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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and Operation
of
the Gas Chambers © | |
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Page 539 |
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particularly important news from outside was able to reach us.
In May 1958, the putsch by Salan and Massu in Algeria shook the
school to its foundations. In 1961, there was the generals' revolt
and then the Eichmann affair. All I knew about the trial was that it
was held in Jerusalem. My understanding of the genocide was very
poor. I was vaguely aware of the extermination of the Jews, but the
causes escaped me completely. This ignorance was reinforced by the
collective life of the school, where I was in constant contact, day
and night, with Vietnamese and North African comrades, the
consequence of the different colonial policies of the State that was
educating me. I do not understand racial discrimination. The older I
grow, the more I realize that while I was in uniform I acquired a
tolerance and understanding of the different races far superior to
the crude reflexes of the vast majority of people - as I began to
realize once I was returned to civilian life. For my eighteenth
birthday I received a book from outside. “La mort est mon
métier” by Robert Merle [translated into English as
“Death is my trade”]. It contained all the
explanations I could wish about the "mills of Auschwitz", and the
founding "miller". I was greatly influenced by it, and my interest
in this aspect of history dates from there - I wanted to be able to
understand why and how men can become so inhuman. Robert Merle, who
had been a prisoner of war, did not learn about the concentration
camps until his return from captivity. His curiosity was triggered
by a report of ten pages or so on Rudolf Hoess [Photo 2]
drawn up by Dr Guilbert, an American psychoanalist at the Nuremberg
trial. Merle wrote to Guilbert for more details and was sent about
five more unpublished pages. Realizing that even this expanded
report was too limited a basis for telling Hoess' story, Merle
turned to the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaire in
Paris and read there the testimonies of people deported to
Auschwitz. He was subsequently able to read the manuscript of the
French version of Dr Miklos Nyiszli’s account, very well translated
from the Hungarian by Tibere Kremer, before parts of it were
published in “Les Temps Moderne” under the title
“S.S-Obersturmführer Doctor Mengele, Journal d’un médecin
déporté au crématoire d’Auchwitz” [“Diary of a doctor
deported to the Auschwitz crematorium”]. A synthesis of
these different sources led to a historical novel — I insist on the
word “novel” — written between 1949 and 1951 and published by
Gallimard in 1952 under the title “La mort est mon
métier”. The critics were very muted because the work
appeared just as West Germany was beginning to rearm. It was not
until later that the book became famous. Merle admits that his
relations with Kremer turned sour, because the latter reproached him
for “borrowing” a lot of material from Nyiszli’s text and then not
giving his support to its publication. It was published in full by
Julliard in 1961 under the title “Médecin à Auschwitz”
[and also appeared in the US and the UK as “Auschwitz: a
doctor’s eyewitness account”]. As Merle had based his
account on Nyiszli, his descriptions of the premises, and in
particular of the Birkenau Krematorien and the chronology of their
genesis are unfortuntely inaccurate. Nyiszli had so exaggerated the
dimensions and capacities of the “murder weapons” that Merle, in all
good faith, presented as huge cathedrals of death what were actually
only big cremation installations that had been diverted from their
original purpose, or at least the first three of them.
Having passed my final examinations and resolved to break
with the army. I thought I would he able to go back to civilian life
and cram for a chemical engineering school in Paris. I was free to
go and I owed nothing. But there was after all a price to pay for
seven years of excellent schooling at low cost. I was so imbued with
the military life that I was able to hold out for only three days in
a civilian environment other than that of my family. I dropped
everything and high-tailed it back to La Flèche to prepare
for entering the Saint-Cyr Military College. I played the
game for three months. Then an effort was made to inspire us by
organising a visit to our future home, the Coëtquidan Military
College. I still do not know what happened within me, but on my
return I was sure I would never again set foot there. The school
year was thus transformed into a sabbatical, mainly of
disindoctrination. I regularly repeated to myself that this year was
the last that I would spend within those walls, and my school
results, which had been brilliant in the first term, were abysmal by
the third. I tried absolutely everything: parachuting, a trip to
Germany at the school’s expense, a new sketch for the end of year
celebrations, everything, that is, except serious work. I tried to
scuttle myself in the entrance examination for Coëtquidan,
trembling lest I should pass, a success that would have presented me
with a terrible problem of conscience. To my cowardly relief I did
not pass and was able to leave slamming the door behind me. I have
never been back to La Flèche. |
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Photo 2:
[PMO
neg. no. 382] |
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Sturmbannführer or SS Major
Rudolf Hoess, camp commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, between
Reichsführer HIMMLER and Max FAUST, assistant to chief engineer
Dürrfeld, responsible for the construction of I G Buna-Werk, during
a visit on 17th July 1942 to part of the construction site of the
huge Monowitz industrial complex, built to produce methanol and
synthetic rubber. Following his two day (16th and 17th July)
inspection of Auschwitz, Birkenau und Monowitz, Himmler promoted
Hoess to Obersturmbannführer or SS Lieutenant Colonel. In “La
mort est mon métier” [Death is my trade], Robert Merle gave
the pseudonym of “Lang” to Hoess. |
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I had finished with the military academy, but it had not
finished with me. The very intense military conditioning through
eight years of physical and mental impregnation had been such that
it look me fifteen years to get rid of most of it. Such a training
cannot he shed overnight. Marching in step and “driving the heel
into the ground” does not equip one for walking normally. Having
worn navy blue and seen all one’s comrades dressed the same does not
favour subsequent vestimentary freedom. We always addressed one
another by our surnames, the use of the first name being somewhat
effeminate in our opinion. The day boys that we received had this
unfortunate habit that we took upon ourselves to cure rapidly by
means of appropriate sarcasms. T'he external marks of this sort took
ten years to fade away, but there were also the internal marks, an
intimate domain about which I reflected long, trying to determine
whether the essential core of my personality was still subject to or
was now free from what had been inculcated in me. My training as an
adolescent is indelible and was intended to produce an officer.
Despite my revolts against the system and an undeniable nihilism
proper to former Brutions, I have remained for twenty years a
“latent” officer, with the attitudes, modes of thought and centers
of interest proper to that status. I studied and became familiar
with everything concerning military questions, past, present and
forecast. But this does not prevent me from being convinced that all
these stockpiles of arms ever more sophisticated and destructive,
are an extraordinary waste of human effort and energy, eating away
at our world like a cancer. I know how to give orders. but I have
never wanted to exercise this power, considering that as I have to
take orders from nobody I should not give them. It is easy to become
a perfect “marine” or “para” or “Waffen-SS”. Their training and
conditioning are similar. I know exactly the type of psychological
behaviour and mental obliteration required. If I was tempted to join
an “elite unit”, like many of my comrades who were candidates for
Saint-Cyr, cold logic dissuaded me, for enthusiasm, even suicidal,
can no longer do anything against the atomic reality.
On the
advice of my parents, I studied pharmacy, because it involved a
large dose of chemistry and I would be able to make a good living.
One has to eat after all. I qualified in 1971. After a year of
military service spent at the Inter-Services Sports School at
Fontainbleau, where I spent my time fitting out an analytical
laboratory, shooting, scuba diving, and improving my German with the
soldiers of a liaison post next to the school, I had another moment
of indecision, then set up on my own account.
During my
pharmaceutical studies, using the earnings of my first locum jobs,
and just after the appearance of “Treblinka” by
Jean-François Steiner (Editions Fuyard), I decided in August 1966,
accompanied by my future wife to go to see for myself the remains of
the famous “Konzentrationslager” the media were so full of. We spent
seventeen days in Poland, our first direct contact with the “East”.
Our tour begun on the cold Baltic beaches, which the sun vainly
tried to warm. We could only admire the sunsets. Then it really
shone after Slupsk. and accompanied us to Leba, famous for its
quicksands and incidentally for the concrete remains [Photo
3] of the launching ramp of the Fi-103 flying bomb, more
commonly known as the V 1 . We settled temporarily in the
Gdynia-Sopol-Gdansk conurbation. We had rented a room with a family
in Gdynia. The apartment of our host family of six, not counting the
baby on the way, consisted of an entrance kitchen, WC-bathroom,
bedroom and dining-room/dormitory. With the bedroom let to us. the
whole family had to squeeze into the dining room to sleep. There was
just one picture on the wall of our room: Mary and the infant Jesus.
The mistress of the house explained in German that whenever they let
the room to a member of the Party, she covered the picture with a
piece ofcloth. Talking to and living with this woman taught me far
more about living in communist Poland than any journalist staying at
a hotel “for foreigners” could have done. A country can be
discovered only by living with a family. At Gdynia, we visited the
Naval Museum and the “Blyskawica”, a ship that took part in many
naval engagements in 1939-45. now at anchor and converted into a
museum. In Gdansk, formerly Danzig, we visited the traditional sites
and the ruins of “Westerplatte” , where the Polish garrison
commanded by H Sucharski suffered and contained for seven days the
first German assaults of the Second World War. A trip to Malbork
revealed to us the esthetic inconsistency created by erecting modem
buildings near the imposing medieval complex of Marienburg, a visit
to which warrants at least three hours. There is a valuable
collection of amber, a fossilized vegetable resin. Through the
explanations of a member of the staff we discovered the fierce
nationalism of the Poles. One might almost have thought it was their
own ancestors who designed the great fortress of the Teutonic Order.
Lastly, we embarked on a tour of the camps. The first was Stutthof /
Sztutowo, 35 km east of Gdansk,. destined at first for Polish
civilians and designated as a “civilian internees camp”. There
remain only the enclosure of the “old camp” with its entrance and a
row of huts [Photo 4], two single-muffle cremation furnaces
[Photo 5] housed in a building that was reconstructed after
the war, and a small. partly restored gas chamber [Photo 6].
It is not known when this gas chamber for delousing prisoners’
effects was installed. Its dimensions (8 meters long, 3 wide and
2.30 high, giving a volume of approximately 55 m³) are close to the
standard dimensions of those erected by BOOS or DEGESCH. There are
two gas-tight doors, one in the southern end and the other in the
northern end. The doors do not seem to be original, since they were
missing at the Liberation and there has been modification of the
brickwork to adjust to the curved top of the frame, as can be seen
by comparison with a photograph of this chamber published on pages
108 and 109 of “1939-45. We have not forgotten”
Polonia, Warsaw 1962. The agent used is not known precisely, but
given the presence of the external stove (to the left of the door on
Photo 6), it must have been either dry heat or hydrocyanic acid
[Zyklon-B] used in a heated room. In this case it was not essential
to pour the product in through an external opening as an operator
wearing a gas mask could distribute the pellets or porous discs on
the floor, then go out and close the door. At the end of the cycle,
opening the two doors allowed efficent natural ventilation. From
22nd June to the beginning of November 1944, it was used as a
homicidal gas chamber for groups of about 100 people.
Zyklon-B being poured in through a small opening of 15 cm diameter
in the roof, a system apparently introduced on the advice of SS
Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Hoess, former commandant of
Auschwitz-Birkenau and at that time head of Department D1 of the
WVHA-SS (SS Economic Administration Head Office). While the history
of this gas | |
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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and operation
of the gas chambers
Jean-Claude Pressac
© 1989, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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