The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (192 page)

Through heavy-glass portholes the executioners could watch what happened. The naked prisoners below would be looking up at the showers from which no water spouted or perhaps at the floor wondering why there were no drains. It took some moments for the gas to have much effect. But soon the inmates became aware that it was issuing from the perforations in the vents. It was then that they usually panicked, crowding away from the pipes and finally stampeding toward the huge metal door where, as Reitlinger puts it, “they piled up in one blue clammy blood-spattered pyramid, clawing and mauling each other even in death.”

Twenty or thirty minutes later when the huge mass of naked flesh had ceased to writhe, pumps drew out the poisonous air, the large door was opened and the men of the
Sonderkommando
took over. These were Jewish male inmates who were promised their lives and adequate food in return for performing the most ghastly job of all.
^*
Protected with gas masks and rubber boots and wielding hoses they went to work. Reitlinger has described it.

There had been, the records show, some lively competition among German businessmen to procure orders for building these death and disposal contraptions and for furnishing the lethal blue crystals. The firm of I. A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, manufacturers of heating equipment, won out in its bid for the crematoria at Auschwitz. The story of its business enterprise was revealed in a voluminous correspondence found in the records of the camp. A letter from the firm dated February 12, 1943, gives the tenor.

The correspondence of two other firms engaged in the crematorium business popped up at the Nuremberg trials. The disposal of the corpses at a number of Nazi camps had attracted commercial competition. One of the oldest German companies in the field offered its drawings for crematoria to be built at a large S.S. camp in
Belgrade
.

Another firm, C. H. Kori, also sought the Belgrade business, emphasizing its great experience in this field since it had already constructed four furnaces for Dachau and five for
Lublin
, which, it said, had given “full satisfaction in practice.”

In the end even the strenuous efforts of German free enterprise, using the best material and providing faultless workmanship, proved inadequate for burning the corpses. The well-constructed crematoria fell far behind at a number of camps but especially at Auschwitz in 1944 when as many as 6,000 bodies (
Hoess
put it at as many as 16,000) had to be burned daily. For instance, in forty-six days during the summer of 1944 between 250,000 and 300,000 Hungarian Jews alone were done to death at this camp. Even the gas chambers fell behind and resort was made to mass shootings in the
Einsatzkommando
style. The bodies were simply thrown into ditches and burned, many of them only partly, and then earth was bulldozed over them. The camp commanders complained toward the end that the crematoria had proved not only inadequate but “uneconomical.”

   The Zyklon-B crystals that killed the victims in the first place were furnished by two German firms which had acquired the patent from
I. G. Farben
. These were Tesch and Stabenow of Hamburg, and Degesch of Dessau, the former supplying two tons of the cyanide crystals a month and the latter three quarters of a ton. The bills of lading for the deliveries showed up at Nuremberg.

The directors of both concerns contended that they had sold their product merely for fumigation purposes and were unaware that lethal use had been made of it, but this defense did not hold up. Letters were found from Tesch and Stabenow offering not only to supply the gas crystals but also the ventilating and heating equipment for extermination chambers. Besides, the inimitable Hoess, who once he started to confess went the limit, testified that the directors of the Tesch company could not have helped knowing how their product was being used since they furnished enough to exterminate a couple of million people. A British military court was convinced of this at the trial of the two partners, Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher, who were sentenced to death in 1946 and hanged. The director of the second firm, Dr. Gerhard Peters of Degesch of Dessau, got off more lightly. A German court sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment.
⁶³

Before the postwar trials in Germany it had been generally believed that
the mass killings were exclusively the work of a relatively few fanatical S.S. leaders. But the records of the courts leave no doubt of the complicity of a number of German businessmen, not only the Krupps and the directors of the
I. G. Farben
chemical trust but smaller entrepreneurs who outwardly must have seemed to be the most prosaic and decent of men, pillars—like good businessmen everywhere—of their communities.

How many hapless innocent people—mostly Jews but including a fairly large number of others, especially Russian
prisoners of war
—were slaughtered at the one camp of Auschwitz? The exact number will never be known. Hoess himself in his affidavit gave an estimate of “2,500,000 victims executed and exterminated by gassing and burning, and at least another half million who succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000.” Later at his own trial in
Warsaw
he reduced the figure to 1,135,000. The Soviet government, which investigated the camp after it was overrun by the Red Army in January 1945, put the figure at four million. Reitlinger, on the basis of his own exhaustive study, doubts that the number gassed at Auschwitz was “even as high as three quarters of a million.” He estimates that about 600,000 died in the gas chambers, to which he adds “the unknown proportion” of some 300,000 or more “missing,” who were shot or who died of starvation and disease. By any estimate the figure is considerable.
⁶⁴

   The bodies were burned, but the gold fillings in the teeth remained and these were retrieved from the ashes if they had not already been yanked out by special squads working over the clammy piles of corpses.
^*
The gold was melted down and shipped along with other valuables snatched from the condemned Jews to the
Reichsbank
, where under a secret agreement between Himmler and the bank’s president, Dr. Walther Funk, it was deposited to the credit of the S.S. in an account given the cover name of “Max Heiliger.” This prize booty from the extermination camps included, besides gold from dentures, gold watches, earrings, bracelets, rings, necklaces and even spectacles frames—for the Jews had been encouraged to bring all their valuables with them for the promised “resettlement.” There were also great stocks of jewelry, especially diamonds and much silverware. And there were great wads of banknotes.

The Reichsbank, in fact, was overwhelmed by the “Max Heiliger” deposits. With its vaults filled to overflowing as early as 1942, the bank’s profit-minded directors sought to turn the holdings into cold cash by disposing of them through the municipal pawnshops. One letter from the Reichsbank to the Berlin municipal pawnshop dated September 15 speaks
of a “second shipment” and begins, “We submit to you the following valuables with the request for the best possible utilization.” The list is long and itemized and includes 154 gold watches, 1,601 gold earrings, 132 diamond rings, 784 silver pocket watches and “160 diverse dentures, partly of gold.” By the beginning of 1944 the Berlin pawnshop itself was overwhelmed by the flow of these stolen goods and informed the Reichsbank it could accept no more. When the Allies overran Germany they discovered in some abandoned salt mines, where the Nazis had hidden part of their records and booty, enough left over from the “Max Heiliger” account to fill three huge vaults in the Frankfurt branch of the Reichsbank.
⁶⁶

Did the bankers know the sources of these unique “deposits”? The manager of the Precious Metals Department of the Reichsbank deposed at Nuremberg that he and his associates began to notice that many shipments came from
Lublin
and Auschwitz.

At Nuremberg the notorious Oswald Pohl, chief of the Economic Office of the S.S., who handled the transactions for his organization, emphasized that Dr. Funk and the officials and directors of the Reichsbank knew very well the origins of the goods they were trying to pawn. He explained in some detail “the business deal between Funk and the S.S. concerning the delivery of valuables of dead Jews to the Reichsbank.” He remembered a conversation with the bank’s vice-president, Dr. Emil Pohl.

Once, Pohl related, after an inspection tour through the vaults of the Reichsbank where the valuables “from the dead Jews” were inspected, Dr. Funk tendered the party a pleasant dinner in which the conversation turned around the unique origins of the booty.
^68
*

More than one eyewitness has commented on the spirit of resignation with which so many Jews met their deaths in the Nazi gas chambers or in the great execution pits of the
Einsatz
squads. Not all Jews submitted to extermination so gently. In the spring days of 1943 some 60,000 Jews
walled up in the Warsaw ghetto—all that remained of 400,000 who had been herded into this place like cattle in 1940—turned on their Nazi tormentors and fought.

Perhaps no one has left a more grisly—and authoritative—account of the Warsaw ghetto rebellion than the proud S.S. officer who put it down.
^*
This German individual was Juergen Stroop, S.S. Brigadefuehrer and Major General of Police. His eloquent official report, bound in leather, profusely illustrated and typed on seventy-five pages of elegant heavy bond paper has survived.
^†
It is entitled
The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More
.
⁶⁹

By the late autumn of 1940, a year after the Nazi conquest of Poland, the S.S. had rounded up some 400,000 Jews and sealed them off within a high wall from the rest of Warsaw in an area approximately two and a half miles long and a mile wide around the old medieval ghetto. The district normally housed 160,000 persons, so there was overcrowding, but this was the least of the hardships. Governor Frank refused to allot enough food to keep even half of the 400,000 barely alive. Forbidden to leave the enclosure on the pain of being shot on sight, the Jews had no employment except for a few armament factories within the wall run by the Wehrmacht or by rapacious German businessmen who knew how to realize large profits from the use of
slave labor
. At least 100,000 Jews tried to survive on a bowl of soup a day, often boiled from straw, provided by the charity of the others. It was a losing struggle for life.

But the ghetto population did not die fast enough from starvation and disease to suit Himmler, who in the summer of 1942 ordered the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto to be removed altogether “for security reasons.” On July 22 a great “resettlement” action was instituted. Between then and October 3 a total of 310,322 Jews, according to Stroop, were “resettled.” That is, they were transported to the extermination camps, most of them to
Treblinka
, where they were gassed.

Still Himmler was not satisfied. When he paid a surprise visit to Warsaw in January 1943 and discovered that 60,000 Jews were still alive in the ghetto he ordered that the “resettlement” be completed by February 15. This proved to be a difficult task. The severe winter and the demands of the Army, whose disaster at
Stalingrad
and whose consequent retreats in southern Russia gave it first claim to transportation facilities, made it difficult for the S.S. to obtain the necessary trains to carry out the final “resettlement.” Also, Stroop reported, the Jews were resisting their final liquidation “in every possible way.” It was not until spring that Himmler’s order could be carried out. It was decided to clear out the ghetto in a “special action” lasting three days. As it turned out, it took four weeks.