Army of Evil: A History of the SS (51 page)
Read Army of Evil: A History of the SS Online
Authors: Adrian Weale
The procedure for the murders at Belzec was ultimately adopted throughout Operation Reinhard. It started with the arrival of twenty freight cars at the camp’s railway “ramp.”
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The Jewish prisoners disembarked with the guards in attendance and under the supervision of two or three SS men. Next, the “work Jews” would remove any corpses from the wagons, leaving them on the ramp to be cleared away later. Wirth or one of his subordinates would then give a speech, informing the prisoners that they had arrived at a transit camp, where they would be fed and re-clothed before being moved on to work camps. They were told that they needed to undress and tie their shoes together with the laces. The women were informed that they would have their hair cut before they were all taken to the showers for delousing. At this stage, the men and the women were separated.
The men were always killed first, to reduce the risk of any resistance. They were driven by the Ukrainian guards—with clubs and bayonets, if necessary—into the “sluice” that connected the reception area to the gas chambers. This two-metre-wide passageway was topped with barbed wire and covered with camouflage netting. But the fiction of where the prisoners were going was maintained even here: “To the Baths” signs adorned the walls in a bid to allay suspicions. As soon as they reached the gas chambers, the men were crammed in, shoulder to shoulder, and the doors were shut. Then the engine was started by Hackenholt or one of his Ukrainian assistants. As the Jews in the gas chambers realised what was happening, there would be screams and shouts, but within a few minutes most were unconscious. In twenty to thirty minutes, they were all dead.
On 17 August 1942, an SS technical officer, Kurt Gerstein, witnessed
the process from beginning to end. His path into the Waffen-SS had been anything but typical: he had joined with the sole purpose of gleaning information about the euthanasia programme, in which his sister-in-law had been murdered. Born in 1905, the son of a judge, he originally trained as a mining engineer and worked as a civil servant for the Saarland mining administration. However, he was independently wealthy, and he helped to finance Christian anti–National Socialist propaganda even though he had joined the NSDAP in May 1933. He was arrested twice before the war by the Gestapo, and was incarcerated in concentration camps. As a result, he was expelled from both the civil service and the party. Having lost his job, he went to Tübingen University to study medicine.
He volunteered for the Waffen-SS in 1941 and was accepted, astonishingly, on the basis of references that were provided by two of the Gestapo officers who had investigated him. “The gentlemen took the view that my idealism, which they probably admired, must be of advantage to the National Socialist cause,” Gerstein reported. He did his basic training with the
Germania
Regiment in Hamburg, but was soon transferred into the Waffen-SS’s technical medical service, commissioned as an SS-lieutenant (F)
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and assigned to the “hygiene” department, which specialised in the delousing of military uniforms and water purification.
In June 1942, Gerstein was ordered by SS-Major Günther of the RSHA to obtain a hundred kilos of the delousing agent Zyklon B for an undisclosed purpose. Two months later, Günther, Gerstein and SS-Major Wilhelm Pfannenstiehl, the Professor of Medical Hygiene at Marburg University, drove via Prague to Lublin, where they met Globocnik. The SSPF swore them to secrecy and briefed them on Operation Reinhard, which by then was in full swing at Belzec and two other camps: Treblinka and Sobibor. Gerstein now learned why he had been brought along. He was given two tasks: to look into the disinfection of
the vast amount of clothing that had been stolen from the murdered Jews and was being sent back to Germany for use by forced labourers;
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and to determine the viability of using Zyklon B in the gas chambers. To this end, it had been decided that Gerstein should witness the current gassing procedure. Gerstein recorded what happened that day:
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The next day we drove to Belzec. A small special station had been created for this purpose at a hill, hard north of the road Lublin–Lemberg, in the left angle of the demarcation line. South of the road some houses with the inscription “Waffen-SS Special Unit Belzec.” Because the actual chief of the whole killing facilities, Police Captain Wirth, was not yet there, Globocnik introduced me to SS-Captain Obermeyer. That afternoon he let me see only that which he simply had to show me. That day I didn’t see any corpses, just the smell of the whole region was stinking to high heaven in a hot August, and millions of flies were everywhere.
Near to the small double-track station was a large barrack, the so-called “cloakroom,” with a large counter for valuables. Then followed the barber’s room with approximately 100 chairs…Then an alley in the open air, below birches, fenced in to the right and left by double barbed wire with inscriptions: “To the inhalation- and bath rooms!” In front of us a sort of bath house with geraniums, then a small staircase, and then to the right and left 3 rooms each, 5 × 5 metres, 1.90 metres high, with wooden doors like garages. At the back wall, not quite visible in the dark, larger wooden ramp doors. On the roof as a clever little joke: the Star of
David. In front of the building an inscription: “
Hackenholt Stiftung
.”
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More I couldn’t see that afternoon.
The next morning, shortly before 7 a.m. someone announced to me: “In ten minutes the first transport will come!” In fact the first train arrived after some minutes, from the direction of Lemberg (Lvov). 45 wagons with 6,700 people of whom 1,450 were already dead on arrival. Behind the barred hatches children as well as men and women looked out, terribly pale and nervous, their eyes full of the fear of death. The train comes in: 200 Ukrainians fling open the doors and whip the people out of the wagons with their leather whips. A large loudspeaker gives the further orders: “Undress completely, also remove artificial limbs, spectacles, etc.” Handing over valuables at the counter, without receiving a voucher or a receipt. The shoes carefully bound together…because on the almost 25 metre high heap nobody would have been able to find the matching shoes again. Then the women and girls to the barber who, with two, three scissor strokes is cutting off all hair and collecting it in potato sacks. “That is for special purposes in the submarines, for seals or the like,” the SS-Corporal who is on duty there says to me.
Then the procession starts moving. In front a very lovely young girl. So all of them go along the alley, all naked: men, women, children, without artificial limbs. I myself stand together with Captain Wirth on top of the ramp between the gas chambers. Mothers with babies at their breast, they come onward, hesitate, enter the death chambers! At the corner a strong SS man stands who, with a voice like a pastor, says to the poor people: “There is not the least chance that something will happen to you! You must only take a deep breath in the chamber, that widens the lungs; this inhalation is necessary because of the illnesses and epidemics.”
On the question of what would happen to them he answered: “Yes, of course, the men have to work, building houses and roads but the women don’t need to work. Only if they wish they can help in housekeeping or in the kitchen.”
For some of these poor people this gave a little glimmer of hope, enough to go the few steps to the chambers without resistance. The majority are aware, the smell tells them of their fate! So they climb the small staircase, and then they see everything. Mothers with little children at the breast, little naked children, adults, men, women, all naked—they hesitate but they enter the death chambers, pushed forward by those behind them or driven by the leather whips of the SS. The majority without saying a word. A Jewess of about 40 years of age, with flaming eyes, calls down vengeance on the head of the murderers for the blood which is shed here. She gets 5 or 6 slashes with the riding crop into her face from Captain Wirth personally, then she also disappears into the chamber. Many people pray. I pray with them, I press myself in a corner and shout loudly to my and their God. How gladly I would have entered the chamber together with them, how gladly I would have died the same death as them. Then they would have found a uniformed SS man in their chambers—the case would have been understood and treated as an accident, one man quietly missing. Still I am not allowed to do this. First I must tell what I am experiencing here!
The chambers fill. “Pack well!”—Captain Wirth has ordered. The people stand on each other’s feet. 700–800 on 25 square metres, in 45 cubic metres! The SS physically squeezes them together, as far as is possible.
The doors close. At the same time the others are waiting outside in the open air, naked. Someone tells me: “The same in winter!” “Yes, but they could catch their death of cold,” I say. “Yes, exactly what they are here for!” says an SS man to me in his Low German. Now I finally understand why the whole installation is
called the Hackenholt Foundation. Hackenholt is the driver of the diesel engine, a little technician, also the builder of the facility. The people are brought to death with the diesel exhaust fumes. But the diesel doesn’t work! Captain Wirth comes. One can see that he feels embarrassed that that happens just today, when I am here. That’s right, I see everything! And I wait. My stop watch has honestly registered everything. 50 minutes, 70 minutes—the diesel doesn’t start! The people are waiting in their gas chambers. In vain! One can hear them crying, sobbing…Captain Wirth hits the Ukrainian who is helping Sergeant Hackenholt 12, 13 times in the face. After two hours and 49 minutes—the stop watch has registered everything well—the diesel starts. Until this moment the people live in these 4 chambers, four times 750 people in 4 times 45 cubic metres. Again 25 minutes pass. Right, many are dead now. One can see that through the small window in which the electric light illuminates the chambers for a moment. After 28 minutes only a few are still alive. Finally, after 32 minutes, everyone is dead.
From the other side men from the work command open the wooden doors. They have been promised—even Jews—freedom, and some one-thousandth of all valuables found, for their terrible service. Like basalt pillars the dead stand inside, pressed together in the chambers. In any event there was no space to fall down or even bend forward. Even in death one can still tell the families. They still hold hands, tensed in death, so that one can barely tear them apart in order to empty the chamber for the next batch. The corpses are thrown out, wet from sweat and urine, soiled by excrement, menstrual blood on their legs. Children’s corpses fly through the air. There is no time. The riding crops of the Ukrainians lash down on the work groups. Two dozen dentists open mouths with hooks and look for gold. Gold to the left, without gold to the right. Other dentists break gold teeth and crowns out of jaws with pliers and hammers.
Among all this Captain Wirth is running around. He is in his element. Some workers search the genitals and anus of the corpses for gold, diamonds, and valuables. Wirth calls me to him: “Lift this can full of gold teeth, that is only from yesterday and the day before yesterday!” In an incredibly vulgar and incorrect diction he said to me: “You won’t believe what we find in gold and diamonds every day”…“and in dollars. But see for yourself!” And now he led me to a jeweller who managed all these treasures, and let me see all this. Then someone showed me a former head of the
Kaufhaus des Westens
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in Berlin, and a violinist: “That was a Captain of the Austrian Army, knight of the Iron Cross 1st class who is now camp elder of the Jewish work command!”
The naked corpses were carried on wooden stretchers to pits only a few metres away, measuring 100 × 20 × 12 metres. After a few days the corpses welled up and a short time later they collapsed, so that one could throw a new layer of bodies upon them. Then ten centimetres of sand were spread over the pit, so that a few heads and arms still rose from it here and there. At such a place I saw Jews climbing over the corpses and working. One told me that by mistake those who arrived dead had not been stripped.
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Wirth was clearly embarrassed by the problems that had been encountered that day, and asked Gerstein not to bother conducting the Zyklon B experiments. Consequently, Gerstein buried the canisters in some nearby woods.
T
HE SECOND
O
PERATION
Reinhard camp was built close to the village of Sobibor, in a densely wooded part of the eastern Lublin district. It was situated close to the River Bug, which formed the border between the General Government and the
Reichskommisariat
Ukraine, and not far from the Chelm–Wlodawa railway. Construction began in March
1942, and the layout of the camp reflected lessons that had been learned from the early murders at Belzec. For instance, a rail spur, leading from the station at Sobibor, ran straight into the camp, through a gateway in a wall constructed from concrete and “camouflaged” with tree branches.
In April 1942, Franz Stangl was placed in command of the camp.
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His story is fairly simple. He was born in 1908 in Altmünster, Austria, the son of an ex-soldier who bullied and terrorised him for the first eight years of his life. However, in 1916, Stangl’s father died, and his childhood became more bearable. At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed in a local textile mill, and three years later he qualified as a master weaver, supposedly the youngest in Austria. He continued in that profession until 1931, when he joined the police in Linz. He seems to have been a reasonably competent policeman, and in July 1934, shortly after the assassination of Dr. Dollfuss, the Austrian Chancellor, he discovered a National Socialist arms cache in a forest. His reward was a decoration and a posting to detectives’ school. After he qualified, he joined the political police in the town of Wels, where he investigated anti-government activity.
Stangl claimed that he was not a National Socialist supporter prior to the
Anschluss
; and thereafter, he feared that his police record might well lead to him being branded an enemy of the new regime. He therefore persuaded a contact to enter his name retrospectively on a list of secret National Socialists, which he hoped would afford him some protection. His police unit was absorbed into the Gestapo in early 1939,
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and he was promoted to the status of an established, pensionable civil servant. He also left the Church, in line with SS policy (even though he was not yet an SS member). He continued with his police work—which by now included some tasks relating to forced Jewish
emigration—until November 1940, when he was informed by his superior that he had been selected for a special role.
