Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (14 page)

Herr Allers claims to know very little about individuals attached to T4, or indeed about the expansion of the Euthanasia Programme into the
Aktion Reinhard.
However, this personnel, wherever they were, and whatever their assignments, were administered from the offices of T4 in Berlin. Herr Allers continued as administrative director until May 1944, when a high-powered administration in Berlin obviously became superfluous and he was transferred to Trieste – incidentally, to take the place of Wirth who had been killed. (This information comes from judiciary authorities in Germany, not from Herr Allers himself.) Considering his situation, Herr Allers and his wife showed some courage in talking with me at all; but considering the extent of his unique knowledge of matters we know far too little about, and on which all records have disappeared, one could wish that he had shown even more.

Although prepared up to a point to discuss euthanasia, Herr and Frau Allers were less ready to talk about T4 and the Jews.

“When did you first hear about what was happening to the Jews in Poland?” I asked, and there was a long silence.

“Oh, some time in ’14,” Frau Allers finally said.

“Is that what you remember too?” I asked her husband. By 1943 millions of Jews had already been killed, and the
SS
men who directed the killing were paid, issued papers and sent on frequent leave by the Berlin T4 office which also, as Herr Allers was to concede later, looked after a special leave-centre on the Attersee in Austria, for T4 personnel and their families.

“How would we have known?” he said.

“Well, how did you feel about it when you
did
hear?”

“Can you ask us that?” Frau Allers said. “Can you sit here, in this room with us, and ask us that question?”

“Well, yes I can,” I answered. “You were there; you didn’t leave T4 when the Euthanasia Programme in Germany ended. You stayed. You knew.”

“Well of course terrible, awful,” she said. “We had nothing against Jews. I used to go to school with Jews. Only the other day I found a photo of myself in a Jewish kindergarten in Berlin.…”

“Yes,” added Herr Allers, “when I went to school, there were fifty boys in my class, forty of them Jews. That wasn’t right, was it – in Charlottenburg … But how did we feel? How could we feel? It goes without saying – terrible. But what could one do?…

“But, this whole miserable business about the Jews,” he said later. “Do you know the
real
history of it? Nobody here thought of extermination; if you had said to somebody in Germany, a man in the street
or
an
SS
officer ‘We are going to kill the Jews’, he would have said ‘The man is mad: have him locked up!’ Originally what they wanted to do was put into practice an old Polish plan. You can find it outlined in one of Pilsudksi’s books; one-third to be killed; one-third re-settled somewhere; and one-third to be allowed to assimilate. According to this they first planned to create a Jewish state in Madagascar. It was to be included in the treaty with the French. And when that didn’t work out they thought of establishing it in the province of Lublin. I think it was only when nothing else worked out that they decided.…” He stopped.

“Are you sorry about it now? Do you regret what was done?”

“Well yes, that goes without saying. But, on the other hand, if one realizes what the situation was in Germany in the early 1930s: I remember when I said I wanted to study law, somebody in my family took me to the Ministry of Justice in Berlin. We walked along a corridor and he told me to read the names on the office doors we passed. Almost all of them were Jews. And it was the same for the press, the banks, business; in Berlin all of it was in the hands of Jews. That wasn’t right. There should have been
some
Germans.”

“Of course, they
were
Germans, weren’t they?”

“Well yes, but you know what I mean.… I was thinking some more,” he said later, “about what Stangl said to you, remember? About when he came to T4 and was given the choice of either going East, or back to his home station; I’ve never wanted to harm those people who went to Poland, so I’ve never said this: I think it is quite possible that Stangl – as he told you – and others too, did not know what they were going to do in Poland. But, if they had any suspicions [Stangl said he had learned later that “some of the men knew”] then, after all, they didn’t
have
to go; just like Stangl, they
were
asked. There
was
an element of choice.…”

*
Heinemann, London, 1967.

*
The method of “intermediate institutes” was adopted for camouflage purposes when the public first began to be suspicious about the destination of the blacked-out buses which fetched patients from mental hospitals.

*
Chelmno was the first of the “death-camps” to be set up in occupied Poland but appears to have been originally intended as a euthanasia institute. On May 1, 1942, the Gauleiter Artur Greiser proposed to Himmler that 25,000 tubercular Poles from the “Warthegau” should be admitted to Chelmno for “special treatment”.

*
See Martin Broszat
Hitler und die Genesis der Endlösung
in the
Vierteljabresbefte fur Zeitgeschichte
, 4/1977.

Part II

1

H
ISTORICAL RECORDS
in the public domain prove beyond any doubt that the Nazi extermination of the Jews, and concurrently of large numbers of gypsies, was intended as only the first step in a gigantic programme of genocide of all the so-called “inferior races” of Europe. A beginning was made both in Russia, where the Nazis are said to have killed about seven million civilians between 1941 and 1944, and in Poland where the reported figures vary, depending on the source, from between 800,000 to 2,400,000 Poles other than Jews.

In view of these monstrous figures, and of the fact that genocide in one form or another has existed as long as human history is recorded – not least in our time, and also perpetrated by nations other than the Germans – it is not altogether surprising that the question “What is so different about the Nazi murder of the Jews?” has been asked time and again, and often by enlightened people.

Perhaps because so much has been written, over so many years, about the highly emotive subject of the Nazis and the Jews, many people now manifest a weary – and wary – resistance to it. Hard facts have become blurred and some indeed have never been accepted.

Using – or misusing – the perspective of history, some chroniclers of the time will have us believe that the extermination of the Jews was almost an accidental development, somehow forced upon the Nazis by circumstances. Dieter Allers’ “Nobody here thought of extermination” has been said to me dozens of times in Germany, and by people far less implicated than Herr Allers.

But the truth is that the record does not bear out that defence. The ways and means towards achieving this enormous act of murder only evolved with time, but the intention was there almost from the start. On January 30, 1939, Hitler said in the course of a speech to the Reichstag: “Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will not be the bolshevization of the world and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation [
Vernichtung
] of the Jewish race throughout Europe.”

SOBIBOR EXTERMINATION CAMP
as remembered by Stanislaw Szmajzner

1. Anti-escape trench

2. Barracks housing the shoe-maker, tailor, jeweller, and hat-maker (exclusively for German Officers); also living quarters for workers

3. Barracks for all workers in Camps 1 and 2

5. Tailor and shoe-maker for Ukrainian guards; bakery, painters

6. Machine-shop and blacksmith

7. Carpentry shop

8. Area for selections

9. Officers’ recreation room

10. Officers’ baths and barber

11. Officers’ quarters, “The Birds’ Nest”

12. Sentry box

13. Garage

14. Two-storey building for officers

15. Railway platform

15A. Small rail line to Camps 2 and 3

16 and 17. Living quarters for Ukrainian guards

18. Kitchen stores, Ukrainian guards

19. Water-tank, with garden round it

20. Wooden observation tower

21. Victims’ belongings

22. Communication corridor with Camp 2

23. Deposit for gold and valuables

24. Electrical workshop, stables, depository for tinned goods

25. Store-rooms for clothes, utensils, etc

26. “Himmelstrasse” – access to “baths” and hair-cutting

27. Hair-cutting

28. Gas chamber

29. Crematorium, and quarters for workers

31. Woods

32. Munitions deposit for material from the Russian front (sorting and repair)

It is true that the so-called “Madagascar Plan” – conceived by the Poles in 1937 and briefly considered by the French as a solution to the voluntary resettlement of 10,000 of the many thousands of Jewish refugees who had been given sanctuary in France between 1936 and 1938 – was taken quite seriously by at least some of Nazi leadership for a short time. Eichmann is said to have been busy for a year working out the details. When the idea of eventually shipping four million people to Madagascar was defeated by its own lack of realism, the same faction of Nazi administrators who had entertained it as a possibility turned to the idea of setting up a Jewish reservation in the province of Lublin (Lublinland, it was to be called). But these were only pipe-dreams, quite possibly encouraged by those few really in Hitler’s confidence in an effort to mislead the others.

On March 13, 1941, an ambiguous Führer order was communicated to the army command in Russia. “By order of the Führer, the Reichsführer
SS
has been given special tasks, arising from the conclusive and decisive struggle between the two opposing political systems. Within the limits of the set tasks, the Reichs-Führer
SS
acts independently upon his own responsibility.” The fact that this Führer order, which was to cover the execution of a wide category of “undesirable elements” in conquered Eastern territories, referred primarily to the Jews was never to be put into words, or on paper.
*

The Nazi plans for the “Final Solution” in terms of mass murder had crystallized as the plans for invading Russia were made. The armies advancing into Russian territory in June 1941 were closely followed by the infamous
Einsatzgruppen
(Action Groups) who carried out faithfully the Führer order for the execution of “Jews, gypsies, racial inferiors, asocials and Soviet political commissars”.

One of the
SS
signals concerning these “actions” was found amongst
Einsatzgruppen
records after the war. Addressed to the security police, Riga, from the commander of the security police (and
SD
) Eastern zone, and entitled “Executions”, it requests “immediate mediate information regarding number of executions categorized as
(a)
Jews;
(b)
Communists;
(c)
Partisans;
(d)
Mentally ill;
(e)
Others. (The signal also requested the information: “Of the total, how many women and children?”)

The reply, addressed to Group A in Riga, states that executions up to February 1, 1942 were:
(a)
Jews, 136,421;
(b)
Communists, 1,064 (amongst them 1 Kommissar, 1 Oberpolitruck, 5 Politruck–presumably Communist Party titles);
(c)
Partisans, 56;
(d)
Mentally ill, 653;
(e)
Poles, 44; Russian
POWS
, 28; gypsies, 5; Armenian, 1. Total: 138,272; of which, women, 55,556; children, 34,464.
§

By early 1942, behind the front from Riga and Miusk to Kiev and the Crimea, they had killed well over 500,000 Jews – two-thirds of them, as we can see from the signal, women and children, and nearly all by shooting in previously dug mass graves.