inmates. Incredibly—given the suffering that already existed in the camp—as a group they were treated worse. Jerzy Bielecki heard the noises of their mistreatment before he saw them: “It was a great yelling and moaning and roaring.” He and a friend made their way towards the gravel pits on the edge of the camp where they saw the Soviet prisoners. “They were pushing these wheelbarrows full of sand and gravel while running,” he says. “It was very difficult. The planks they pushed the wheelbarrows over were sliding from side to side. It was not normal work; it was a hell that the SS men created for those Soviet prisoners of war.” The Kapos beat the commissars with sticks as they worked, encouraged by the watching SS men who yelled, “Boys! Hit them!” But it was what he saw next that particularly shocked Jerzy Bielecki.

In such a manner, during the summer of 1941, the war on the Eastern Front—the war without rules—came to Auschwitz.

The murder of the Soviet commissars was, of course, only a small part of the function of Auschwitz during this period; above all else the camp remained a place to oppress and instill terror into the Polish prisoners. And in striving to make the institution perform that service for the Nazi state, Höss constantly tried to limit the number of escapes. Only two people attempted to escape in 1940, but that number increased to seventeen in 1941 (and was to rise still further, leaping to 173 in 1942, 295 in 1943, and 312 in 1944).
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Because in the early years most of the inmates were Poles, and the
locals were sympathetic to their cause, once a prisoner had evaded the camp security it was possible to avoid recapture permanently—to vanish into the maelstrom of population movement caused by the ethnic reorganizations. Because many inmates worked away from the camp during the day, it was not even necessary for them to cross the electrified wire that surrounded the camp itself. They needed to surmount only one obstacle, the outside perimeter fence, the so-called Grosse Postenkette.

Höss's policy to prevent these escapes was simple—brutal retribution. If the Nazis could not capture the person who had escaped then they would imprison his relatives. They would also select ten prisoners from the block where he had lived and put them to death in a deliberately sadistic way. Roman Trojanowski participated in three separate selections during 1941 after escapes had been detected from his block. “The Lagerführer and others would look into the eyes of the prisoners and choose,” he says.

Trojanowski remembers one selection that epitomized the mentality of Karl Fritzsch, the Lagerführer: