Army of Evil: A History of the SS (52 page)

This was an assignment to the T-4 programme euthanasia killing centre at Hartheim. It is not clear why Stangl was chosen, but perhaps it was because he was fundamentally obedient, the sort of man who would not disobey an order from a superior, even if it conflicted with his own moral beliefs. Stangl also seemed to believe that accepting the position would help his career. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in the uniformed police and duly became the administration and security officer at Hartheim. He was responsible for the general smooth running of the operation, the issuing of death certificates and the return of the victims’ personal effects to their families. Although he was intimately involved in all aspects of the operation, the killing at Hartheim (as in all of the euthanasia centres) was carried out by doctors and nurses, and Stangl appears to have been able to distance himself from it emotionally.

He remained at Hartheim until the centre’s T-4 killings were wound down in the autumn of 1941, whereupon he moved to Bernburg to supervise the end of the T-4 programme there. As we have seen, both centres continued to kill “incurables” from the concentration camps as part of Operation 14 f 13, but Stangl still had to resolve administrative issues associated with the end of the formal euthanasia programme. He completed this in February 1942,
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and was then offered the choice of a return to Linz or an unspecified “anti-partisan” task in Lublin. He had not enjoyed a good working relationship with the senior officers in Linz, so he chose the second option and travelled east in a group of about twenty T-4 personnel.

Stangl later claimed that he had no idea what was awaiting him. When he reached Lublin, in March 1942, he had a long conversation with Globocnik, who sounded him out for the role of commandant of Sobibor. However, according to Stangl, the SSPF was vague about the camp’s true function. Globocnik did tell Stangl that Christian Wirth was in charge of the operation, and soon afterwards Stangl travelled
to Sobibor to take up his new post. When he arrived at the camp, a small group of Polish labourers was building the camp under the supervision of a number of former T-4 personnel. They were soon supplemented by a Jewish labour detail and a company of Ukrainian guards from Trawniki. As construction continued, Stangl was summoned by Wirth to Belzec, and it was here that he finally realised the true purpose and scale of Operation Reinhard. On the day he arrived, there was a problem in the burial pits: the corpses had putrefied, expanded and spilled on to the open ground surrounding the pits. Wirth was furiously trying to deal with this situation, but he found the time to tell Stangl that he would soon be having similar problems at Sobibor.
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On his return to Sobibor, Stangl discussed what he had witnessed with Sergeant Hermann Michel, a friend and former co-worker at Hartheim, who had been appointed his deputy. According to Stangl, both he and Michel were deeply distressed, but they decided to keep their heads down and seek transfers out of Operation Reinhard, rather than protest or refuse to serve. Some days later, Wirth made an extended visit to the new camp to ensure that preparations were continuing smoothly. Wirth demanded that the gas chamber should be fully tested, so he gave the order for twenty-five of the “work Jews” to be murdered in it.

This test revealed some deficiencies that had to be rectified, but Sobibor was ready to receive its first transport of prisoners in the first week of May 1942. The procedure was almost identical to that employed at Belzec, as SS-Sergeant Kurt Bolender recalled:

As at Belzec, a few hundred Jews were kept alive in the camp to perform menial duties: burying corpses, cleaning trains and sorting through the vast amounts of goods, money, jewellery, food and clothing that were stolen from the victims before they died.

Between May and July, 90,000–100,000 Jews—primarily from the General Government but also from Austria and Czechoslovakia—were murdered at Sobibor.
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By most accounts, it was a more efficient camp than Belzec, having learned from its precursor’s mistakes, and because Stangl was a better, more sober organiser than Wirth. The pace of the murders was less frantic than at Belzec. Sobibor rarely received more than one transport per day, which usually consisted of no more than 2,500 victims. That made the process more manageable, although the maximum capacity of the gas chambers at this stage was not more than six hundred people at a time.

Engineering work on the Lublin–Chelm railway line caused a lull in the gassings between July and October 1942, but this gave the camp staff the opportunity to increase the gas chambers’ capacity to some 1,300 people. Between October 1942 and June 1943, between 150,000 and 170,000 Jews from the General Government and Slovakia were murdered, as well as 4,000 from France and 34,000 from the Netherlands. Killing operations were wound down at Sobibor after July 1943, when the camp was transformed into a depot for captured ammunition.

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C
ONSTRUCTION BEGAN ON
the third and largest of the three Operation Reinhard extermination camps soon after Sobibor had accepted its first transport in May 1942. Treblinka was placed under the command of SS-Lieutenant Dr. Irmfried Eberl, who had been present at the first gassing experiment at Brandenburg and had then worked for T-4 both there and at Bernburg. Initially, there were three gas chambers in Treblinka, each capable of murdering between 200 and 250 prisoners at a time. In the first five weeks of its operation, in excess of 300,000 Jews were murdered there: some 245,000 from the Warsaw ghetto and surrounding areas; over 50,000 from Radom; and more than 16,000 from Lublin.
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But while the camp had managed this industrial scale of killing, the rest of the operation was in a state of chaos. By July, the reception area was littered with the decomposing corpses of people who had died on the transports or had been too weak or too sick to make the short journey to the gas chambers and had thus been killed on the spot. Vast piles of prisoners’ belongings were also piling up, because Eberl had not thought to set up work details to sort through them. This meant that valuables ended up in the pockets of the camp staff, were forwarded by Eberl to his former employers at T-4 (presumably at the instigation of T-4), or were simply left lying around. In the last week of August, Globocnik and Wirth visited the camp and saw a complete breakdown of the system: a transport train full of dead and dying Jews was waiting to be unloaded, because there was no space within the camp itself. Eberl was dismissed on the spot,
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and Globocnik stated that he would have had him court-martialled, had he not been a fellow Austrian.

The dependable Stangl was brought in to re-establish order at Treblinka. He and Wirth asked Operation Reinhard headquarters to call a temporary halt to deportations to allow them to sort out Eberl’s mess.
This was agreed to, and five hundred Jews from previous transports were set to work cleaning up the camp and burning or burying the piles of corpses. The transports resumed on 3 September, by which time Stangl had organised a prisoner work detail to deal with the arriving prisoners and their luggage. One group of prisoners removed dead bodies from the trains and buried them in the mass graves; others cleaned the freight cars; others sifted through the piles of clothing, valuables and food.

Generally speaking, each of the Operation Reinhard camps had a prisoner labour force of between five hundred and a thousand people. Unsurprisingly, their existence was brutal and extremely precarious. Roll-calls were held up to three times each day, and any prisoner who seemed ill or weak, or had irritated the SS NCOs, would be sent to the gas chamber or shot, to be replaced by a new arrival from the next transport. Those who remained alive were entirely at the mercy of the SS and the Ukrainians. There were no effective rules to regulate the behaviour of their overseers, who could—and did—beat and murder the workers at will. Survivors of the camps reported that very few of the guards behaved with any decency or humanity. The great majority of them were either indifferent to the prisoners’ suffering or were actively cruel and violent. One tiny shred of relief for the working prisoners was that food was usually plentiful: the victims tended to bring supplies with them on the transports, and this was used to supplement the basic rations provided by the SS. The working prisoners also managed to obtain cash and valuables, which they bartered with local civilians and some of the Ukrainian guards for more provisions. However, if the transports slackened off for any reason, the supply of extra food dried up and hunger added to the prisoners’ misery.

Male prisoners were mostly assigned to heavy physical work, but a few women were also employed in the death camps—as laundrywomen, cooks and cleaners. They lived in separate barracks to the men and could be subjected to sexual abuse and rape by the guards, despite National Socialist strictures against “race defilement.” In Sobibor,
a love affair is said to have developed between a young Jewish woman from Vienna and SS-Sergeant Paul Groth, who had a reputation as a sadist. Groth’s behaviour towards the other prisoners apparently improved as a result of the affair, but when it became known to his fellow SS men the girl was murdered.
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In spite of being fully aware of the consequences, the prisoners staged several acts of resistance in the Operation Reinhard camps. The first of these was the killing of SS-Sergeant Max Bialas at Treblinka in September 1942, when the camp had been in operation for only a few weeks. Bialas was in charge of the evening roll-call and was in the process of deciding which prisoners were to be murdered that night when one of the prisoners ran from the ranks and stabbed him with a knife he had been concealing. Bialas fell to the ground while his assailant—Meir Berliner, an Argentinian who had been in the camp only a few days
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—stood over him. Berliner was beaten to the ground with a shovel by a Ukrainian guard and then shot. Meanwhile, other Ukrainians started shooting randomly into the prisoners, killing and wounding dozens. Once order had been restored, Wirth, who was in the camp at the time, demanded the immediate execution of ten prisoners. Another 150 were shot the next morning.

On several occasions, groups of prisoners fought with the guards as they were being hustled towards the gas chambers, but these acts of defiance were always doomed to fail in the tightly organised and confined conditions of the “chute.” So it was perhaps inevitable that the major act of resistance to the Holocaust should take place where the murderers had less control over their victims. From July 1942, the SS began to clear the Warsaw ghetto of its inhabitants, with the vast majority being sent to Treblinka. By the end of September, some 300,000 had already been deported and murdered, leaving only 60,000
in the ghetto. But at that point, the Jewish Fighting Organisation came into being to offer some resistance. Led by Mordechai Anielewicz, the organisation smuggled a few weapons into the ghetto, and started to manufacture more with whatever materials they could find.

Three thousand SS, army and police troops from the Warsaw garrison, commanded by SS-Brigadier Jürgen Stroop, eventually entered the ghetto on 19 April 1943 to begin the final clearance. Using armoured vehicles, artillery and heavy machine guns, they attacked, blew up and set fire to buildings where the Jewish resisters were thought to be hiding. The defenders responded by fighting a running battle from ruined buildings, bunkers and trenches. Their ferocity shocked the German units, and Stroop could not claim victory until 16 May.
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(Notoriously, he subsequently produced a bound volume of photographs and reports, as if the operation had been a considerable military victory.) Even then, some Jewish resisters continued to fight until July. Overall, the fighting claimed the lives of some 14,000 Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto, but 7,000 more were removed to Treblinka and exterminated, with the remainder being sent to Majdanek concentration camp. The Germans lost around 400 killed and 1,000 wounded.
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The camps were never able to launch anything to rival the Warsaw ghetto rebellion, but prisoner committees in Treblinka and Sobibor did at least try. The Treblinka revolt occurred on 2 August 1943. There had been a lull in new arrivals at the camp since late May, when the Warsaw ghetto had finally been cleared. The prisoners’ workload now comprised routine maintenance in and around the camp, and the cremation of corpses exhumed from the mass graves, which had been ordered by Himmler following a visit in the early spring. This relative lack of activity convinced many of the prisoners that the camp was about to be wound down and that they, inevitably, would not survive its closure. Consequently, they began to plan a revolt. Among the leaders
were the camp elder, Bernard Galewski, a former Czech Army officer named Zelomir Bloch and several others with some military experience. Their plan was straightforward: teams of prisoners armed with whatever weapons they had managed to steal from the camp store would attempt to kill as many on-duty SS and Ukrainian personnel as possible; then they would attempt to seize as many weapons as possible; and finally they would burn down the camp and flee into the surrounding countryside.

In the event, circumstances forced the rebels to abandon even this basic plan. SS-Sergeant Kuttner, commander of the “lower camp,” where most of the working prisoners were housed, unexpectedly appeared in their barracks and began a conversation with a known informer during the early afternoon of 2 August. One of the committee leaders decided something had to be done, so he sent for an armed prisoner. In the meantime, Kuttner had discovered a young prisoner with bundles of cash, in readiness for his escape. As he led this prisoner to the gate of the barracks, Kuttner was shot by one of the rebels. Obviously, the general uprising now had to begin, but many of the stolen weapons had not yet been distributed among the prisoners. As a result, the revolt was chaotic. A group of prisoners armed with grenades attacked the camp headquarters, but they failed to kill or even injure any of the SS men inside. Others attacked the Ukrainian guards and fired on the watchtowers. Still others ignited the camp’s petrol depot. However, in the confusion, nobody thought to cut the telephone line, and Stangl, who was in his office, called for reinforcements from the local police. In the extermination area of the camp, prisoners managed to kill or disarm their Ukrainian guards and set light to the wooden buildings, but they were unable to destroy the gas chambers or knock out the guards in the watchtowers. As a result, as the prisoners began to break through the fences and gates, many were cut down by rifle and machine-gun fire from the towers.