Auschwitz (15 page)

Further evidence that the air was thick with talk of “extermination” that week is provided by a speech that Hans Frank, Gauleiter of the General Government, made to senior Nazi officials in Krakow on December 16:

Frank, who had been one of those briefed by Hitler on December 12, also added that “in Berlin” he had been told that he, and people like him, should “liquidate the Jews ... themselves.”

The discovery of Himmler's complete desk diary in the 1990s also provides
one tantalizing further link with Hitler during this most crucial period. On December 18, after a one-on-one meeting with Hitler, Himmler notes: “Jewish question—to be exterminated [auszurotten] as partisans.”
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The reference to “partisans” is part of the camouflage language that allowed the murder of the Jews to be concealed as necessary security work in the East.

Although no document written by Hitler linking him with a direct order to pursue the “Final Solution” has ever been found, this body of evidence does demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that he was encouraging and directing an intensification of anti-Jewish actions that December. It is likely that, even without the catalyst of U.S. entry into the war, the deportations of the Reich Jews to the East, directly ordered by Hitler, would eventually have led to their deaths. The anger and frustration Hitler felt at the launch of the Red Army's counterattack at the gates of Moscow on December 5, had already probably predisposed him further to vent his rage upon the Jews. But what happened at Pearl Harbor brought a murderous clarity to Hitler's thinking. All pretence among leading Nazis that the Jews would simply be deported and kept in camps in the East was dropped. One way or another, they now faced “extermination.”

The day after Pearl Harbor marked another watershed in the practical implementation of the “Final Solution,” for on December 8, the first transports arrived at Chełmno to be gassed. Jews from Koło, Dabie, Kłodawa, and other towns and villages in the immediate area were brought to the camp by truck (later, Jews would arrive by train at Powiercie station nearby). They were taken up to the large house—the Schloss—in the center of the small village and ordered to undress prior to “disinfection.” Then they were taken down to the basement and forced along a passage and up a wooden ramp until they found themselves in what appeared to be an enclosed dark room. They were in fact locked in the back of a van.

Initially, the gas vans at Chełmno were identical to the ones used in the adult euthanasia actions the previous year, and relied on bottled carbon monoxide to kill the people locked in the sealed rear compartment. But, a few weeks into Chełmno's operation, new gas vans arrived that used their own exhaust gases to murder those inside. The gassing was taking place in the village, with the vans stationary in the courtyard of the Schloss, so it was
impossible to keep knowledge of the murders a secret. Zofia Szałek,
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who as an eleven-year-old girl worked and played just a few meters from the site of the murders, witnessed some of the first arrivals.

After the Jews had been gassed at the Schloss, the vans drove just over three kilometers into the nearby Rzuchowski forest. “When I saw it moving I said, ‘Hell is going!'” says Zofia Szałek. “I was tending cows by the side of the road—how could I not see it going by?” Once in the forest, the vans were unloaded by Jews who were then forced to bury the bodies. Each evening these Jews were transported back to the Schloss and kept locked up overnight. Every few weeks they too were murdered and other Jews selected for this task from the new arrivals.

Physical conditions in the forest soon became appalling, as Zofia learned first-hand from one of the Germans in the Waldkommando (forest commando) charged with supervising the disposal of the bodies:

Kurt Moebius was one of the German guards at Chełmno, and was later tried for war crimes. During his interrogation in Aachen prison in November 1961 he gave an insight into the mentality of the Nazi perpetrators as they participated in the killing process.

The main reason for the setting up of Chełmno was to murder the Jews from the Łódź ghetto who were no longer thought productive, and the first transport left the city for the new extermination center on January 16, 1942. Lucille Eichengreen, who had now lived in the Łódź ghetto for three months, sums up the mood by saying, “We didn't want to go. We figured the misery we knew was better than the misery we didn't know.” Now, with the added stress and pressure of “selections” for deportations, life in the ghetto, already bad, was set to become worse.

Chełmno was a landmark along the road to the “Final Solution,” the first center for the extermination of Jews established anywhere in the Nazi state. But the facility was able to become operational so quickly only because it relied on the hurried conversion of a large house as a base for the killing and on the existing technology of the gas vans. From the perspective of the Nazi murderers it was therefore inherently inefficient. Secrecy could not be maintained, nor could the bodies be disposed of adequately—“faults” that would be addressed when the new death camp of Bełźec, already under construction, was eventually finished.

In the meantime, on January 20th, four days after the first transport of Łódź ghetto Jews to Chełmno, a meeting was held at an SS villa on the shores of the Wannsee, a lake outside Berlin. This gathering has become infamous as the single most important event in the history of the Nazis' “Final Solution”—an epithet it does not quite merit.

The meeting was called by Reinhard Heydrich, who invited the relevant government state secretaries to take part in a discussion about the Jewish question. Included with each invitation was a copy of the authorization that Goering had given Heydrich on July 31, 1941, to pursue the “Final Solution” (although, as discussed in Chapter 1, it is highly unlikely that the
phrase “Final Solution” had the same meaning in July 1941 that it had acquired by January 1942). Notoriously, because the meeting was due to begin at midday, the invitation also mentioned that “refreshments” would be provided.

The address at which the meeting was held was Am Grossen Wannsee 56–58, a villa once used by Interpol, the organization that coordinated international police activity. It is a useful reminder that the individuals who sat round the table at the Wannsee conference were salaried functionaries from one of Europe's great nations, not back-street terrorists, although their crimes were to be greater than any conventional “criminal” act in the history of the world. Equally instructive, when today some still refer to an ill-educated “criminal underclass,” is that, of the fifteen people around the table, eight held academic doctorates.

Invitations had originally been sent in November 1941 and the meeting scheduled for December 9, but the bombing of Pearl Harbor had resulted in its postponement. One of the unanswered questions of history is therefore what the content of the Wannsee meeting would have been had events in the Pacific not caused a delay. Certainly the intention would still have been to implement an ultimately genocidal “solution” to the Nazis' “Jewish problem,” but perhaps the discussion would have focused more on an eventual post-war solution or a real attempt to set up work camps for Jews deported to the East—we can only speculate. What is certain is that, regardless of whether the United States had entered the war, Wannsee was always going to be an important meeting for Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. During the autumn of 1941 a variety of killing initiatives had emerged from a number of sources within the Nazi state. For Himmler and Heydrich, Wannsee was necessary, above all else, to coordinate them and to establish beyond doubt that the SS was in control of the whole deportation process.

The issues discussed at the Wannsee conference are known primarily because a copy of the minutes, taken by SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich's “Jewish expert,” survived the war. Eichmann's record of the meeting is of great historical importance, as it is one of the few documents that shine a light directly on the thinking process behind the “Final Solution.” At the start of the meeting, Heydrich made reference to the administrative authority given him by Goering that
allowed him to preside. Then he announced the formal change in Nazi policy that, no doubt, all the delegates would already have known. Instead of the “emigration” of the Jews to countries outside Nazi control, there would now be “evacuation ... to the East” within the Nazi sphere of influence.

In total, eleven million Jews—a figure that included several million in countries such as Ireland and Britain that were not yet under Nazi domination—would eventually be subject to such “evacuation.” Upon arrival in the East, these Jews would be separated by sex, and those who were fit and healthy were employed in building roads (Heydrich was almost certainly thinking of proj ects like the Durchgangsstrasse IV, a road and rail link from the Reich to the Eastern Front already under construction). Those Jews who were not selected for this work would—the implication is clear—be murdered immediately. The rest faced only a stay of execution, since large numbers were expected to die as a result of harsh manual labor.

Heydrich went on to express particular concern about any Jews who might survive the attempt to work them into the ground: These were the very Jews that natural selection would have determined were the most dangerous to the Nazis. These Jews, said Heydrich, must also be “treated accordingly.” There could have been no doubt in the minds of the other delegates just what Heydrich meant by this.

Significantly, there was no dissent at the meeting over the broad principle of killing the Jews. Instead, the greatest area of debate focused around the exact legal definition of “Jew” and, thus, precisely who would be subject to deportation and who would not. The question of what to do with “half Jews” stimulated a lively exchange of views. There was a suggestion that such people should be sterilized, or offered a choice between that operation and deportation. Alternatively they might be sent to a special ghetto—Theresienstadt, the Czech town of Terezin—where they would be housed alongside the elderly and those high-profile Jews whose deportation directly to the East would have caused disquiet among the ordinary German population.

The discussion then passed to the more immediate “problem” of the Jews of the General Government and the occupied Soviet Union. In the latter, the Jews were being murdered by shooting while, in the former, the death camp at Bełźec was already under construction. Millions of Jews
were still alive in these areas, however, and so Eichmann recorded in the minutes that “various possible solutions” were mentioned in this context—an innocuous phrase that masked a discussion of specific methods of extermination.

The minutes of the Wannsee conference are deliberately opaque, and Eichmann's draft was edited several times by Heydrich and Müller (the head of the Gestapo) to create that exact effect. Because they were intended for wider distribution it was necessary for them to be written in camouflage language; those who understood the context would realize exactly what was intended, while the lack of crude terminology meant that the uninitiated would not be shocked should they catch sight of the document. Nonetheless, these minutes remain the clearest evidence of the planning process behind the Nazis' “Final Solution” and the strongest evidence of widespread state complicity in the murders that were to follow.

But does that mean that the Wannsee conference deserves its place in popular culture as the most significant meeting in the history of the crime? The answer must be no. The misconception in the popular consciousness rests on the belief that it was at this meeting that Nazis decided to embark upon their “Final Solution.” This simply is not the case.

Certainly Wannsee was important, but it was a second-tier implementation meeting, part of a process of widening the sphere of knowledge of an extermination process that already had been decided upon elsewhere. Much more important than the conversations at Wannsee were the discussions Hitler held in December 1941. If proper minutes were available of the Führer's meetings with Himmler during that period, then we would truly see the bleak landscape of the mind that made all this suffering enter the world.