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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and Operation
of
the Gas Chambers © | |
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chamber is known from testimonies reported by Father Krzysztof
Dunin-Wasowicz, there has been no scientific examination of the
“murder weapon” since 1945, which means that we do not know how the
chamber functioned as a delousing installation and are unable to
provide material proof of its criminal, use. The number of victims
is estimated a one or two thousand.
The visit did not
greatly impress us. We were young and in love, and our car, a
Renault 4L, was in a hurry to get to Gizycko, formerly Lötzen, on
the shores of lake Niegocin in Mazuria. Our canoe expeditions, which
led us to deserted islands surrounded by protective reeds, have left
indelible memories. Love is an agreeable pastime tor two students of
opposite sex but it is not very enriching for the intellect. In
order to meet this latter need we devoted one day to visiting, near
the village of Gierloz the Rastenburg Führer Headquarters known as
“Wolfsschanze” or “Wolf’s Lair”, Hitler’s advance command post for
the operations in Russia. These colossal bunkers are now the
dislocated ruins [Photo7] of totalitarian pride, but though
they are choked by trees and other vegetation, they still exhude a
disquieting power, and are still dangerous because the area is full
of mines, only a small proportion of which have been neutralized.
One of the concrete roads leads to a clearing where Hitler enjoyed
presentations of different prototype tanks, such as the “mouse”, a
tank of 189 tons, proudly carrying at 20 kmh one 150 mm gun and one
75 mm. The Reichskanzler combined the mentality of a mole with a
taste tor heavy objects. The bunker walls, of staggering thickness,
had been fitted with explosives, so that in January 1945 the Germans
set off an enormous explosion that destroyed the bunker-city and
caused many of the lower levels to be flooded by the waters of the
surrounding lakes.
After our self-indulgent idleness on the
shores of the lakes, spoilt only by atrocious food, we headed south
towards the second camp. Treblinka, the one that had inspired our
trip to Poland. It was difficult to find, the rare signposts being
silent as to its location. At Stutthof I had hought a guide to the
“Places of struggle and martyrdom”. Reckoning that we must be very
close, I saw an isolated house and, armed with my guide book and a
photograph, went to ask where the former extermination camp was
located. I was told they did not know. Disappointed, I continued
along the road and a few hundred meters further on, beyond a screen
of trees, saw the mushroom-like Treblinka II monument-mausoleum
[Photo 8], surrounded by a symbolic cemetery of, apparently,
17000 standing stones. The three Polish artists who collaborated on
the monument must have been inspired by unconscious cynical humour.
Their bedtime reading apparently did not include the book of the
“Stürmer”, (Julius Stretcher’s anti-semitic journal),
addressed “to young and old” entitled “Der Giftpilz”,
in which the Jews are assimilated to poisonous toadstools. At the
entrance to the camp the former railway was represented by cement
sleepers that suddenly stopped. Not a soul to be seen. Completely
deserted. If I had become aware of Polish nationalism at Malbrock. I
began to see at Treblinka an attitude towards the Jews that I had
not previously suspected.
There was NOTHING left of the
former camp. There were absolutely no facilities whatever tell
visitors: no entrance, no guard, no guide. not even a kiosk selling
postcards, books or pamphlets in memory of the 800,000 (official
figure) Jewish victims who had gone up in smoke. This abundance
of “Nie ma” did not keep us long and we reached Warsaw at
dusk. In the middle of August, the capital was dead after 9 o'clock.
The night life that we were seeking outside the hotel was actually
IN the hotel and we had not even noticed it. How sad it must have
been to be young in Warsaw in August 1964, in a city only half
rebuilt and dominated by the towering 234 meters of the Palace of
Culture and Science donated by Stalin, “the little father of the
people”. Such was our impression as French students discovering
heroic “Warzawa”. We could not imagine what Warsaw must have been
like after its Liberation on 17th January 1945. Trying to imagine
TWO THOUSAND Oradours all merged into one is beyond the powers of a
Frenchman. Visually materializing this tragic annihilation would
have meant going through all the streets of Oradour 2000 times the
in winter of 1944. Only an album published in 1985 by the State
Scientific Publishing House gives a glimpse of "WARSAWA
1945". These photographs of a city devastated, sacked,
pillaged, dynamited and burned, taken under conditions so difficult
that there was even a lack of water for developing the films,
represent the despairing observation of their author, Leonard
Sempolinski. |
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Photo 3:
(Photo by the author) |
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In the region of Leba, a
concrete guard post near the beach belonging to a former V 1 flying
bomb launching site. |
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We wanted to visit the National Museum with its paintings and
collections of ancient art, but it was closed. I pleaded and
stressed our student status all in vain — all I got was a "Nie"
after having stated, in response to a direct question, that we were
students of pharmacy. We turned instead to the Polish Army Museum
next door. Its façade was lined with a row of guns of different
calibre, whose barrels were by pure chance pointing towards the
east. In the museum we saw in particular the famous armour of the
17th century Polish Hussars. In view of my special tastes I was
particularly interested in the open-air exhibition of aircraft,
tanks and artillery. But we did not visit many of the places of
interest, for Warsaw was only a stopover an our way to Cracow.
In Cracow we stayed in the French (“Francuski”) Hotel, near
to the Barbacane and the Florianska Tower that dominates the street
of the same name. Far a whole day our activities were limited to
wandering around the center, taking in the main square (Rynek
Glowny) and the stands of the cloth market (Sukiennice ), following
the traditional path of tourists in Cracow. Incapable of staying in
one place, we left the next day for the salt mines of Wieliczka and,
the day after that, Oswiecim.
Signposts being rare in
Poland, and often located in the least visible places, reaching
Auschwitz turned into an exhausting and hazardous pathfinding
exercise. Finally having arrived at our destination, we had a whole
afternoon to visit the most “famous” KZ of all. We raced through the
main camp, or “Stammlager” [Photo 9], and all that remains in
my memory is the vision of thousands of identity photographs of
prisoners along the walls of certain Blocks and of visitors
searching among them for members of their families. As for the “old”
crematorium or Krematorium I, it was conspicuous by its absence from
the itinerary. There were many visitors in the main camp, not real
crowds but there were plenty of people. Then came the turn of
Birkenau, site of the mass extermination of the Jews. Here, WE WERE
ALONE. The guard who lived in the entrance huilding spoke perfect
French. He told us what we ought to see, and informed us that in BA
III (the third construction stage at Birkenau), the SS had planned
to build an electric crematoriunn. where people would have been
electrocuted in series and incinerated by electricity too. I took
what he said for gospel, not knowing at the time that the poor man
was only repeating the claims made by the Soviet journalist Boris
Polevoi in “Pravda” in February 1945, announcing that
mass murders were committed using an “electric production line where
hundreds of people were killed simultaneously by an electric
current: the bodies fell onto a slowly moving conveyor driven by a
chain and advanced towards a kind of blast-furnace”. Thirty years
later, the legend still persisted, but had become a project, not an
accomplished fact. In our car, we had scarcely begun to explore the
women’s camp with its brick barracks, when a storm that had begun to
threaten suddenly burst with exceptional violence. The sight of the
multitude of long, dark wooden huts, cramped between barbed wire
barriers and overlooked by black watchtowers in the midst of this
violence of the elements gave us the impression of having gone back
in time to the period just after the SS had evacuated the camp. The
storm quickly abated and we continued towards the Krematorien. The
final monument-mausoleum as it exists today was under construction
and was completed for General de Gaulle’s arrival in Poland. We
passed before the ruins of Krematorium II with scarcely a glance.
How could we imagine, without any explanations or drawings or
photographs, what had gone on in these buildings whose internal
layout we did not know. When we came to the second sewage treament
plant [Photo 10], we were overcome by a ridiculous sense of
horror when we read a sign [Photo 11] stating that the
Germans had tried to produce a vehicle fuel from human excrement.
This was in fact untrue as I was later to establish in the Museum
Archives, for “Kläranlage II” [drawing 12] had no such thing
as a digestor where the anaerobic fermentation of the slurry would
have formed a gas rich in methane that could have been stored in an
associated gasometer. Our own purification plants have used and
still use this technique without anyone finding it repugnant or
immoral. Further on, the only building still intact in the area of
Krematorien IV and V was the “Zentral Sauna” . I entered through a
half open window at the back and went through the building without
understanding its function, wondering what on earth such an
installation could be used for. Finally, we looked for the two
“forest” Krematorien, numbers IV and V. We looked in vain, finding
only the remains of the concrete floors of huts. That is all that
remains of Krematorien IV and V, but I did not find that out until
1980. Many visitors must have had the same experience as us at
Birkenau, finding it impossible to imagine the atrocities carried
out there over a period of four years, because of the lack of valid
explanations.
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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and operation
of the gas chambers
Jean-Claude Pressac
© 1989, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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