Gestapo (21 page)

It all seems very muddled, and indeed it was. We have been at some pains to discover that these massacres were carried out under the leadership of the R.S.H.A.—of the Security Police, that is, and the S.D.—which was strongly denied at Nuremberg. But it is already clear that a great many others were involved as well in actions which the Germans as a nation have firmly maintained were known only to the handful of men who carried them out: the three thousand men of the four
Einsatzgruppen
.

And those involved were not only Germans. In
Einsatzgruppe
A Lithuanian mercenaries took to the work with great fervor, and in a short time formed the main elements in Stahlecker's firing squads. Although they were said to lose their enthusiasm after a time and failed to emulate their German colleagues in plodding, conscientious devotion to duty, this fact about the Lithuanians has to be recorded. Considerable use, also, was made of the indigenous Ukrainian anti-Semitism. At one time certain Germans, Ribbentrop among them, had dreams that the Ukrainians would do all their work for them; but as time went on the Group Commanders found, as the Russians had found before them, that the Ukrainians were unbiddable and that their animal high spirits got in the way of orderly extermination and the compilation of accurate records. There were also the Roumanians, who carried out important massacres of their own, above all in Odessa. They offended the Germans on the spot by not troubling to bury their victims; and they offended the R.S.H.A. by their failure to keep proper records and by their uncontrolled looting. It was above all, however, the volunteers from Lithuania and the Ukraine who provided the mainstay of local help for the hard-pressed Group commanders.

And, indeed, they were hard-pressed. They had immense areas to cover. Stahlecker's Group was responsible for the extermination of the Jews in a territory half the size of Western Europe. His was the largest Group, certainly; but to set against that, he had the biggest concentrations of Jews, so that he was able to forge ahead of the rival Groups (although Ohlendorf with his ninety thousand in a year protested that he exaggerated). Stahlecker's elaborately detailed figures for the first four months totaled one hundred thirty-five thousand five hundred sixty-seven, though this figure included nearly four thousand Communists and seven hundred forty-eight lunatics. To cover all this ground he had barely more than a thousand men divided into four commandos, and it took him a very long time to get around the area, until he was given his private airplane.

It is perfectly obvious that his commandos could not operate over these vast distances without assistance from the civil and military authorities. As a rule they received it as their right; only occasionally were the people on the spot obstructive—and then, as a rule, not because they wished to resist the “final solution,” but because they objected to being rushed. Or because they thought such actions were detrimental to the German cause, as indeed they were.

There were more Jews, however, than the
Einsatzgruppen
could kill by shooting. The Germans recognized this, and their problem was expressed by Governor Frank in the very early days of the Russian campaign:

“We cannot shoot or poison three and a half million Jews,” he told his Cabinet, “but we shall nevertheless be able to take measures which will lead somehow to their annihilation, and this will be done in connection with the gigantic measures to be determined in discussions in the Reich. The General Government must become free of Jews, just as the Reich is. Where and how this is to be achieved is a matter for certain offices
which we must set up and create here. These activities will be brought to your notice in due course.”

Frank, of course, was speaking from a parochial point of view. He was interested in killing only the Jews in the General Government of Poland, and he was anxious to direct this operation himself. He was already in conflict with Himmler—not as to methods and aims, but as to who was to be the scourge of Poland: he obpected strongly to being sidetracked by Himmler, the Gestapo, and the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders in the matter of creating terror. And he had quarreled with S.S. Lieutenant General Odilo Globocnik, an Austrian Nazi, who had taken an extremely active part in the conspiracies which resulted in the
Anschluss
. Globocnik was appointed by Heydrich to liquidate the Polish Jews in November, 1939, when he was made Higher S.S. and Police Leader for Lublin province. He was a handsome brute in a coarse and heavy way, who, having been disgraced for corrupt practices as the first Nazi Gauleiter of Vienna, found, at thirty-five, his spiritual home as a conspiratorial dictator of the heart of Polish Jewry. He had to be a conspirator because he was required to double-cross Frank. But he was one of those born conspirators and racketeers who can function as well when they are drunk as when they are sober. Globocnik was almost always drunk. It would be a pleasure to be able to believe that he was sober when, five years later, he met his death at the hands of Yugoslav partisans in Istria. But he was probably drunk then too. His activities have been conveniently summarized by Goebbels:

“Beginning with Lublin,” he wrote in his diary on March 27th, 1942, “the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is pretty barbaric and is not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. About sixty per cent of them will have to be liquidated. Only about forty per cent can be used for forced labor. The former Gauleiter of Vienna (Globocnik), who is to carry out this measure, is doing it with considerable circumspection and in a way that does not attract much attention … the ghettos that will be emptied in the cities of the General Government will now be refilled
with Jews thrown out of the Reich. The process is to be repeated from time to time.”

This was the process known as “resettlement,” the moving of the Jews by stages farther and farther into the East, until they ended in the gas chambers or in the mass graves of the
Einsatzgruppen
. In the beginning they were either shot in or around the ghettos, or taken to one of the early death camps (e.g., Treblinka, Belzek, or Sodibor). The action, as it developed into wholesale extermination, was known as
Aktion Reinhard
, in honor of Heydrich, who, in June, 1942, was assassinated at Lidice. The scenes described by Engineer Graebe were part of
Aktion Reinhard
, Globocnik's “special.”

It was not the easiest thing in the world to manage, and we can sympathize with Globocnik, at the end, asking for a distribution of medals among his officers and men. One of the most remarkable achievements of Globocnik and Himmler working together was the way in which they bullied the Army into giving up much needed railway space for trainloads of starving Jews to be shuttled about between ghetto and ghetto, and ghetto and death camp, at a time of extreme military exigency. We find a letter from the Ministry of Transportation to Himmler's Adjutant, S.S. Lieutenant General Karl Wolff, dated July 28th, 1942:

“Since July 22nd one train a day with five thousand Jews goes from Warsaw to Treblinka via Malkinia, as well as two trains a week with five thousand Jews each from Przemysl to Belzek. Bedob is in constant touch with the S.D. in Cracow.…”

S.S. Lieutenant General Karl Wolff, who has been a free man ever since 1949, sent a congratulatory reply:

“I was especially pleased to learn from you that already for a fortnight a daily train, taking five thousand of the Chosen People every time, had gone to Treblinka.…”

Mr. Reitlinger remarks as follows:

“As a witness at the trial of Oswald Pohl on June 5th, 1947, Karl Wolff had ‘not the slightest recollection' why he had taken such a close interest in these trains. He was not unduly pressed on the subject. Karl Wolff was a ‘good German.' He had gone as Kesselring's peace
envoy to Berne in March, and In May he had signed the capitulation of the a my in Italy, as a consequence of which he was allowed to wear his general's insignia in court at Nuremberg. The sight was apparently so impressive that no one thought of asking him what he thought happened to seventy thousand people, who were moved in the course of a fortnight to a single improvised camp, from which there was no transport to take them any further. Nor was Karl Wolff asked under what conditions of hygiene he supposed that five thousand old people and children could travel in a single goods-train.”

The gas chambers at Treblinka, to which the trains of Karl Wolff's special interest were directed, were the direct successors of the euthanasia establishments in Germany, originally used for the destruction of lunatics and useless mouths. It became customary to detail individuals from the concentration camps to these euthanasia establishments (those from Dachau went to Schloss Hartheim for gassing); but the facilities were so inadequate and the waiting list became so long that it was soon found expedient to build gas chambers inside the individual concentration camps. They were inefficiently designed and inefficiently run.

Dr. Figl, the gallant Chancellor of the Austrian Republic from 1945 to 1952, an engineer by profession, was a prisoner in Dachau; and, told to design a gas chamber and a crematorium, succeeded in saving many lives by quiet sabotage: he would specify materials he knew could not be obtained and produce designs which would not work. But sooner or later every camp had its death chamber. The original idea was to exterminate the sick, as well as unwanted Jews, but the idea spread. And under Globocnik the Gestapo and the S.D. in Poland established three camps to assist them in their task of eliminating the Jews in Poland: Belzek, Treblinka, and Sodibor. The Camp Commander at Treblinka, which had the best record of gassings, was S.S. Major Christian Wirth, with the rank of
Kriminal Kommissar
, a favorite of Globocnik's. He had a curious job, because not only was he Chief of the Death-camps organization in Poland, but he also actually ran Treblinka. He developed a technique of his own for using Jews to handle their own co-religionists, and gave them
a vested interest in this activity by allowing them to plunder the corpses, particularly of gold from their teeth. These men, living in the shadow of death, could accumulate great riches in no time at all, which they would squander in festivity, knowing that soon they themselves would be gassed in their turn. One of the witnesses for the S.S. at Nuremberg told a fantastic story of a Jewish wedding near Lublin, a fabulous banquet with over a thousand guests, which was given by the members of Wirth's special Jewish commandos on the proceeds of their loot.

To trace Wirth's career is impossible: he seems to have held rank in the Kripo. He occupied one of those strange positions so familiar in Nazi Germany which makes it impossible to pin him down; but it is clear that he had the most intimate connections with Hitler's Chancellery, through Phillip Bouhler, a young Major General of the S.S. who was Hitler's expert on euthanasia. Wirth had worked with him in the more peaceful days, and had so developed the feeling that he alone understood the business of mass killing. In fact, Wirth was not very clever, and his death apparatus was inefficient in the extreme.

His original method, once the gas vans had been discarded as not good enough, was to pump the exhaust gases of the engines into permanent chambers, each holding several hundred people. But the installation at Belzek kept on breaking down, and the victims of the Lublin “resettlement” were left either in the box-cars to die of suffocation and exhaustion in the sidings, or else turned out into the open (this was March, 1942) and left naked and without food and water. The same thing happened at Sodibor. On top of this, the engines were perpetually breaking down for short periods. The gas expert, Kurt Gersten, has told how it once took two and three-quarter hours to start the engines, and while the mechanics fiddled and cursed, three thousand people were left packed in the four gas chambers, waiting, moaning. Treblinka, however, had more efficient engines, self-contained Diesels, not simply the engines of the discarded death vans. In the end it had thirteen gas chambers and a very smart “Potemkin” railway station—a complete model of an ordinary working station, put up in the middle of the camp siding, with bogus time-tables, posters, and advertisements, to make the victims feel at
home, and to conceal from them that Treblinka station was the terminus and, for there, the terminal of their lives.

But the camp which has stamped its imprint on the mind of the Western world is Auschwitz. This is partly because more Jews were gassed there than anywhere else,—though not as many as its commander laid claim to; partly because this commander, S.S. Lieutenant Colonel Franz Hoess, was found at Nuremberg to be a most communicative witness; but more than anything else because it was above all to Auschwitz that the Jews from all over Europe were sent, so that there are far more people in France, or Holland, or Belgium, to say nothing of Hungary, who have had friends and relations murdered at Auschwitz than in any other camp.

Rudolf Hoess was described by Wirth as his “untalented disciple.” But Hoess, who was quiet and efficient, with the quietness and efficiency of a born confidential clerk, regarded Wirth as an untidy amateur. Although he was only an S.S. Camp Commander (promoted step by step from the day when he became a Block overseer, while serving a sentence for political murder in Buchenwald), he had the closest ties with the Gestapo and the R.S.H.A., since he was their chief agent for the disposal of the Jews they rounded up. Few men have been more difficult to rattle. He could handle small groups of victims or the largest consignments with perfect imperturbability. Even when Eichmann landed two hundred and fifty thousand Hungarian Jews on his doorstep with very little warning, he simply set to and passed them through his gas chambers as part of the day's work. The only thing that ever worried him, even slightly, was the fact that although he could kill ten thousand prisoners a day in his gas chambers without disorganization, it was not so easy to dispose of the bodies. It took much longer to incinerate ten thousand bodies than to put them to death, and the burning was harder to conceal.