Auschwitz (26 page)

Himmler felt able to order his men to murder the Poles by the end of 1942 not because he thought Auschwitz would play a leading role, but because he knew that the majority of the killings would be carried out at three new camps already established in the forests of Poland: three places that, unlike Auschwitz, have scarcely seeped into the popular consciousness–Bełźec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. That these camps are not mentioned today in the same breath as Auschwitz is something of a black irony, because the Nazis themselves wanted those names erased from history and sought to ensure that every physical trace of them was removed once they had completed their murderous task. Long before the end of the war, the Nazis had destroyed the camps and the land was left to return to forest or ploughed back into farmland.

In contrast, no attempt was ever made by the Nazis, even in the last days of the camp's existence, to eliminate Auschwitz as a physical place. It was born of an established pre-war model within the Nazi system—the concentration camp—and no effort was made to hide these camps from the general population. Indeed, a camp such as Dachau was built in the suburbs of an existing town and there were propaganda advantages for the Nazis in making obvious their desire to imprison and “re-educate” those whom they considered malcontents. Only after people started to be murdered en masse at Auschwitz did the schizophrenic nature of its function (discussed above) begin to emerge—a state of mind that led the Nazis to blow up the gas chambers when they left, but to leave the rest of the massive complex largely intact.

Something entirely different was born in Bełźec, Sobibór, and Treblinka during 1942. There was no precedent for the existence of these camps in the Nazi state—arguably no precedent for them in the whole of history. No previous model determined their construction, and in many ways their history and operation more exactly encapsulates the uniqueness of the Nazis' “Final Solution” than does Auschwitz.

Bełźec, the first to be built, was the only one whose history pre-dates 1942. It was in November 1941 that construction began on a small camp
about 500 meters from the railway station in the isolated town of Bełźec in the far southeast of occupied Poland. In the minds of the members of the SS, this was to be a local solution to a local problem—the need to kill “unproductive” Jews living in the surrounding area. Just as the Chełmno gas van center was established primarily to kill Jews from the Łódź ghetto, so Bełźec was built to kill “unwanted” Jews from the Lublin area.

In December 1941, SS Haupsturmführer (captain) Christian Wirth arrived at Bełźec to take up the post of commandant. Originally trained as a carpenter, the fifty-six year old had fought in World War I and was awarded medals for bravery, had joined the Nazi party, and then, during the 1930s, worked for the Gestapo in Stuttgart. In 1939, Wirth became involved in the euthanasia actions against the mentally ill and helped organize their murder by use of bottled carbon monoxide. By 1941, he was working in the Lublin area, conducting more euthanasia killings. Known by the nickname “savage Christian,” Wirth was a sadist. He was once observed whipping a Jewish woman and chasing her into the gas chamber, and he personally murdered Jews with his own hands. Red faced and sweating, he screamed obscenities while encouraging his men to commit bestial acts.

At Bełźec, this loathsome man was able to cram all his previous killing experience into one physical space. He decided to use carbon monoxide gas as the means of murder, not supplied from canisters as in the gas chambers of the euthanasia program but from a normal combustion engine, just as Widmann had used a few months before in the Soviet Union. The three small gas chambers themselves were incorporated into a brick building that was disguised to resemble a shower room, with the carbon monoxide gas delivered through fake shower heads.

So far, with the use of carbon monoxide from a car engine and the pretend showers, Wirth was adapting previous killing techniques. But now, in supervising the layout of the camp, he entered entirely new territory and broke completely with established concentration camp design. First, he realized that because the vast majority of arrivals would be alive only for a matter of hours, the large complex of buildings that characterized Auschwitz or Dachau could be dispensed with. The death camp—unlike the concentration camp—needed relatively few facilities of any kind and could be contained in a small space. Thus Bełźec measured less than 300 meters square.

Visitors to the sites of Bełźec, Sobibór, and Treblinka (of whom there are far, far fewer than travel to Auschwitz) are shocked by how tiny these killing camps were. A total of about 1.7 million people were murdered in these three camps—600,000 more than the murder toll of Auschwitz—and yet all three could fit into the area of Auschwitz–Birkenau with room to spare. In a murder process that is an affront to human dignity at almost every level, one of the greatest affronts—and this may seem illogical unless you have actually been there—is that so many people were killed in such a small area. Somehow the mind associates an epic tragedy with an epic space—another reason, perhaps, that Auschwitz is so much better known today than these three death camps. The massive scale of Birkenau gives the mind space to try and conceive of the enormity of the crime—something that is utterly denied to visitors at a place like Bełźec. How can the brain conceive of 600,000 people, the estimated death toll here, being murdered in an area less than 300 meters square?

But small as it was, Bełźec was not simply one camp. Wirth knew that the key to the smooth functioning of his death factory was concealing the true purpose of the place from the new arrivals for as long as possible. So within the camp he enclosed the gas chambers in a special area known as Camp 2, which was hidden behind trees and wire fences woven through with branches. This area was connected to the rest of the camp only by “the tube,” a passageway through the wire. Camp 1—the rest of Bełźec—consisted of the arrival area next to the railway, various barracks (in which the new arrivals undressed and where their belongings could be stored before being transported out), and a roll-call square.

Three categories of people worked at Bełźec, and subsequently at the other two death camps. The first consisted of Jews. Wirth realized at once that employing the Jews in the killing process would not just spare his own men psychological suffering but would mean that fewer Germans would be needed to run the camp. No doubt the emotional torment this caused the Jews also appealed to his warped sensibilities. So several hundred fit, ablebodied Jews were selected from the arriving transports and put to work burying the bodies, cleaning the gas chambers, and sorting the enormous quantity of clothes and other belongings that rapidly piled high in the camp. Initially, these Jews were themselves killed after only a few days' work—but
their murder soon caused problems for the Nazis. Not only were the Jews under no illusion as to the fate that awaited them when they were ordered to take a “shower,” but after their deaths more Jews had to be selected and trained. On the other hand, allowing them to live longer created a class of inmate who had nothing to lose, since they knew they were all going to be killed at some stage, while giving them collectively time to think about their fate and, perhaps, plot a way to resist. For the Nazis there always remained this dilemma: How do you supervise people who know they will eventually be killed by the very people who are in authority over them?

Ukrainians guards comprised the second category of workers. About 100 of them, in two platoons, were assigned to carry out basic supervisory duties at the camp. Famed for their brutality, many of these Ukrainians previously had fought for the Red Army, been retrained by the Germans, and were allowed this opportunity to escape the horrendous conditions of the POW camps. And then, of course, there were the Germans—the third category. So smoothly had Wirth delegated the mechanics of running his killing machine to other nationalities, however, that only twenty or so German SS men needed to be involved in the process of murder at Bełźec. By March 1942, with the arrival of the first transport at Bełźec, Wirth had realized Himmler's dream. He had built a killing factory capable of exterminating hundreds of thousands which could be run by a handful of Germans, all of whom were now relatively protected from the psychological damage that had afflicted the firing squads in the East.

The same month in which Bełźec started operating, March 1942, the Nazis began to construct another death camp—Sobibór, due north of Bełźec but still in the far east of Poland in an area densely populated with Polish Jews. The construction and operation of Sobibór closely followed the Bełźec model. Like Wirth, the majority of the SS members involved—including the commandant, Franz Stangl—had experience of the T4 euthanasia program. And just as at Bełźec, 100 or so Ukrainians, many former prisoners of war, were allocated to the camp as guards. The camp was still tiny by comparison with Auschwitz–Birkenau (though at 600 meters by 400 meters it was slightly bigger than Bełźec) and was divided, as was Bełźec, into two internal camps separated by a passageway that linked the reception camp to the gas chambers. But, unlike at Bełźec where the SS members
lived in requisitioned houses nearby, because there was no suitable local accommodation, a third internal camp was created as living quarters for the SS men and the Ukrainian guards.

The thinking behind the design and construction of Sobibór was identical to Bełźec—new arrivals were to be conned into believing they had alighted at a disinfecting stop where they would be treated as a precaution against disease, and were then to be hurried through the camp to their deaths as quickly as possible. Just as at Bełźec, high fences intertwined with branches separated each section of the camp, so that it would be hard for new arrivals to grasp exactly what was going on until it was too late. Sobibór accepted its first transport in May 1942, and in little over a year a quarter of a million people were murdered there.

Also in May 1942, building work began on the third and last main death camp, Treblinka. It was no coincidence, because this camp benefited from the Nazis' previous learning experiences at Bełźec and Sobibór, that more people died here than at any of the other dedicated death camps. Indeed, the death toll at Treblinka—an estimated 800,000 to 900,000—very nearly rivals that of Auschwitz. Treblinka was situated northwest of Sobibór, a short railway journey away from Warsaw. The Warsaw ghetto represented one of the largest concentrations of Jews in the Nazi state, and Treblinka's primary purpose was to kill them.

At the start, the killing did not go smoothly at any of the camps. It is worth recalling once again that the Nazis were embarking on something that human beings had never attempted before—the mechanized extermination of millions of men, women, and children in a matter of months. Gruesome as the analogy is, the Germans had created three killing factories and, as in any industrial operation, all the various components had to be completely synchronized for the Nazis' desired end result to be achieved. If the trains failed to send people on schedule, if the gas chambers could not cope with the volume of new arrivals, if there was a bottleneck anywhere in the system, then bloody chaos could result. In those early days that is exactly what occurred.

At Bełźec it soon transpired that the capacity of the gas chambers was not sufficient to deal with the numbers of people scheduled to be sent, and so in June the camp shut down for a month or so and new gas chambers
were built. At Sobibór, the problem was both the size of the gas chambers and the local transport links. The camp ceased operations between August and October while the Nazis sorted out these difficulties. But it was at Treblinka that the greatest problems for the Nazis arose, and truly hellish scenes resulted.

To begin with, Treblinka operated more or less as the Nazis had planned, with about 6,000 people arriving to be killed each day. But by August the numbers had doubled and the operation of the camp began to fall apart. Yet the camp commandant, Dr. Irmfried Eberl, still kept it open. “Dr. Eberl's ambition,” said August Hingst, another member of the SS at Treblinka, “was to reach the highest possible numbers and exceed all the other camps. So many transports arrived that the disembarkation and gassing of the people could no longer be handled.”
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As a result, many people were simply shot in the lower camp, but that, of course, destroyed the subterfuge that was the basis of the camp's operation—no one believed they were at a disinfecting station when they saw corpses on the ground. As a result, trains backed up at Treblinka station some three kilometers away, waiting until the camp could be cleared. Conditions on board became so appalling that many died in the freight cars. Oskar Berger arrived at Treblinka on one transport in late August at the height of the chaos.

In such circumstances it was impossible to keep the reality of the camp's operations from the Poles who lived in the hamlets and villages nearby. “The smell of the disintegrating corpses was just terrible,” says Eugenia Samuel,
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who was a local schoolgirl at the time. “You couldn't open a window or go out because of the stench. You cannot imagine such a stench.”

Nonetheless, in the midst of this horror an enormous number of people were killed. In slightly more than a month's time, from between the end of July and the end of August 1942, an estimated 312,500
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people were
murdered at Treblinka. This is a phenomenal figure, a killing rate of around 10,000 a day and a death toll not even approached by any other camp until the height of the Hungarian action at Auschwitz—in 1944—when the four crematoria of Birkenau were functioning at full capacity. The cost of this incredible rate of destruction was too high for Dr. Eberl's superiors to bear, however. Reports reached them of how Treblinka was degenerating in a spiral of disorganization. Worse still, from the Nazi point of view, the Third Reich appeared to be losing out financially. The belongings of the murdered Jews were left sprawled about the camp, and there were suggestions that some of the valuables were even being pilfered by the Germans and Ukrainians.