Masters of Death (48 page)

That summer saw the expansion of gassing operations at all of Globocnik’s killing centers to accommodate Himmler’s resettlement order. Globocnik’s project to murder all the Jews of Poland had been renamed Operation Reinhard in honor of the SS’s fallen hero. Höss at Auschwitz also had to expand to accommodate victims from Germany and western Europe. “In the spring of 1942,” Höss recalled, “the first convoys of Jews to be exterminated arrived from Upper Silesia,” but “whereas in the spring . . . only small operations were involved, the number of convoys increased during the summer, and we had to create new extermination facilities.” Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka all used carbon monoxide from engine exhaust to poison victims; Höss favored Zyklon B, the prussic acid insecticide (the letter designation B was one of several and indicated concentration), and used it exclusively at Auschwitz. Gassing was also instituted at Majdanek, outside Lublin, beginning in October 1942, using at various times either Zyklon B or pure bottled carbon monoxide.

At the same time, the Einsatzgruppen, the Order Police, Sonderkommando Dirlewanger and other SS agencies began clearing the ghettos of the Ostland and the Ukraine. Byelorussian Generalkommissar Kube, with his supposed soft spot for Reich Jews, wrote his friend and superior Lohse on 31 July 1942 detailing the carnage:

We have liquidated [using gas vans] about 55,000 Jews in the past ten weeks. In the Minsk area the Jews have been completely eradicated, without any negative effect on the workforce. In the mainly Polish area of Lida 16,000 Jews have been liquidated, in Slonim 8,000 Jews. Our preparations for the liquidation of the Jews in the Glebokie area were disrupted when the rear army area preempted us, liquidating 10,000 Jews whom we had been due to eradicate systematically, without any prior liaison with us. . . . On 28 and 29 July about 10,000 Jews were liquidated in the city of Minsk, 6,500 of them Russian Jews—for the most part old people, women and children—and the rest [German and Austrian] Jews unfit for work, who had mostly been sent from Vienna, Brünn, Bremen and Berlin in November of last year to Minsk on the Führer’s orders.

In addition, the Slutsk area has been alleviated of several thousand Jews. The same applies for Novogrudok and Vileyka. Radical measures have yet to be taken in Baranovicze and Gantsevice. There are still some 10,000 living in the city of Baranovicze alone, of whom 9,000 will be liquidated next month.

There are 2,600 Jews from Germany left in the city of Minsk. In addition to these, there are a total of 6,000 Russian Jews and Jewesses still alive, left over from the labor units in which they were employed during the Aktion. . . . In all the other areas the SD and I have limited the number of Jews coming for [work assignment] to a maximum of 800 and, where possible, 500. Thus, at the conclusion of the Aktionen we have reported, we retain in the city of Minsk 8,600 Jews and in the other ten areas, including the Minsk area which is Judenfrei, some 7,000 Jews.

On 27 October 1942 Himmler ordered the destruction of the Pinsk ghetto, the last large ghetto in Byelorussia; on 1 November 1942, in an
Aktion
approaching Babi Yar in scale, 26,200 human beings were murdered at Pinsk.

Allied forces landed in North Africa on 8 November 1942. The next day in Munich Hitler felt called upon to remind his people once again of his “prophecy.” Of those who had laughed at him in 1939, he said, “countless no longer laugh today; and those who still laugh today will probably not be laughing for much longer either.” Soviet forces surrounded the Wehrmacht Sixth Army at Stalingrad a few weeks later and that long winter siege began. “Did Hitler begin to doubt the final victory?” asks German historian Eberhard Jäckel. “He would not admit it, but it now became obvious that the extermination of the Jews became increasingly the most important aim of the war as such; as the fortunes of war turned against Germany, the destruction of the Jews became National Socialism’s gift to the world.”

Hitler said as much in the will he dictated on 2 April 1945. “Although trampled underfoot,” he gloated there, “the German people must try, in its helplessness, to respect the laws of racist science that we have given it. In a world whose moral order is more and more contaminated by the Jewish poison, a people immunized against it will finally regain its superiority. From this point of view, eternal gratitude will be owed to National Socialism because I exterminated the Jews in Germany and central Europe.”

By the end of 1942, the Einsatzgruppen and their SS cohorts had largely fulfilled their mission. Einsatzgruppe A had murdered, according to its own reports, 249,421 Jews. Einsatzgruppe B counted 126, 195, surely only a fraction of its total in Byelorussia. Einsatzgruppen C and D had murdered 363,211 between September and December 1942 alone. Adding in other agencies—the Higher SS and Police Leaders, the Wehrmacht, Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, the Romanian army and gendarmerie, Lithuanian and Ukrainian auxiliaries—and including the full period of the war, Raul Hilberg estimates that more than 1,300,000 Jewish men, women and children were murdered in the East after Barbarossa. Adding non-Jewish victims would raise the total above two million, each one a name, a person, a kin, a soul, a loss.

SEVENTEEN

“Cinders Flying in the Wind”

Outside Kiev on a day in March or April 1942—the ground was thawing but there was still snow—Obersturmbannführer and Catholic priest Albert Hartl remembered driving in the country with Paul Blobel. Hartl had been the chief of the Church Information Service in the Reich Security Main Office and would see service with Einsatzgruppe C; he was visiting Kiev because in January 1942 Heydrich had sent him on what Hartl called “a special mission to study the spiritual situation in the Soviet Union.” At about the same time, Heydrich had relieved Blobel of his burdensome responsibility commanding Sonderkommando 4a; in Kiev Blobel was closing out his Sonderkommando duties pending reassignment.

Hartl hardly knew the former architect. Max Thomas, the physician who now commanded Einsatzgruppe C, had invited both men to his country estate to dine, and they had decided to ride out together on the old Zhitomir road. “That was the usual road if one wanted to leave the town for some fresh air,” Hartl would testify. “It was quite beautiful as far as the landscape was concerned.” Hartl was curious to observe his dinner partner. “Physically Blobel was in bad condition,” he said, “and even psychologically he seemed somewhat exhausted.” Thomas had used a vivid metaphor to explain Blobel’s condition to Hartl: “With Blobel,” the physician had told Hartl, “the film constantly tears.” Hartl explained: “He meant that psychologically Blobel was entirely exhausted, to the point where he was no longer competent.”

“It was evening and just getting dark,” Hartl said, continuing the story to Gitta Sereny. “At one moment—we were driving past a long ravine. I noticed strange movements of the earth: clumps of earth rose into the air as if by their own propulsion—and there was smoke: it was like a low-toned volcano; as if there was burning lava just beneath the earth. Blobel laughed, made a gesture with his arm, pointing back along the road and ahead of us, all along the ravine—the ravine of Babi Yar—and said, ‘Here lie my thirty thousand Jews.’ ” Corpse gases were bubbling up through the thawing earth. “It made a shattering impression on me at the time,” Hartl said at his trial. He himself had (“or faked,” Sereny interjects) a nervous breakdown a few months later. Hospitalized in Kiev, he spent six months convalescing and then was invalided out of the SS.

In mid-May 1942, shortly before Heydrich was assassinated, Blobel found himself sitting across a desk at RSHA offices in Berlin listening to the Obergruppenführer’s insults. “Well, you’ve developed a tummy,” he remembered Heydrich telling him. “You’re a soft person. You’ve gone queer. We’ll only be able to use you in a china factory.” That label followed him through the years, Blobel whined at his trial. But Heydrich had a cure for Blobel’s troubles. “I’ll stick your nose very much deeper into it,” Blobel heard him say. “You will report to
Gruppenführer
Müller.”

Then the swine was dead. Heinrich Müller, the unexpressive Gestapo chief, met with Blobel at the end of June 1942 and assigned him the work Heydrich had passed along to stick his nose deeper into Einsatzgruppen mass murder:

Gruppenführer Müller entrusted me with the task of removing the traces of executions carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. My orders were to report personally to the commanders in chief of the Security Police and SD, to pass on, verbally, Müller’s order and to supervise its execution. This order was top secret, and Gruppenführer Müller decreed that, owing to the strict secrecy of this task, no written correspondence of any kind was to be carried on.

Blobel spent a grisly summer at Chelmno investigating fuels and systems for destroying masses of corpses. The bodies of the victims murdered in the gas chambers at Chelmno had been buried in mass graves. Blobel ordered them exhumed and used them in his experiments. Höss, who had traveled there from Auschwitz in September to see what Blobel had achieved, found that he had “constructed several experimental ovens and used wood and gasoline as fuel. He tried to destroy the corpses by means of dynamiting them, too; this method was rather unsuccessful. The ashes, ground to dust in a bone mill, were thrown away in the vast forests around.” Historian Shmuel Spector assesses Blobel’s main achievement as “the aerodynamic arrangement of the bonfires,” which alternated bodies with railroad ties; then they were doused with gasoline or other available flammable liquids. Blobel’s technology was applied first in the death camps. “At the end of the summer in 1942,” Spector writes, “there were serious health problems in . . . Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka; the earth above the graves was open and noxious odors arose; leakage from the bodies also threatened the wells and the drinking water.” The system was also used at Auschwitz.

Having developed an effective open-air cremation system, Blobel reported to Max Thomas in Kiev in September 1942 and verbally passed along Müller’s order. Thomas, Blobel testified, “refused to carry out this [order] pending a conference with
Reichsführer
Himmler. He thought that this was a very foolish order, and this I reported to Müller after my return.” With gasoline in short supply and the ground frozen, Blobel managed to delay the project through the winter and spring of 1943. That April, however, Radio Berlin announced the discovery, in a forest six miles west of Smolensk, of a mass grave containing the remains of some four thousand Polish officers, blaming the massacre on the NKVD. The Soviets denied the accusation and in turn blamed the Germans. The debate contributed to souring Allied relations, which delighted the Nazi leadership; though the forests of western Russia were crowded with Einsatzgruppen mass graves, the NKVD had in fact perpetrated the Katyn Forest massacre in 1940, before Barbarossa. But Himmler, who by the spring of 1943, with the German defeat at Stalingrad on 2 February, understood that the outcome of the war was in doubt, now demanded that Blobel get busy exhuming and cremating the remains of Einsatzgruppen butchery. “It was in May 1943,” Blobel confirmed, “that I had to see Dr. Thomas again in order to report to him that the
Reichsführer-SS,
in disregard of his objection, demanded a burning of all those places on the whole Eastern Front.” Himmler also gave orders, Höss adds, that “the ashes should be disposed of in such a way that no clues as to the number of cremated persons could be drawn in the future.”

Blobel formed a Sonderkommando code-named 1005. Höss says “the work itself was carried out by Jewish work units, which, upon finishing their particular task, were shot. . . . Auschwitz had to furnish Jews continuously for this
Kommando
1005.” Blobel also used Russian prisoners of war and captured partisans. Burning the corpses the Einsatzgruppen had generated, he took orders from his SS superiors. “Dr. Thomas in June, July and August 1943 began with this work,” Blobel testified. “According to his express wish, I had to prepare special fuels in Berlin for this purpose, fuel quotas which were to be supplied from the fuel plants in the Ukraine. That demanded constant travel from Berlin to Ukraine.” Blobel described a cremation in August 1943 in a mass grave near Kiev, possibly a section of Babi Yar, although it hardly sounds deep enough. “This grave was about fifty-five meters [180 feet] long, three meters [10 feet] wide and two and a half [8 feet] deep. When the cover [of earth] had been lifted, the bodies were soaked with fuel and set on fire. It took about two days for the grave to burn down. I myself saw that the grave became red hot right down to the ground. Afterwards, the grave was filled in, and thus all traces were as good as eliminated.”

In September 1943 Blobel carried Himmler’s order to Jeckeln in Riga. “The Higher SS and Police Leader began burning in his own sector in October,” Blobel testified. In Kaunas in autumn 1943 one of William Mishell’s friends, David, had escaped the ghetto and was fighting as a partisan. The Lithuanian police captured the group of Jewish partisans and turned them over to the Gestapo. They were taken to the Ninth Fort, but rather than being murdered, they were assigned to burn bodies. David told Mishell:

We were mobilized to build a very tall enclosure around the Fort to block the view from the adjacent homes. Hundreds of trucks loaded with firewood, chemicals, gasoline, and tar were brought in and huge excavation equipment showed up at the Fort. The next week the excavation started. The excavators removed the topsoil from the entire site and huge mass graves appeared below the surface. . . . Our job was now to eradicate all traces of the mass executions. Between the prisoners of war and us, we were a group of 64 people. Except for several specialists who stayed behind in the barracks, we performed the dirty work. We were divided into three groups. One group was forced to drag the corpses out of the mass grave [using iron hooks] and put them on the ground alongside the ditch. The second group pulled the corpses across the site to a huge bonfire which could be seen all around the Fort. Here the bodies were piled in layers, a layer of wood and the layer of corpses one on top of the other, drenched with gasoline and ignited. All work was done by hand. At first we revolted, but after several good beatings we had to go on. The stench was terrible and the view was even worse: mothers with children in their arms, people with split-open heads, people naked and fully dressed one on top of the other, layer upon layer, the full depth of the trench. From the documents we found in the pockets of the dressed people, we established that these were the foreign [i.e., Reich and other European] Jews who were brought to the Fort. Most of them had documents showing that they had been recruited for “work in the East.” These foreign Jews, apparently, resisted and refused to undress. From the expressions on their faces, we could tell who was killed by the bullets and who suffocated later when the bullets failed to kill him. Of course, the ones with cracked skulls needed no explanation.