KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (60 page)

In the
end, the default option for SS officers at the Auschwitz ramp was to point toward the gas chambers; on average, only around twenty percent of Jews were selected for forced labor and registered as Auschwitz prisoners (though there were significant variations between transports and over time).
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The SS applied a similar measure on the night of December 6, 1942, to the transport from M
ł
awa. Only
406 young and strong men were temporarily spared (unusually, the SS condemned all women on board). Among the chosen few was Lejb Langfus. His wife, Deborah, and his son, Samuel, disappeared into the other group, more than two thousand people strong. Langfus watched intently as women and children calmly climbed on board large SS trucks, illuminated in the bright lights. Many prisoners were deceived
by the sight of polite SS men aiding ailing Jews onto the trucks, mistaking it as a sign of charity. Other SS men reassured the remaining Jewish men that they would soon meet their loved ones again; Langfus was told that he would see his family once a week in a special barrack. Then the trucks drove off and made their way to the gas chambers.
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Fire and Gas

The other Jews selected for the gas
normally followed the same road as the trucks, marching for one and a half miles from the ramp, past the Birkenau camp and across a meadow, toward the converted farmhouses. “This is a one-way street,” Charlotte Delbo (who arrived from France in early 1943) later wrote, “but no one knows it.” During the march, SS men normally kept the prisoners in line with guard dogs. But they also kept up the
deception, casually asking Jews about their jobs and background, and telling them that they were heading to the baths, for disinfection. Some prisoners were relieved to notice that they were followed by an ambulance, which was driving slowly at the rear of the column; occasionally, it even carried Jews unable to walk. But the ambulance was not meant to provide medical care. Its real purpose was to
carry the SS doctor to oversee the gassing. The tins of Zyklon B were also on board. “Nobody was bothered in the slightest,” Commandant Höss recalled, “about profaning the sign of the Red Cross by driving to the extermination facilities.”
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When the final destination came into view, the first impression was reassuring: a little farmhouse and two wooden barracks (for undressing), surrounded by
fruit trees. On site were more SS men and a group of inmates from the so-called Special Squad (
Sonderkommando
), who had to assist in mass murder. By the time the prisoner column had come to a halt, those who had earlier arrived by truck were often already inside the farmhouse. Before long, the others had joined them. Those who moved too slowly were hit by SS men and attacked by the dogs. As they
stumbled inside, the last thing they saw was a sign on the open doors: “To the Baths.” Once the rooms had been crammed full of men, women, and children, the heavy doors were locked and the SS physician ordered the medical orderly to throw in the gas. SS doctor Johann Paul Kremer, who supervised numerous gassings in autumn 1942, later testified that he drove off after the “screams and noise of the
victims” had died down.
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The gas chambers remained off-limits for some time, often overnight, as there was no mechanical ventilation in bunkers 1 and 2 to draw out the fumes.
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Once the doors were opened, prisoners from the special squad set to work. One of them was Lejb Langfus. After the SS had separated him from his wife and son at the ramp on December 6, 1942, he had marched into the Birkenau
compound, together with the other Jewish men selected that day for slave labor. The next morning, they had been led from their barrack to the so-called Birkenau sauna for the usual admissions procedure. After a shower, they had their heads shaved and received striped uniforms; then they were tattooed. Two days later, on the evening of December 9, 1942, SS officers led by Hauptscharführer Otto
Moll suddenly appeared in the prisoners’ barrack and announced that they would choose some strong inmates for a special assignment in a rubber factory. Each prisoner stepped forward and Moll took his pick. None of the three hundred or so Jewish men knew that they had really been selected for the Special Squad. Neither did they know that at the same time the corpses of their predecessors—the first
Birkenau Special Squad—were burning inside the old crematorium.

The following day, December 10, most men from the new Special Squad were escorted out of the Birkenau compound, not to any rubber factory, but to the gas chambers, which were operating at full capacity that day (with almost 4,500 Jews arriving on transports from Holland, Germany, and Poland). Surrounded by SS men with guard dogs,
Moll addressed the new Special Squad prisoners. They did not yet know that this small, blond man, who looked rather amiable, with his round and freckled face, was feared across the camp. Not only was he exceptionally brutal, Moll was also one of a small group of Camp SS experts in mass murder and cremation. After he had instructed the prisoners about their real task, he threatened anyone who refused
to participate with beatings and wild dogs.
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The prisoners of the two Special Squads—one for each of the converted farmhouses—now split into different groups. Among the dozen or so prisoners who had to pull bodies out of the gas chambers on December 10, 1942, was a burly twenty-year-old with broad shoulders called Shlomo (Szlama) Dragon. Born in a small Polish town, he had lived for more than
a year in the Warsaw ghetto, where his father and sister were to die, before escaping together with his older brother, Abraham. Exhausted, after hiding for months without papers, the two brothers eventually joined a transport to what they assumed was a forced labor camp. On December 6, 1942, they arrived in Auschwitz, on the same train that brought the muscular Lejb Langfus to the camp; like Langfus,
the Dragon brothers were selected for the Special Squad.
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Wearing masks, Shlomo Dragon and the other men from his commando had to enter the gas chambers after they were opened on December 10, 1942; “it was very hot” inside, he testified a few years later, “and one could feel the gas.” Next, they had to drag out the entangled corpses. Complaining that the prisoners from the Special Squad were moving too carefully, Moll showed them how it was done.
“He rolled up his sleeves,” Dragon recalled, “and threw the corpses through the door into the yard.” Here, other Special Squad members stripped the dead of anything the SS regarded as valuable. Some prisoners had to cut the hair of the dead, while so-called dentists pried open the corpses’ foaming mouths to rip out gold teeth (some “dentists” took regular breaks to vomit). Once the building was empty,
Special Squad prisoners had to wash the floors, scatter more wood shavings, and touch up the white walls, until the bunker was ready for the next transport.
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From now on, this would be the life of Shlomo and Abraham Dragon, Lejb Langfus, and the others from the Special Squad.

Like many mass murderers before them, the Auschwitz SS men soon realized that it was easier to kill than to dispose
of the victims. In their haste to create a large death camp, SS planners had given little thought to the corpses. When the mass extermination transports began in summer 1942, there was no working crematorium: the old one was out of commission, while the new one in Birkenau was not yet built. As the bodies of Jews gassed in Birkenau mounted up, the SS resorted to the same makeshift solution it had
used months earlier, during the mass deaths of Soviet POWs, and buried the bodies in ditches in the Birkenau forest (together with thousands of deceased registered prisoners). But this soon proved impractical. By the time Himmler visited in mid-July 1942, the camp was engulfed in a sickening smell. In the heat of the summer, rotting body parts spilled out of mass graves, and there were concerns that
the groundwater would be contaminated, threatening the whole region. With more extermination transports on the way, the Camp SS hurried to accelerate the completion of the new crematorium in Birkenau.
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Looking ahead, the WVHA construction experts around Hans Kammler agreed that a single new crematorium would no longer suffice, given the role of Auschwitz in the Holocaust. By August 1942, they
had settled on three additional crematoria for Birkenau; together, the four new buildings would be able to burn one hundred and twenty thousand corpses each month. Soon, SS planners added an additional feature to the emerging Birkenau crematorium complex—gas chambers. Moving the gassings from the converted farmhouses into the new crematoria would allow the SS to murder and burn the victims in the
same location (just like in the main camps’ old crematorium). Genocide would become more efficient. The almost identical crematoria II and III were now redesigned for mass murder, by turning the morgues in the basement into undressing rooms and gas chambers; mechanical ventilation was fitted to draw out the gas, and a lift was added for moving corpses to the incinerators on the ground floor. By
contrast, the smaller crematoria IV and V had simpler structures, as they were designed from the start to accommodate mass gassings; both were long above-ground brick buildings, with undressing rooms, gas chambers (naturally ventilated), and incinerators, all on one level.
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Until this new cremation complex in Birkenau was operational, the SS decided, the dead would be put into flaming pits.
Shortly after his mid-July 1942 visit to Auschwitz, Himmler decreed that all the rotting corpses in Birkenau had to be dug up and burned. Standartenführer Paul Blobel, an SS expert in open-air cremation, was sent to teach the Auschwitz guards. A former commander with the murderous task forces in the occupied Soviet Union, Blobel had recently been appointed by Himmler to run a secret SS unit devising
the most efficient way of destroying corpses of Holocaust victims. Experimenting in the Chelmno death camp, where huge numbers of corpses had accumulated, Blobel quickly arrived at an effective procedure: burning the dead in holes, grinding their bones, and scattering the remains. On September 16, 1942, shortly after Blobel’s visit to Auschwitz, Commandant Höss himself traveled to Chelmno to watch
the mass cremations in action. He was so impressed that he immediately placed an order for the necessary equipment, including a heavy bone-crushing machine. Within days, the new procedures were in place, largely modeled on Chelmno.

For several weeks in autumn 1942, the SS forced Special Squad prisoners to unearth all the corpses buried in Birkenau, working day and night with their bare hands.
By the end, the prisoners had pulled out more than one hundred thousand bodies (by the estimate of Rudolf Höss). One of the Special Squad prisoners, Erko Hejblum, later described the task: “We waded in a mix of mud and decaying bodies. We would have needed gas masks. The corpses seemed to rise to the top—it was as if the earth itself was turning them back.” Many Special Squad prisoners could not
bear the nightmare. After one week, Hejblum “felt like I was going mad” and decided to kill himself; he was saved by a friend who engineered his transfer to a different work detail. Several prisoners who refused to carry on were shot point-blank. The others had to continue to stack the decomposing bodies for burning, first in huge pyres, later in long rectangular ditches. Meanwhile, the bodies of
new victims deported to Auschwitz for mass extermination were cremated in other pits, near bunkers 1 and 2. Ash and bone fragments were dumped into rivers and marshes. They were also used to grit the roads in winter and to fertilize the surrounding fields, where Himmler’s cherished agricultural experiments were under way. The roots of Germany’s future settlements were supposed to grow from the remains
of its slaughtered victims.
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The Birkenau Killing Complex

The new facilities in Birkenau—four huge crematoria with integral gas chambers—promised state-of-the-art genocide. But the construction of the new killing complex took much longer than anticipated. The Camp SS continued to push for its completion, blaming the persistent problems on Topf & Sons, the private contractors building the incinerators.
After months of delays and recriminations, the four crematoria became operational between March and June 1943.
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At the end of June 1943, the head of the Auschwitz SS construction authority, Sturmbannführer Karl Bischoff, reported to his superiors in Berlin that the four crematoria could turn 4,416 corpses into ash within twenty-four hours.
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So pleased was Bischoff, he even displayed pictures
of the crematoria in the Auschwitz main building, for all visitors to see.
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Senior SS officials were proudly shown around the new site. In March 1943, WVHA officers attended the first incineration in crematorium II, and once the entire complex was ready for use, SS tours often included the new facilities. When Oswald Pohl came to Auschwitz in August 1943, for one of his regular visits, he carried
out a thorough inspection of the new crematoria area. Himmler also sent leading party and SS men to watch and learn. “They were all deeply impressed,” Rudolf Höss recalled.
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Following the hurried initial conversion of Auschwitz into a death camp, the SS had now created more lasting and methodical procedures. In the words of Primo Levi, the camp became an inverted factory: “trains heavily laden
with human beings went in each day, and all that came out was the ashes of their bodies, their hair, the gold of their teeth.”
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This image of Auschwitz as a factory of death evokes its modern nature, with the reliance on bureaucracy, railways, and technology.
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The use of machinery even extended to the bookkeeping of the dead. After each selection on arrival, an SS man from the Auschwitz political
office—which oversaw the process of mass extermination at the crematoria—established how many Jews had been sent to the gas chambers. He then raced back by motorcycle to his office to prepare a statistical report noting the transport’s date of arrival and place of departure, the total number of Jews on board, and the number of men and women selected for forced labor and for “special accommodation”
or “special treatment” (the Camp SS continued to use camouflage language in documents, with only rare slips). The Auschwitz political office then transmitted these details by telex to the RSHA and the WVHA, mostly within a day of the killings; sometimes the officials added a brief explanatory note, such as the following from a February 1943 telex: “The men were specially accommodated because
of excessive frailty, the women because most of them were [with] children.”
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In this way, SS managers in Berlin, such as Adolf Eichmann and Richard Glücks, gained an immediate picture—almost in real time—of the progress of the Holocaust in Auschwitz.