The History

of the Holocaust

Pat Morgan

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Introduction

From 1933 until 1945, the Nazi regime in Germany waged a brutal war on groups of people whom they considered inferior – among them Jews, Roma, Slavs and the disabled – and on political opponents and religious enemies. Jews, whom the Nazis believed were the creators of their country’s downfall, were particular targets. At first through discrimination and persecution but later through violence, enslavement and mass murder, the Nazis carried out a pitiless attempt to eradicate an entire people.

The word Holocaust stems from classical Greek, in which it meant literally ‘wholly burnt’, and the word was later used to signify a sacrifice by fire. Perhaps a better description of the attempted liquidation of the Jews and others lies in the Hebrew word Shoah: calamity or destruction. Whichever term you prefer, they both adequately convey the emotional impact of the tragedy.

Although the Holocaust was ended in 1945, it was not until the early 1960s that the scale and meaning of the years of murder began to be truly appreciated in the western world. After World War II, it seemed to the European peoples that the reconstruction of their shattered countries was more important than chasing after the perpetrators of genocide; and the existence of the Cold War meant that much documentation of the Holocaust lay hidden behind the Iron Curtain.

In the early 1960s, two events occurred that led to many a historian embarking on a mission to uncover the true history of the Holocaust: in 1960 a principal player in the genocide, SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, was abducted by Mossad agents in Argentina and put on trial in Israel; and in 1961 an art historian, Gerald Reitlinger, published his book The ‘Final Solution’: the Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe. Eichmann’s trial (he was executed in Israel in 1962) and Reitlinger’s book served to focus historians’ attention on the Holocaust, and the whole truth started to trickle out.

Over time, the trickle became a flood and today anyone who wishes to study the course of the Holocaust, its causes and its effects has a vast range of resources at his or her disposal. This book contributes in a very small way to those resources.

Readers who want to arrive at a better understanding of the events of the Holocaust must have some knowledge of the history of the persecution of the Jewish people in Europe and elsewhere. That history dates back two thousand years to the time of Jesus Christ and the Roman Empire, and has been marked by countless attempts to ‘punish’ the Jews for perceived defects and misdeeds. There must be an understanding, too, of Germany in the decades leading up to World War II: of how the perverted, racist ideology of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to the fore; of how and why Germany accepted that ideology and those men. Maybe, once the reader has studied a little of the precedents of the Holocaust, he or she will be able to comprehend the enormity of its atrocities.

Aharon Appelfeld is a distinguished Israeli novelist who emigrated to Palestine in 1946 and has lived in Israel ever since. Born in what is now Ukraine in 1932, he was eight years old when his mother was killed by invading Nazi forces and he was deported with his father to a concentration camp.

Appelfeld escaped from the camp and survived the Holocaust. He says: “The Holocaust is a central event in many people’s lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it.”

Sure enough, there never will be an end to speaking and writing about the Holocaust.

Chapter 1

The background to genocide

If you want to arrive at some kind of understanding of the cruel minds that conceived and carried out the most appalling and infamous acts of genocide of the twentieth century, you need to delve way back in history.

Adolf Hitler and his henchmen, it is true, were unique products of twisted political thinking, of unnatural hatred and of ideas born in minds that were diseased and cynically manipulated. They were also unique in their savage desire to rid a continent of an entire people. But they were far from unique in their antipathy towards the Jewish race, as the history of many centuries shows very clearly.

The sheer, terrible scale of the mass murders of the Holocaust is unrivalled, as we must hope it always will be. The idea that killing Jews was justified is, however, almost as old as the story of Jesus Christ.

The Jews have long been vilified by some of the more stupid elements of Christendom as the killers of Jesus, the man they did not accept as the Messiah. And a few short years after the death of Christ, in the first and second centuries AD, the ruthless Roman Empire overcame a series of uprisings by the Jewish people in Israel to send them on many lifetimes of wandering throughout Europe and elsewhere. The Jews had become a stateless people and the Jewish Diaspora – the scattering of a people – had begun.

The Jews were made truly welcome in very few places, for all too often Christian people regarded them as the enemies of Christ. Indeed, all too often the Christian people of Europe took it upon themselves to persecute, demonise and murder their Jewish visitors. Preceding Hitler by seven hundred years, massacres took place in English cities in the 13th century. Even before then, German Crusaders on their way to reclaim the Holy Land had stopped off on the way to murder Jews, blaming them for the death of Christ.

The centuries that followed were marked by relentless discrimination and persecution. Jews gained unenviable reputations as cruel moneylenders – Catholics were forbidden by their Church to lend money with interest and Shakespeare’s Shylock character in The Merchant of Venice would have been a familiar caricature to Elizabethan audiences. In a rabidly anti-Semitic society, Jews were portrayed as evil, grasping and wily.

Even when the Reformation began to offer Christians alternatives to the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, its leading light, Martin Luther, made it clear that he saw the Jews as blasphemers and liars, and indicated that they should be converted to Christianity. “Know, Christian,” wrote Luther, “that next to the devil you have no enemy more cruel, more venomous and violent than a true Jew.”

Hitler and his Nazi cronies were influenced by all this anti-Semitic feeling and action, and they would have been well aware of events in nineteenth and twentieth century Russia that saw the persecution of Jews apparently endorsed by the state. The Tsars of that time actively encouraged attacks on Jewish populations, and the word ‘pogrom’ began to be widely known. Derived from a Russian word that means ‘destroy by the use of violence’, pogrom describes massacres inflicted on the Jews by peoples who enthusiastically accepted the centuries-old prejudices and received the support of their leaders.

Russia at that time was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. An atrocious massacre took place, with the authorities merely looking on, in Kishinev in 1903, while anti-Jewish feeling reached new peaks of hostility during the Beilis affair of 1913, in which a Ukrainian Jew was accused of the ritual murder of a 13-year-old boy in Kiev.

Some observers believe the Tsarist regime in Russia had already been responsible for an act of anti-Semitism that had plumbed new lows: the publication in 1903 of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This fraudulent publication, which was not proved to be a forgery until 1921, by which time enormous worldwide damage had been done, purported to be the minutes of a meeting at which Jewish world domination was discussed.

The belief that Jews were unwelcome aliens who threatened the stability of their host countries was not exclusive to Russia, however: it was commonplace throughout Europe, and Germany was no exception. That country was indirectly involved in the infamous Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish French army officer of that name was accused of passing secrets to the Germans. Exiled to the penal colony of Devil’s Island in French Guiana (South America), Dreyfus was eventually cleared of blame, but not before his case had revealed ugly and widespread anti-Semitic feeling in high places.

In Germany itself – where a growing sense of national pride followed the unification of the country following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 – public figures had long made known their contempt for the Jews. Chief among these was the eighteenth and nineteenth century philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who is rightly seen as one of the fathers of German nationalism. Calling on the German people to ‘be German’, he declared that making Jews free citizens would damage the nation. He went further, saying that it would only be possible for Jews to have civil rights if it were possible to “cut off all their heads in one night, and set new ones on their shoulders, which should not contain a single Jewish idea.” Is it necessary to look any further to find an inspiration for Hitler’s savage demonisation of the Jewish race? Sadly it is, for Fichte was not alone in his view of the Jews as a corrupting influence who were not worthy of citizenship.

Among that number was a composer of almost unrivalled celebrity and influence: Richard Wagner. Like many another German of his period, he made no secret of his dislike and disdain for Jews and went so far as to criticise fellow composers such as Felix Mendelssohn for their “Jewishness in music”. They could only create inferior music, he felt, because they had no connection to the German spirit.

Wagner’s feelings are notably expressed in the quotation: “With all our speaking and writing in favour of the Jews’ emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them.” He felt able to express this sentiment in spite of the fact that his friends and colleagues included many Jewish friends, colleagues and supporters – a clear indication of the deep roots of anti-Semitic feeling in German society.

In 1878, an event occurred that predated the Jew-persecuting policies of the Nazi party by some fifty years: the foundation of the Christian Social Workers’ Party by Adolf Stoecker, court chaplain to the German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm I. The party’s anti-Semitic message formed a small element of its policies – policies that the German people largely ignored – but its formation was a significant precursor of later events.

It was made possible by a growing conviction that certain races were superior to others, largely influenced by the work of the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau. His book An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-55) laid out the theory that the white, ‘Aryan’ race was superior to all the others he crudely defined in his book, and the idea was to be seized upon enthusiastically by the racist policy-makers of the Nazi Party. The mixing of races would, Gobineau believed, inevitably result in global chaos and must be avoided.

These were some of the ideas that were regarded as fact by large blocs of European – not just German – peoples as the world lumbered towards global conflict in 1914. World War I, of course, changed the course of history. It also saw some 12,000 German Jews die while fighting for their country. What’s more, it introduced a frustrated young Austrian, Adolf Hitler, to military service and to extreme right-wing politics.

The world war turned out to be a disaster for Germany, and Jews were to the forefront when, in 1918 and the years that followed, humiliated Germans looked around for targets for blame. Jews, the racist theories ran, had managed to profit financially from the war; they had proved they could not be trusted by inspiring the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; and, most astoundingly of all, had stabbed Germany in the back by inspiring the revolution of 1918 that eventually saw the imperial government replaced by the Weimar Republic in 1919. Germany had been betrayed by Jews to the extent that it had lost the war, the right-wing racists proclaimed, and the Jews had to be made to pay for their treachery.

It was a view with which Hitler agreed vehemently. Even though he did not become a German citizen until 1932, he felt the shame of the country’s defeat profoundly and, when he found himself investigating the new German Workers’ Party on behalf of the army in 1919, he was impressed by its ideas and became its 55th member.

Hitler soon became noted for his powers of oratory and for his attacks on diverse groups that included Jews and Marxists. He found willing allies among those who, like him, deplored the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany after the war and, when the opportunity to lead the party arose, he grabbed it. This was a party, renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (later to be known in the English-speaking world as the Nazi Party), that embraced the policy: “Only those of German blood may be citizens of the state. Accordingly no Jew may be a member of the nation.”

The Germany of the early 1920s was in political and economic turmoil, and it was all because of the activities of the Jews and Marxists, according to the Nazi Party and its compatriots on the right wing of the political spectrum. The terms of the hated Versailles Treaty had grave consequences for the country’s finances, and groups working to undermine the Weimar Republic made various attempts to topple it. Among them was Hitler’s Nazi Party, which was convinced that Jews were running the republic.

At a patriotic rally in a Munich beer hall in November 1923, the Nazis launched a rather pathetic attempt to seize power. The attempted coup d’état (known thereafter as the Beerhall Putsch) failed spectacularly, Hitler was arrested and tried for treason and he spent his nine months in prison brooding, formulating his twisted political theories and writing his autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). He would, he wrote, be doing God’s work by fighting off the Jews.

At first unsuccessful in achieving its desired political supremacy, the Nazi Party nevertheless gained a foothold in Germany: its crude vilification of the country’s 525,000 Jews had a certain popularity. It took the desperate times of America’s 1929 Wall Street Crash and its global effect on the world’s economies to bring Hitler to power. By now playing down his anti-Semitic message in order to gather votes, he promised desperate Germans the earth if they would only elect him. At a time when six million Germans could not find jobs, he promised employment, rearmament and a nation that could once again be proud of itself.

Even so, it was not by purely electoral means that Hitler achieved ultimate power. In the parliamentary elections of November 1932 the Nazis won 196 seats in the Reichstag – 34 fewer than in elections of July of that year – but power was at hand. The same year saw Hitler lose in two presidential elections to the elderly Paul von Hindenburg, but the old man was persuaded that he needed Hitler’s charisma in the office of chancellor. By January 1933, Hitler was in a position of huge influence.

Von Hindenburg was to linger as president until his death in 1934, but Hitler was in no mind to delay the implementation of his anti-Semitic policies. Before he even proclaimed the office of president redundant and declared himself head of state following von Hindenburg’s death, he had driven into action the brutal campaign of repression and persecution that characterised the Nazis’ time in power and would eventually lead to their attempt to wipe out European Jewry.

Chapter 2

Repression and persecution

If Germany’s Jewish population had imagined that, once he was in power, Hitler might leaven his outspoken anti-Semitism with a little compassion, it did not take long for them to be disillusioned. The Nazis’ hate campaign, aimed at depriving Jews of their civic rights and effectively expelling them from society, began to take shape almost immediately.

Even though just as much malign attention was being paid to Hitler’s other sworn enemies, the Communists, Jewish people began to feel the true weight of his hatred as early as 1 April 1933. Thugs in the brown shirts of the Sturmabteilung – or SA, the stormtroopers who formed the paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party – had been throwing their weight around with random beatings and threats for some time. Now, with Hitler’s blessing, they organised a one-day boycott of Jewish-owned shops and businesses.

To ensure the boycott was observed, SA troopers positioned themselves outside the shops and offices, which were adorned with yellow-painted Stars of David and menacing slogans: Don’t Buy From Jews was the clear message. Meanwhile, the police stood idly by as threats were followed by violence. But the boycott was a comparative failure: many Germans continued quite happily to patronise their local Jewish shops, and there were even reports that some had forced their way past the stormtroopers guarding the doors.

But equally sinister, if less dramatic, events were by now taking place off the streets, behind the doors of the legal and legislative worlds. In March 1933, Jewish judges were forced to retire and it was made clear that juries were not to include Jews in their number. Next, the Law for the Re-establishment of the Professional Civil Service was enacted, making it illegal for Jews to be employed in the civil service – except, at the insistence of President von Hindenburg, those who had fought for Germany in World War I. Jews, said the new law, were not ‘Aryans’ and were therefore not racially acceptable for service to their country.

The legal moves to exclude the Jewish population from society were gathering speed in 1933: a quota was imposed on schools whereby only five per cent of places could be allocated to Jewish children; Jewish lawyers and journalists found they were prevented from practising their professions; Jews were banned from working in the worlds of music, film and theatre.

That same year saw the opening of an establishment whose name was to become a byword for Nazi cruelty: Dachau. Located on the site of a former munitions factory about 16km outside Munich, Dachau was hailed by its Nazi instigator Heinrich Himmler – at that time Munich’s police chief – as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners”.

Concentration camps – defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as places “where large numbers of people … are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labour or to await mass execution” – were not new. The British had made notable use of them for Boer internees during the Second Boer War at the end of the nineteenth century, following the earlier examples of the Spanish and Americans. The Dutch had used them during World War I. But Dachau was new, and it provided the template for the hundreds of camps set up and used by the Nazis, for varying purposes, until 1945.

Dachau’s first internees – political prisoners such as Communists, other opponents of the Nazi regime and trade unionists – entered the camp by passing through a gate bearing the chilling words ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘through work one will be free’). In fact, few people who passed through those gates ever tasted much freedom in Germany again.

As time passed, Dachau’s internees began to include Jews and other persecuted groups such as Roma, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses, as we will see in a later chapter.

As Dachau opened its grim portals, the Nazis were busy exploring other ideas for dealing with the Jews, and one involved physical displacement – in other words, emigration. An apparently hare-brained scheme to house German Jews on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar was never implemented, but an agreement was reached with the Jewish Agency for Palestine whereby some Jews from Germany were able to make a new life in their ancient homeland and escape the gathering terror.

Back at home, 1935 saw the introduction of the Nuremberg Race Laws, the fiercest legal attack yet on Germany’s Jewish population. Following that year’s Nazi Party rally in the Bavarian city, Jews were excluded from citizenship of the Reich (the State) since they were not ‘racially pure’, and were forbidden to have sexual relations with people of ‘Aryan’ blood. They were even barred from employing female German servants under the age of 45 for fear that Aryan women might be seduced and bear children of ‘impure’ blood. Further, Jews were deprived of the right to vote and were deemed unable to hold public office.

The Nazis needed to define Jewishness if they were to enforce these laws efficiently. So a Jew, they announced, was anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents – even if he or she had left the Jewish faith behind and converted to Christianity. Anyone who had two Jewish grandparents and belonged to a Jewish religious community, or married a Jew, was also defined as a Jew. There were even categories for ‘part-Jews’, of the first or second degree.

Thus, many unsuspecting German citizens were ensnared in the trap of the racial purity laws. The Nazis calculated that there were more than 1.5 million people with some degree of Jewish blood in the Reich. That was 2.3 per cent of the population, but also damned by the new laws were “Gypsies, negroes and their bastards”.

The impact of the Nuremberg Laws was immediate and forceful, and it was followed by further anti-Semitic legislation as the Nazis proceeded with plans to ‘Aryanise’ all Jewish businesses – the passing of those businesses to non-Jewish parties. With a brief pause to allow the world to see how reasonable Germany was, when the anti-Semitic message was toned down during the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, the Nazis continued on their reckless, hate-filled path. The years of 1937 and 1938, for instance, saw Jewish doctors forbidden to treat non-Jews and Jewish lawyers banned from practising law. And in 1938 came the clearest sign yet of the Nazis’ murderous intent.

It was yet another act of Nazi callousness that was at the origin of Kristallnacht (Night of Crystal), when the glass from the windows of Jewish properties throughout Germany lay shattered in the streets. The parents of 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan were among thousands of Polish Jews who were expelled from Germany and stranded in terrible conditions in a refugee camp near the Poland-Germany border when the Polish authorities would not admit them. Grynszpan, who was living illegally in Paris having left Germany in 1936, received the news in shock and determined to exact revenge. On 7 November 1938, he made his way to the German embassy and shot Ernst vom Rath, a diplomatic official.

Vom Rath died two days later and the news of his death provoked terrible acts of retribution on the part of the thuggish storm troopers of the Sturmabteilung and their Nazi Party masters. As the Nazis commemorated the 1923 Beerhall Putsch, propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels made it clear that, should “spontaneous demonstrations” against the vom Rath outrage take place, they should not be hampered.

An orgy of violence and destruction ensued on November 9 and 10, in Germany, Austria and Sudetenland (both of which were now in German hands) in the worst pogrom yet to take place in the Third Reich. Synagogues, houses and businesses were consumed by flames, Jewish people were assaulted, often with deadly consequences, and many thousands were arrested.

When the awful events of Kristallnacht were over, 91 people had died, 7,500 businesses had been devastated and 267 synagogues had been burned to the ground. There had been many instances of rape and suicide. In addition, up to 30,000 Jewish men had been rounded up by the SA and the Gestapo secret police, arrested and transported to concentration camps like Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.

Insult was added to injury in the days that followed Kristallnacht. It was decreed that the Jewish community had been to blame for the pogrom and was to be fined one billion Reichsmarks. What’s more, no Jew was to benefit from insurance compensation for damage suffered during the violence, for all such payments were to be confiscated.

There followed a raft of legislation aimed at completing the elimination of Jews from society: property and businesses continued to be transferred to ‘Aryan’ ownership; no Jew was to work in the retail trade or manage a company, sell any goods or work as a craftsman; no Jew was to enter a theatre, cinema or concert hall, or set foot on a beach; no Jewish child was to be educated in a German school; no Jew was to hold a driving licence.

In hindsight, and given the apparent indifference of the German public to the excesses of Kristallnacht and its aftermath, it is reasonable to assert that these events signalled a turning point in the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews and prepared the ground for the horrors of the Holocaust.

Emigration of Jews from Germany was still looked on favourably by the Nazis, however, and after the events of Kristallnacht thousands did indeed flee – not always without difficulty. The 937 refugees aboard the St Louis bound for the USA in 1939, for example, found they were refused entry by America and were eventually given sanctuary by sympathetic European nations.

Europe, meanwhile, was speeding towards war as the Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Agreement was signed in August 1939 and Poland was invaded a few days later. Poland was just one of many territories to fall to Germany’s Blitzkrieg (Lightning War) tactics, and everywhere the Nazis emerged victorious, the question was posed: what to do with the Jews?

Hitler himself seems never to have been troubled too much by the question; in 1939 he stated unequivocally: “We are going to destroy the Jews. They are not going to get away with what they did on 9 November 1918.” But it is fair to say that there was a deal of debate among Germany’s rulers about the fate of the Jews. And somewhere along the line, the decision was made to exterminate them.

As German troops had occupied Poland they had also started establishing Jewish ghettos – areas where Jews were separated from the rest of the population and were forced to live in squalid conditions. As the war progressed and Germany launched its offensive against the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, more than 1,000 such ghettos were established in Poland and the USSR – and the prospects for the unwilling residents of those ghettos, some of whom had even been transported from western Europe, were dim.

Towards the end of 1941, long before the 1942 Wannsee Conference at which Nazi leaders apparently debated the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish question, the ghettos were being dismantled and their inhabitants either shot and interred in mass graves or transported to the death camps that had been set up in Poland: Chelmno was the first such camp to start conducting its grisly business, in December 1941.

In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, another way had been found of disposing of those Jews who found themselves in the way of the invading German army. Mobile killing squads known as Einsatzgruppen had been tasked with following the army and murdering all the Jews thus exposed.

The numbers of people killed by the Einsatzgruppen – usually by shooting, sometimes by gassing in specially-adapted trucks – are difficult to comprehend. On 28 and 29 September 1941, for example, it is believed 34,000 Jews met their deaths at the hands of killing squads at Babi Yar, near Kiev; on November 7, 13,000 more from the Minsk ghetto were killed in nearby Tuchinki. And those terrible numbers are just a fraction of the total.

The Einsatzgruppen undeniably formed a clinically efficient killing machine but the Nazi warlords were conscious of the effect such barbarity could have on the morale of those who perpetrated it. Their genius for inventing new and ever more hideous means of mass murder was demonstrated most vividly in the death camps.

Chapter 3

Arbeit macht frei

As we have seen, the Nazis first opened a concentration camp at Dachau, not far from Munich, in March 1933. Dachau, at first used solely for the detention of political prisoners, served as the model for the mass programme of building upon which the Nazis embarked, leading eventually to the presence of more than a thousand camps on German soil and elsewhere.

According to figures released by the German Ministry of Justice in 1967, there were in the region of 1,200 camps in territories under German rule, but other sources put the figure far higher: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example, says there were about 20,000 such camps between 1933 and 1945. There is also a great deal of understandable confusion about what role these institutions played; what kinds of people were imprisoned in them; and how many met their deaths in them.

It’s important to distinguish between the so-called extermination camps – those set up by the Nazis in Poland purely to process and kill masses of people – and the other types of concentration camp. To confuse the picture still further, some camps had more than one purpose, with ‘extermination’ occurring in camps ostensibly set up for other matters. To arrive at some kind of understanding, let us follow the definitions of the Holocaust expert Moshe Lifshitz and categorise the camps in the following way. We need to bear in mind that all of these camps might have mixed purposes, and any of them might have witnessed scenes reminiscent of an extermination camp.

Hostage camps were places where hostages were held and killed as reprisals for acts judged by the Nazis to be damaging to their interests.

Captured prisoners of war were held in POW camps, where many were tortured and killed.

Transit and collection camps were where prisoners were gathered together on the way to the main camps, or were just held temporarily.

Labour camps were concentration camps where, as the name suggests, prisoners were forced to work. The conditions were often appalling, the treatment was inhumane and the death toll from disease, starvation, exhaustion or simple execution was high. Labour camps were often attached to larger establishments or were set up on a temporary basis.

Moshe Lifshitz also points out the existence of camps for the rehabilitation and re-education of Poles, where the Nazis attempted to ‘re-educate’ Polish intellectuals.

And then there were, of course, the extermination camps, whose purpose was simple: to slaughter. There were four that could not be defined as concentration camps – Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka – but two others – Auschwitz and Majdanek – combined the functions of concentration and extermination.

It is imagined too often that Nazi concentration camps held only one kind of prisoner – Jews. That is far from the case. Many others were on the list of people who simply did not fit in with the Nazi idea of Aryan perfection, or who posed a threat to the regime: political prisoners, Communists, trade unionists, freemasons and anarchists, for example, fell into the latter category. These people would often be identified in the camps by the black triangular badges sewn on to their shirts and jackets.

The Nazis also regularly imprisoned habitual criminals, who would wear a green badge, and emigrants, who were forced into labour and often bore a blue triangle. Those prisoners who wore a pink badge could be identified as male homosexuals, paedophiles or rapists, and a purple triangle would be given to Jehovah’s Witnesses. Roma internees wore a brown triangle, while an upside-down red triangle meant a prisoner was a prisoner of war, a spy or a deserter.

Most famously, a double yellow triangle forming a Star of David identified a Jewish prisoner. The list of those who wore a black badge was long: the mentally ill and retarded, drug addicts, alcoholics and beggars, pacifists and conscription dodgers, aristocrats and royalty, prostitutes and lesbians.

What happened in the concentration camps? We will be examining the operation of several such places in the following pages, and we will go on to look at the death camps in the next chapter. For now, suffice it to say that concentration camps, at first used mostly for the detention of political prisoners, increasingly became places where those people the Nazis deemed unworthy of normal lives were imprisoned and forced to labour, were tortured, starved, raped and murdered. If they did not, or could not, work hard enough, they faced execution. Life under the Schutzstaffel (SS – Protection Squadron) and its Death’s Head Units, who ran the camps, was as close to intolerable as it is possible to be. And many prisoners died before they even reached their destination camp, for the conditions in which they were transported by rail – often for days or weeks – were inhumane, with little food or water.

From 1941, concentration camps were often the locations of euthanasia programmes for those deemed unfit to live, and the world has learned with horror of the medical experiments carried out on living prisoners in some sites.

It is impossible to be accurate in determining how many people were incarcerated in concentration camps, or how many met their deaths in the Nazis’ genocide campaign. Some estimates put the number of deaths at around eight million, others much higher. Most sources seem to agree that about six million Jews perished, and it is possible that you could add to that between two to three million Soviet prisoners of war, up to two million Poles, up to one and a half million Roma, a quarter of a million disabled people, 15,000 homosexuals, 80,000 freemasons … the list goes on and depressingly on.

The naked, distressing truth is that no one really knows.

What was life like in the concentration camps? The following pages will give a taste of the daily lives of the poor wretches who were imprisoned, worked to death or slaughtered in a few of the most notorious camps. We will see how camps were designed, how they were run with contempt for human life and, finally, how they were liberated.

Dachau

“Dear God, make me dumb, that I may not to Dachau come.” That was the earnest prayer being offered up by untold thousands a mere two years after the opening, in March 1933, of the Nazis’ first concentration camp. Its awful reputation had spread fast, and it had spread far.

The press release accompanying Dachau’s opening, and confirming its original function as a repository for political prisoners, was bald and emotionless: “On Wednesday the first concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5,000 persons. All Communists and – where necessary – Reichsbanner [Social Democrat paramilitary] and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here, as in the long run it is not possible to keep individual functionaries in the state prisons without overburdening those prisons, and on the other hand these people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organise as soon as they are released.”

Dachau’s first internees were indeed a mixture of Communists, Social Democrats and other enemies of the Reich, for the Nazis simply did not tolerate political opposition. As time wore on, however, many other groups passed through those infamous gates – the gates that bore the darkly ironic legend ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘through work one will be free’). Jews, homosexuals, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses and habitual criminals all knew the horrors of the prototype concentration camp. Following the Kristallnacht turning point in 1938, for example, around 10,000 Jewish men found themselves within Dachau’s confines. Most of these men were later released after proving to the authorities that they intended to emigrate.

It is thought that, in all, Dachau housed up to 200,000 people between 1933 and 1945. It is impossible to know how many died, but estimates range up to about 32,000. We can, however, be pretty certain about the number of registered prisoners in Dachau and its satellite sub-camps as the liberating American forces approached the main camp on 26 April 1945: 67,665. Political prisoners made up 43,350 of that total and Jews numbered 22,100, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).

Despite the ever-nearer presence of the American liberators on that day in April, the terror of Dachau was to be prolonged for 7,000 prisoners, most of them Jewish, who were unwilling participants in a ‘death march’. Forced to march towards Tegernsee, about 50km to the south of Munich, many succumbed to their hunger or exhaustion, while others, unable to continue, were simply shot by guards.

When the Americans did reach Dachau on April 29, they were stunned by what they found in the camp, but also by the macabre sight of 30 railway trucks filled with corpses. It was to be early May before the unfortunate prisoners on the death march were rescued.

Given that Dachau was the model on which all German concentration camps were based, and that it became a training centre for other camps’ SS guards, it is particularly instructive to learn something about its construction and its organisation. Originally a munitions factory, the camp was developed and enlarged using the labour of prisoners – what else? – from 1937, until it had assumed its final shape in the summer of 1938. Grouped inside an electrified barbed wire fence, a ditch and a wall, with seven surveillance towers, were two main areas: one for the camp, another for crematoriums.

Thirty-two barracks, including one detailed for medical experiments, were arranged within the camp area, which also contained a kitchen, showers, laundry, workshops and a prison block. Between the kitchen and the prison block was a courtyard where summary executions of prisoners were carried out.

The running of other sites clustered around southern Germany also fell within Dachau’s remit. Towards the end of the war, more than 30,000 prisoners toiled in these camps at the making of armaments.

Although Dachau was equipped with a gas chamber, USHMM says that there is no credible evidence that it was used for murderous purposes. Several thousand prisoners who were deemed too sick or weak to continue their labours were sent to the Hartheim euthanasia centre near Linz in Austria, where they were killed. The death toll at Dachau was maintained through the use of a firing range and a gallows.

These were not the only instruments of death available to the Nazis. If you did not die at the hands of a firing squad, on the gallows or through overwork, starvation, disease or suicide, you might be chosen to be the subject of medical experiments. Is it possible to comprehend the minds whose owners were able to justify using prisoners for tuberculosis or malaria experiments, for testing medications or for examinations of the effects of high altitude in a decompression chamber?

It’s possible that the victims of those sinister experiments were beyond caring what happened to them. Ordinary daily life at Dachau was designed to sap the spirit of even the hardiest prisoner, with its starvation rations and relentless work programmes. We have already seen how forced labour bolstered the production of weapons; it also facilitated the building of the camp and roads, the draining of marshes, the mundane operation of the camp and the extraction of gravel from the earth.

As the war drew to a close, the death rate at the camp rose to around 200 a day as typhus and starvation exacted a pitiless toll. The bosses who had overseen the death of thousands fled the scene but a Red Cross representative, Victor Maurer, managed to persuade SS guards to remain in the camp with the remaining prisoners while it was surrendered. A white flag was raised.

The surrender of Dachau to the Americans by SS-Sturmscharführer Heinrich Wicker took place on 29 April 1945. A report filed by Brigadier General Henning Linden recorded how, as the forces approached the camp’s south-west entrance, they were met by a Swiss Red Cross representative and two SS troopers, who said they had been detailed to surrender the camp. “The Swiss Red Cross representative acted as interpreter and stated that there were about 100 SS guards in the camp who had their arms stacked except for the people in the tower,” Brig Gen Linden continued.

“He said he had given instructions that there would be no shots fired and it would take about 50 men to relieve the guards, as there were 42,000 half-crazed prisoners of war in the camp, many of them typhus infected. He asked if I were an officer of the American army, to which I replied, ‘Yes, I am Assistant Division Commander of the 42nd Division and will accept surrender of the camp in the name of the Rainbow Division for the American army.’”

It was almost over. The liberators found around 32,000 prisoners in twenty barracks – 1,600 in each building whose design allowed for 250. In the wake of the liberation, an unknown number of SS guards were killed by their former prisoners and by American soldiers appalled at what they were witnessing. Deaths from disease and starvation continued, but at a much lower rate now the Americans were in charge. Local people were forced to visit the camp, witness its horrors and take part in the clean-up operation. According to some sources, they expressed bewilderment at what had been allowed to happen under their noses.

General Dwight D Eisenhower was able to issue the following communiqué: “Our forces liberated and mopped up the infamous concentration camp at Dachau. Approximately 32,000 prisoners were liberated; 300 SS camp guards were quickly neutralised.”

Buchenwald

The Americans were coming. Of that Gwidon Damazyn, an engineer from Poland who had been incarcerated in Buchenwald concentration camp since 1941, was convinced. Five days after the first liberation of a Nazi camp, the Buchenwald sub-camp Ohrdruf, on 4 April 1945, Damazyn took the radio he had managed to build in secret and transmitted the following message in English, German and Russian: “To Allies. To General Patton’s Army. This is concentration camp Buchenwald. SOS. We need help. They’re trying to evacuate us. The SS try to exterminate us.”

The SS were indeed doing their best to exterminate the occupants of this most notorious of concentration camps. As the day of liberation approached, they evacuated around 28,000 prisoners from the main site and several thousand others from sub-camps and forced them to march, with deadly consequences for many. The SS, however, had not reckoned with the willpower and cunning of the camp’s resistance organisation, who had been clandestinely stockpiling weapons and who held key administrative posts. Their delaying tactics hindered the evacuation, bought time and saved lives.

Damazyn waited for fifteen agonising minutes before his radio appeal for help was answered. Then, at last, came the hoped for response, and it came from the US Third Army. Help was on its way, and it would be at Buchenwald as soon as was possible.

It was the message the resistance men had been waiting to hear, and it imbued them with a strength that defied their poor physical condition. On April 11 they seized the secret stockpile of 91 rifles and one machine gun, overpowered and killed the SS guards who remained and awaited the arrival of the Americans.

Captain Frederic Keffer led the liberating detachment of troops into the camp later that day, and they were greeted as heroes by Buchenwald’s survivors, who somehow found the strength to toss some astonished soldiers in the air. More than 21,000 prisoners were liberated from Buchenwald.

Troops were followed the next day by journalists, among whom was the distinguished American Ed Murrow. His April 15 report for CBS conveyed to listeners something of the horror of Buchenwald. “I asked to see one of the barracks,” reported Murrow. “It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovaks. When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed.

“I was told that this building had once stabled 80 horses. There were 1,200 men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description.

“They called the doctor. We inspected his records. There were only names in the little black book, nothing more. Nothing about who these men were, what they had done, or hoped. Behind the names of those who had died, there was a cross. I counted them. They totalled 242; 242 out of 1,200, in one month.”

Murrow continued: “As we walked out into the courtyard, a man fell dead. Two others – they must have been over sixty – were crawling towards the latrine. I saw it, but will not describe it.”

That was the end of Buchenwald as a concentration camp; what of its beginning, and the terrible years of its operation? We know a lot from records kept by the SS, from which we learn that 238,380 prisoners passed through the gate bearing the legend ‘Jedem das Seine’, which can best be translated as ‘everyone gets what he deserves’. We also learn from the SS that Buchenwald accounted for 33,462 deaths, and to this figure may be added a further 13,500 deaths during evacuation, 8,483 executions by shooting and a possible 1,100 hangings. All of this adds up to the grim total of 56,545. Buchenwald was not an extermination camp; its toll of fatalities nevertheless tells of cruelty beyond belief.

Buchenwald was built in 1937 in woods on the northern slopes of a hill called Ettersberg near Weimar in central Germany. It is ironic that Weimar is noted as a centre of culture, as the home of the literary genius Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and as the 1919 birthplace of German constitutional democracy. ‘Goethe’s Oak’, whose preserved stump may still be seen at the site, was a prominent feature of the camp’s landscape.

The usual electrified barbed wire fence, complete with watchtowers, contained its prisoners, who were at first exclusively male and mostly political prisoners. Women started to be incarcerated from 1943. Ten thousand Jews were sent to Buchenwald in the aftermath of Kristallnacht in 1938, and it is thought that 255 of them died almost immediately.

Buchenwald did, however, receive many other groups, including Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, criminals, ‘asocials’ (those deemed workshy), prisoners of war, German army deserters, politicians and resistance fighters.

The layout of the camp placed the detention area known as the Bunker near the entrance, which was divided into two areas: the prisoners’ accommodation; and the guard barracks and administration block. Hangings and shootings were often carried out in the stables and crematorium area.

The northern part of the camp was the site of inhumane medical experiments aimed at testing treatments for contagious diseases like typhus, typhoid, cholera and diphtheria. When a group of four Russian POWs survived one particular treatment, they were strangled and dissected. Another experiment designed to test a treatment for wounds from incendiary bombs saw prisoners being severely burnt by phosphorus. Yet another involved the administration of hormonal transplants to prisoners in the vain hope that they would be ‘cured’ of their homosexuality.

Many inmates, of course, died from starvation, disease or overwork. This was no accident. They were being subjected to the Nazis’ policy of Vernichtung durch Arbeit – extermination through labour. That labour – the alternative to which was immediate death – might take place in one of Buchenwald’s many sub-camps, and it might consist of work in factories or workshops, in stone quarries or in munitions plants. Those prisoners who were picked out during regular selections as unable to work were sent to euthanasia facilities and either gassed or killed by poison injection.

At Buchenwald, death came in many forms. Inmates’ worst nightmares became reality when they met Hauptscharführer Martin Sommer, surely one of the most sadistic Nazis ever to serve that corrupt party. Known as the Hangman of Buchenwald, Sommer perpetrated acts of cruelty that were extreme even by the most twisted standards – so brutal that even the Nazis were forced to bring him to heel.

‘The singing forest’ was where Sommer hanged victims from trees by their wrists, which were secured behind their backs. The ‘singing’ referred to the screams that could be heard from the wooded area. There are also reports that Sommer had two Austrian priests crucified upside down.

Another Catholic priest who dared to give the holy sacrament of penance to a fellow prisoner was beaten to death. Yet another man of religion, a German pastor, was beaten, hung naked outside in winter time and drenched by buckets of water. He froze to death.

Sommer, along with Buchenwald commandant Karl Koch, was eventually brought to trial before SS judge Dr George Konrad Morgen, and it emerged that the depraved master sergeant kept instruments of torture hidden in a secret compartment underneath his desk. Here were found the needles used to kill victims, either with carbolic acid or air, injected into their veins in order to cause an embolism. It was said that Sommer sometimes hid his victims’ bodies under his bed after nocturnal torture sessions, waiting until morning before disposing of them.

This kind of sick conduct was too much even for the hardened SS judge, and Sommer was reduced in rank and sent to fight on the Eastern Front. It was not until 1958 that he was tried by a criminal court and he received a life sentence. Unlike many of his victims, Sommer lived into his seventies, dying in 1988.

The man who stood with Sommer at his SS trial, Karl Koch, was another example of unspeakable cruelty. With his equally cruel wife Ilse – dubbed the Witch of Buchenwald, the supervisor of female guards and hundreds of female prisoners – he had a zoo built by inmates to keep his children amused. The bear pit faced the square where prisoners endured many hours of enforced motionless silence during the twice-daily roll calls.

Koch was executed by the Nazis in 1945 while the Witch was later sentenced to life in prison, where she committed suicide in 1967.

Death at Buchenwald did not stop after its liberation and the defeat of the Nazis. Until 1950 it was used by the Soviet NKVD secret police, the forerunner of the KGB, as an internment camp, and it is estimated that the corpses of more than 7,000 prisoners lie in mass graves in Buchenwald’s beech woods.

Buchenwald was demolished in 1950. Today, the site is home to a monument that is kept at skin temperature throughout the year.

Sachsenhausen

The Nazis had a plan that, if it worked, would trigger raging inflation in Britain and fatally destabilise the economy. It involved the production of millions of counterfeit Bank of England notes in £5, £10, £20 and £50 denominations, which would be dropped from aeroplanes, grabbed with gratitude by the populace and used to introduce a little luxury to their rationing-dominated lives.

Who would do the work of producing the printing plates to such a degree of perfection that the resulting notes would never be detected as duds? Why, Jewish craftsmen, of course. There were plenty of them just hanging around, not doing much in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. And they were used to doing what they were told.

SS Major Bernhard Krüger set about building his 142-strong team of counterfeiters at Sachsenhausen, just north of Berlin. He must have taken some pride in the fact that Operation Bernhard was named after him, but he probably didn’t realise it would become the world’s biggest ever counterfeiting scam. Later, he took workers from other camps including Auschwitz, but, although the banknotes eventually produced – nearly nine million of them, worth a mind-boggling for the time £135 million – were near perfect, the fraud did not have the desired effect.

Sachsenhausen was evacuated in 1945 and the Nazis planned to exterminate the entire counterfeiting team in one fell swoop at the Ebensee sub-camp. The team melted into the crowds of other prisoners, however, the extermination never took place and legend has it that most of the fake notes found their way to the bottom of nearby Lake Toplitz.

It is thought that around 200,000 prisoners passed through Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945, and some sources put the death toll as high as 100,000. The site of murderous techniques later used in the extermination camps in Poland, it was constructed in 1936 by prisoners from other camps, and its SS staff had many ingenious ways of keeping its inmates occupied, apart from working on counterfeit banknotes.

Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, for example, had grandiose plans for the rebuilding of Berlin, and his schemes required the manufacture of a lot of bricks. The brickworks at Sachsenhausen, built in 1938, produced vast amounts of building materials, claiming many lives along the way. Then there was labour to be carried out for Heinkel’s He 177 bomber aircraft, some of which subsequently crashed mysteriously. Sabotage by Sachsenhausen workers? We will never know for sure.

Perhaps the most cruel and unusual task fell to those inmates who found themselves punished in the camp’s ‘shoe walking unit’. Here, prisoners were forced to walk all day, up to 40 kilometres, testing new shoes on tracks made of sand, gravel, cinders, broken stones or cement. This was not sufficiently cruel, apparently: from 1944 prisoners were made to walk in shoes two sizes too small, carrying 20 kilogram sacks of sand.

Originally designed for political prisoners, the triangular-shaped Sachsenhausen took in other groups from 1938 onwards: 6,000 Jews rounded up following Kristallnacht were followed by many thousands of others, as well as Roma, homosexuals, criminals and ‘asocials’. One Berlin Jew, Siegmund Weltlinger, later described the treatment of a fellow prisoner who fell foul of SS guards shortly after his arrival at the camp.

“A block was brought and he was bound fast to it,” remembered Weltlinger, “and the camp commandant said he was sentenced to twenty-five lashes. Then a giant man came, an SS man with a huge ox whip and started to beat him. At first the man only groaned a bit but then he begged them to stop.

“The commandant said: ‘What do you mean, stop? We’ll start all over again from the beginning.’ But after three more lashes the blood was spurting already and salt was rubbed in the wounds, or pepper – I don’t know any more. The man was dragged away, unconscious or dead. We never saw him again.”

By 1944, nine out of ten of Sachsenhausen’s prisoners were from outside Germany, and most of them came from the Soviet Union and Poland. It is thought that more than 13,000 Soviet prisoners of war were executed there. Those executions were carried out by shooting, but Sachsenhausen’s SS masters had another lethal trick up their sleeve: the use of poisonous gas.

‘Station Z’, built of course by prisoners, had been used for the extermination of prisoners by shooting from January 1942, and it had received the approval of high-ranking Nazi officials who witnessed the killing of 96 Jews in May of that year. But from March 1943, Station Z boasted the added facility of a gas chamber, where bottles of liquid Zyklon B – originally a cyanide-based pesticide and later used for exterminations at Auschwitz Birkenau and Majdanek – were placed in the ventilation system and forced into the chamber. It is not known how many victims succumbed to this inhuman treatment before the camp was finally liberated.

The liberation came on 22 April 1945, when 3,000 inmates, including 1,000 women, were found by forces of the 47th Soviet Army and the Polish 2nd Infantry Division. On their way to Sachsenhausen, they had come across the bodies of thousands of victims of a forced march involving up to 40,000 prisoners. The SS had abandoned the camp and were marching their victims north-eastwards. Those who could not cope with the rigours of the march were summarily finished off.

Sadly, deaths at Sachsenhausen did not stop with liberation. Like Buchenwald, it became one of the NKVD’s ‘special camps’ and housed up to 60,000 internees. It was closed in 1950, by which time a further 12,000 people had died of malnutrition or disease.

There are now two museums on the site of Sachsenhausen. One commemorates the victims of the Nazis; the other is dedicated to the Soviet era.

Ravensbrück

Silence fell across the Appellplatz, where the women prisoners of Ravensbrück were required to line up twice a day for the interminable roll calls. Deputy chief wardress Dorothea Binz, whip in one hand, a leashed German Shepherd dog straining at the other, had strolled into view.

Binz was a monster in the clothing of an Aufseherin (female concentration camp attendant). Her violence towards prisoners was said to be unyielding. She was known to strike out without warning, to kick, whip, shoot, stamp. She would kick a prisoner to death at the drop of a hat.

As well as inflicting abuse, Binz loved to watch it being inflicted. She would stroll arm in arm with her boyfriend, SS officer Edmund Bräuning, around Ravensbrück and take in the sights: women being whipped. Afterwards, they would walk on to the house they shared outside the camp, laughing at what they had seen.

But Binz was not the only Ravensbrück overseer who gloried in violence. There was Maria Mandel, who went on from Ravensbrück to control all of the female camps at Auschwitz and was said to have been keen on selecting children for killing. There was Ruth Closius, who received her training under Binz and was once seen to cut a prisoner’s throat with the blade of a shovel. There was Irma Grese, another Ravensbrück graduate who had the skins of murdered prisoners fashioned into lampshades.

Because Ravensbrück served as a training centre for Aufseherinnen, those who ‘benefited’ from their time there spread far and wide throughout the Reich’s network of concentration camps. Female attendants were in demand in many places, but Ravensbrück was unusual in that it catered largely for women prisoners. They came from a wide range of countries – some from as far afield as Great Britain and America – but of the estimated lifetime total of 132,000 inmates, it is thought that the largest group, numbering 48,500, was formed by Polish women. The Jewish element is estimated at more than 20,000, while 28,000 women came from the Soviet Union, 24,000 from Germany and Austria and around 8,000 from France. In all, about 50,000 women are thought to have died or been murdered there, although estimates go as high as 90,000.

Where there were women, there were also children. The camp, situated eighty kilometres north of Berlin alongside the Schwedtsee lake, received 882 young deportees, it’s thought, but children were also born within its confines. Newborn babies did not last long, being put to death by SS doctors or nurses before they could truly understand the horror of Ravensbrück. It might be thought that those tiny, innocent creatures were lucky.

Conditions were atrocious, food was almost non-existent and the forced labour, at Ravensbrück and its thirty-odd sub-camps, was harsh and unremitting. Prisoners might find themselves working for the Siemens company, making electrical components that would be used in the Nazis’ V-1 ‘Doodlebug’ bombs or V-2 ballistic missiles. They might be slaving in the construction of roads, between twelve and fourteen at a time pulling enormous rollers. They might be making carpets from reeds, or they might be making fur coats for the Waffen-SS or the Wehrmacht, for Ravensbrück was a major destination for the fur that the Nazis confiscated in huge amounts.

And then there were the medical experiments to which inmates were unwillingly subjected. They started in the summer of 1942 and they involved 86 female prisoners, 74 of whom were Polish. In one set of experiments, designed to test antibacterial sulphonamide drugs, inmates’ leg bones and muscles were cut and infected, simulating battlefield wounds; or nerves were cut; or foreign objects such as wood or glass were introduced to body tissue; or bones were fractured. In another, the regeneration of muscle, bone and nerve tissue regeneration was studied, and bone transplants were investigated. These foul experiments claimed eleven lives, six of them through execution.

Towards the end of the war, in January 1945, up to 140 Roma women were conned into signing consent forms that they thought would lead to their release; instead, they led to their being unwittingly sterilised. The catalogue of appalling treatment continued with the setting up of brothels in concentration camps on the orders of Reichsfuhrer-SS and Minister of the Interior Heinrich Himmler; each of the brothels, designed to ‘reward’ prisoners who met work targets, was ‘staffed’ by between eighteen and twenty-four women from Ravensbrück.

Perhaps those women might have preferred instant death at Ravensbrück, and instant death was readily available, in many forms. The camp’s killing efficiency was stepped up in February 1945, when a gas chamber was constructed on the site. Thousands of inmates are thought to have met their deaths in that chamber, including 130 babies and pregnant women in March 1945.

In some concentration camps, doomed prisoners plotted resistance programmes, but there was little the women of Ravensbrück could do to fight their captors. Instead, they worked on bolstering each other’s morale: teaching each other languages, geography and history; improvising music and drama; drawing their impressions of daily life; most heart-breakingly of all, preparing imaginary meals, no doubt dreaming of the day they would be able to turn imagination into reality.

Reality dawned with the liberation of Ravensbrück by the Red Army at the end of April 1945. The SS, when the Soviet forces were close at hand, had already handed 7,000 prisoners over to the Red Cross and forced more than 20,000 others on a ‘death march’ northwards. When they reached the camp the Soviet soldiers found fewer than 3,500 prisoners, too ill to walk, remaining. Those who survived the death march were found and liberated a few hours later.

In the years that followed, Aufseherin Dorothea Binz and other sadists who made life a living hell at Ravensbrück were among those found guilty of war crimes and hanged.

In this chapter we have uncovered the grim truth about just a few of the Nazis’ concentration camps. There were many others where life was equally nasty, brutish and short. We could, for example, have learned in awful detail about Bergen-Belsen, from where the BBC correspondent Richard Dimbleby sent the following dispatch when the camp was liberated by British forces in April 1945:

“Here, over an acre of ground, lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which, except perhaps by a convulsive movement or the last quiver of a sigh from a living skeleton too weak to move. The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them.

“Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live. A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms and ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.

“This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.”

We could equally have learned about the group of concentration camps in Austria that came to be known as Mauthausen-Grusen, where upwards of 120,000 people died. We could have read of Flossenbürg in Bavaria, whose death toll is thought to have been in the region of 30,000; or Gross-Rosen in Lower Silesia, another camp whose motto was Arbeit Macht Frei. Perhaps ‘Frei’ was meant to refer to the liberty to be found in death, for estimates of mortalities at Gross-Rosen and in its evacuation transports stand at around 40,000.

Deaths at Nazi concentration camps are, in the strict sense of the word, innumerable. It is sobering to reflect that these were not even the camps that were established for the sole purpose of mass murder.

Chapter 4

The final solution

No one knows for sure exactly when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi leaders grouped round him took the decision to wipe out the Jews of Europe by means of what was to be known as Die Endlösung – the Final Solution. However, one thing that is certain is that Hitler had predicted the genocide as early as 30 January 1939.

In a speech marking the sixth anniversary of his coming to power, he promised: “If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

By the summer of 1941, the Nazi leadership faced a huge problem: despite the efforts of the Einsatzgruppen and other means of extermination in killing vast numbers of Jews in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, there were still simply too many Jews in occupied Europe for the Nazis to deal with comfortably. In a letter of 31 July 1941 to Reinhard Heydrich, SS general and security chief, Hitler’s deputy Hermann Göring charged the former with making the organisational and financial preparations for an overall solution “of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe”. Göring added: “I further charge you with submitting to me promptly an overall plan of the preliminary organisational, practical and financial measures for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question.”

The letter leaves little doubt as to what was in the Nazi leadership’s minds, and some historians believe that Hitler himself took the decision to implement the Final Solution – mass deportations of Jews and their murder – on or around 15 September 1941. It is thought that the first result of this decision – the gassing of Jews – started at Chelmno on December 8 of that year.

Nevertheless, it was not until 20 January 1942 that Heydrich chaired a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee at which leading Nazis discussed the practicalities of the Final Solution. The forced ‘emigration’ of Jews from the living space (Lebensraum) of the German people was to be speeded up, Heydrich informed the conference, and the intended fate of these ‘émigrés’ was made quite plain. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference noted: “Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labour in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.”

The minutes continue: “The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.”

So it was that Operation Reinhard – the planned annihilation of European Jewry in death camps in occupied Poland – proceeded. In fact, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler had as early as 13 October 1941 ordered the police chief of Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, to start building work on an extermination camp at Belzec, and other camps were soon to follow.

The traditional history of the extermination camps concentrates on six sites – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka – all of which were located in Nazi-occupied Poland. However, lesser known camps also carried out deadly business: Jasenovac in Yugoslavia, which was operated by the fascist Ustase forces of Croatia; Sajmiste in Serbia; and Maly Trostenets in Belarus. But the major camps were sited in Poland for good reasons: that was where the greatest number of Jews lived, and the camps and the purpose of their existence would remain unknown to the vast majority of the German people.

Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibór and Treblinka were constructed expressly for the rapid killing of Jews, while the killing centres of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek formed part of existing labour camps. Chelmno opened its gates and its gas vans on 8 December 1941; Belzec first used its gas chamber in February 1942; the next month saw the opening of facilities at Auschwitz and Sobibór; and Majdanek and Treblinka followed in the early summer. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ prediction in his diary for 27 March 1942 that “not much will remain of the Jews” was to be proved terribly correct.

As always with the Holocaust, it is impossible to know exactly how many people perished in the extermination camps. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that a total of nearly 2.7 million Jews were murdered by gassing or shooting. Other estimates put the figure higher, and if you add in the number of deaths at the lesser known camps outside Poland, you could be looking at a possible total of 3.8 million. But no one knows.

One thing that can never be disputed is that the extermination camps were efficient in killing. Each camp was operated differently, yet each had the same outcome: death within a few hours for new arrivals who had survived the inhuman conditions of the transports or, if a prisoner looked capable of hard work, transfer to a Sonderkommando labour unit, working on the killing process and its aftermath. Typically, prisoners would be told they had arrived at a transit camp and would soon be transferred to a work camp. The deception would continue with the Nazis telling their charges that they needed to be bathed and deloused and that this would be carried out in a ‘shower room’. How many victims were truly deceived cannot be guessed, but if the guards suspected that an individual might prove ‘difficult’ on the way to the gas chambers, he or she was isolated and killed quietly.

Men, women and children were forced to undress and herded into the gas chambers, the doors sealed and, in some extermination camps, Zyklon B pellets were dropped through vents. All those inside the chamber were typically killed within twenty minutes, although some died instantly – it depended on how close they were to the vents. In other camps, pipes attached to diesel engines introduced deadly carbon monoxide to the chambers.

It was now the grisly job of the Sonderkommando to remove the bodies from the chambers, get any gold teeth out of victims’ mouths, shave the corpses, take them to a crematorium or burning pit and supervise the burning of fellow human beings. The work of the Sonderkommando will be examined in detail in a later chapter. For now, it is enough to say that they must known a similar fate to that of the gas chamber victims awaited them.

We know some of the detail of the exterminations at Auschwitz-Birkenau because of the testimony of camp commandant Rudolf Höss, who met his death at the end of a hangman’s rope in 1947 after his appearance on trial in Warsaw. Höss reported that Nazi and SS bosses were sent to Auschwitz to witness the efficiency of the gassings for themselves. All were impressed by what they saw, he said, but some “who had previously spoken most loudly about the necessity for this extermination fell silent once they had actually seen the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem’.”

Perhaps they were human after all.

Some prisoners survived the extermination camps, and they have told extraordinary stories: of the well-tended lawns around the crematoriums at Auschwitz; of music being played by young girls in white blouses and navy blue skirts as their compatriots were led to their deaths in the gas chambers; of the rats that feasted upon the bodies of both the dead and the sick; of the living skeletons that peopled the death camps. Which was preferable, death or a living death?

As we have noted, each extermination camp was different. The following pages will throw some light on how each carried out its sickening trade.

Auschwitz-Birkenau

The names of two buildings at Auschwitz-Birkenau – the Little Red House and the Little White House – could have come from the pages of a children’s storybook. But these charming-sounding brick cottages were actually converted into gas chambers and were the scene of the killing of more than a million people, including 960,000 Jews.

The Nazis established no fewer than 48 camps for varying purposes at Auschwitz in southern Poland, about sixty kilometres west of Krakow. Auschwitz II-Birkenau was just one of them, and it was to gain a terrible reputation as the site of mass murder on an industrial scale. The first camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, said during his trial for war crimes that up to three million people died there, although his memory cannot be relied on. It is thought that, apart from the awful toll of nearly one million Jews, 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, plus many thousands of others, died at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The memories of Höss, though, can be relied on in some other matters. He remembered that the super-efficient gas chambers were capable of killing 2,000 people in a single operation, unlike the 200 or so managed at Treblinka, and how one twenty-four hour period saw the gassing of a scarcely credible total of 10,000. “Technically, [it] wasn’t so hard,” Höss explained. “It would not have been hard to exterminate even greater numbers.

“The killing itself took the least time. You could dispose of 2,000 head in half an hour, but it was the burning that took all the time. The killing was easy; you didn’t even need guards to drive them into the chambers; they just went in expecting to take showers and, instead of water, we turned on poison gas. The whole thing went very quickly.”

The burning of corpses posed more than one problem, Höss recalled. “We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.”

Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the camps established near the town of Oswiecim, was constructed close to Brzezinka (‘birch tree’) from October 1941. After the conversion of the first cottage, gassings began in January 1942, while the second chamber was in operation from June 1942 until the autumn of 1944. Gassing by Zyklon B had been carried within the Auschwitz complex since September 1941; its use became massive in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

But these two little gas chambers were thought inadequate for the amount of slaughter the Nazis had in mind. So they set about increasing Auschwitz-Birkenau’s capacity for mass murder by converting a mortuary into Crematorium II, installing gas-tight doors and vents for gas and ventilation. In operation from March 1943, it was a success and was followed by the conversion of Crematorium III and the opening of the purpose-built Crematoriums IV and V. All four gassing centres were in operation by June 1943. Each building had three areas: one where the victims undressed, one devoted to a gas chamber and one where the bodies were cremated in ovens.

From 1942 to 1944, the Germans took advantage of the good railway communications at Auschwitz to send Jews from virtually all over Europe to either immediate death or incarceration in the worst conditions imaginable. They came in the greatest numbers from Hungary, but also from France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway in the west; from Poland itself; from Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia. Between late April and early July 1944 alone, in the region of 426,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz – and about 320,000 of them went immediately to the gas chambers.

When they arrived, deportees underwent the selection that would determine whether they would die straight away or be forced to labour. Those selected for immediate gassing included nearly all children, the elderly, women with children and those deemed, from a rapid inspection by an SS doctor, unfit for work. There were many ways to die at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and they included lethal injection, disease, starvation, shooting, beating and simple overwork. Although Auschwitz-Birkenau performed the function of a labour camp as well as that of a killing centre, as many as seventy-five per cent of its arrivals were sent straight to the gas chambers.

But the SS did not always have things all their way. Wherever prisoners are held there are those who plan ceaselessly to escape, to find some kind of freedom merely by surviving or to take revenge on their captors, and Auschwitz-Birkenau was no different.

Resistance organisations had already enabled a few prisoners to escape from Auschwitz, taking news of its horrors with them, by the time the Sonderkommando workers of Birkenau Kommando III revolted on 7 October 1944. Using whatever weapon came to hand – hammers or other tools, axes, stones – as well as homemade grenades, they overcame their SS guards and managed to blow up Crematorium IV. How did they lay their hands on the explosives? They had been smuggled into the camp by Jewish women prisoners who had been working in an armaments factory. Kommando III were then joined in the uprising by Kommando I of Crematorium II, who overpowered their guards and managed to break out of the camp.

The hundreds of escapees did not last long in the outside world. Soon recaptured, they were executed along with their fellow rebels. The women who had supplied the explosives were hanged publicly.

Gassing at Auschwitz-Birkenau continued until November 1944, and the gas chambers were blown up two months later as news of the liberating Soviet forces’ approach reached the camp. On 17 January 1945, the SS ordered that all prisoners should be executed, but the order was never carried out. Instead, nearly 60,000 prisoners were forced on a death march westwards, while 7,500 were left behind in the Auschwitz complex.

Forces serving in the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front reached Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. The survivors they found were either ill or dying.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum was first opened by the Polish government in 1947. Among the exhibits on show today are shoes, suitcases and many other personal effects taken from victims, but perhaps the most shocking is a thirty metre display case filled with human hair.

What is left of the gas chambers, where much of that hair was cut from victims after their murders, is also open to the public.

Belzec

Kurt Gerstein was an Obersturmführer, or Second Lieutenant, in the Waffen-SS. He was also a member of that organisation’s Institute for Hygiene, and as Head of Technical Disinfection Services he was on a visit to the extermination camp at Belzec on 19 August 1942. That morning he watched as a 45-wagon train carrying 6,700 Jews from the Ukrainian town of Lvov pulled up at the camp and its occupants were disgorged. More than 1,400 Jews were already dead from the rigours of their journey, he noted.

Gerstein’s impressions of that day were later to be used as evidence during the Nuremberg war crimes trials. His testimony continued: “A loud speaker gave instructions: ‘Strip, even artificial limbs and glasses. Hand all money and valuables in at the valuables window.’ Women and young girls are to have their hair cut in the ‘barber’s hut.’ (An SS Unterführer told me: ‘From that they make something special for submarine crews.’)

“Then the march began. Barbed wire on both sides, in the rear two dozen Ukrainians with rifles. They drew near. [Belzec camp commandant Christian] Wirth and I found ourselves in front of the death chambers. Stark naked men, women, children, and cripples passed by.

“A tall SS man in the corner called to the unfortunates in a loud minister’s voice: ‘Nothing is going to hurt you! Just breathe deep and it will strengthen your lungs. It’s a way to prevent contagious diseases. It’s a good disinfectant!’ They asked him what was going to happen and he answered: ‘The men will have to work, build houses and streets. The women won’t have to do that, they will be busy with the housework and the kitchen.’ This was the last hope for some of these poor people, enough to make them march toward the death chambers without resistance. The majority knew everything; the smell betrayed it!

“They climbed a little wooden stairs and entered the death chambers, most of them silently, pushed by those behind them. A Jewess of about forty with eyes like fire cursed the murderers; she disappeared into the gas chambers after being struck several times by Captain Wirth’s whip. Many prayed; others asked: ‘Who will give us the water before we die?’ [a Jewish ritual]. SS men pushed the men into the chambers. ‘Fill it up,’ Wirth ordered; 700 to 800 people in ninety-three square metres. The doors closed.”

Gerstein continued to watch as SS Unterscharführer Heckenholt tried to start the diesel engine whose exhaust was to be used to kill the chamber’s occupants. “It wouldn’t start,” he recalled. “Captain Wirth came up. You could see he was afraid because I was there to see the disaster. Yes, I saw everything and waited. My stopwatch clocked it all: fifty minutes, seventy minutes, and the diesel still would not start! The men were waiting in the gas chambers. You could hear them weeping, ‘as though in a synagogue’, said Professor Pfannenstiel, his eyes glued to the window in the wooden door.

“Captain Wirth, furious, struck with his whip the Ukrainian who was helping Heckenholt. The diesel started up after two hours and forty-nine minutes, by my stopwatch. Twenty-five minutes passed. You could see through the window that many were already dead, for an electric light illuminated the interior of the room. All were dead after thirty-two minutes!”

Now it was time for the Sonderkommando to go to work, with Gerstein still watching. “They had been promised their lives in return for doing this horrible work, plus a small percentage of the money and valuables collected. The men were still standing, like columns of stone, with no room to fall or lean. Even in death you could tell the families, all holding hands.

“Two dozen workers were busy checking mouths, which they opened with iron hooks. ‘Gold to the left, no gold to the right.’ Others checked anus and genitals, looking for money, diamonds, gold, etc. Dentists knocked out gold teeth, bridges, and crowns, with hammers.

“Captain Wirth stood in the middle of them. He was in his element, and, showing me a big box filled with teeth, said: ‘See the weight of the gold! Just from yesterday and the day before! You can’t imagine what we find every day, dollars, diamonds, gold! You’ll see!’”

Gerstein was so horrified by what he had seen at Belzec that he determined to let the world know what was happening in the extermination camps. He chanced upon a Swedish diplomat on a train the next day, and told him his story. It took a long time, but word eventually spread.

Gerstein’s report gave much detail of Belzec’s deadly operation and its commanders and staff. Little useful remains to be said, except for a few bald statements of fact.

The construction of the killing centre on the site of the former Belzec labour camp in the Lublin area of Poland, started in November 1941. It began its murderous work on 17 March 1942 by slaughtering prisoners sent from Lublin and Lvov. It is thought that around 434,000 Jews, plus an unknown number of Poles and Roma, were deported to Belzec and killed in the period up to December 1942. Almost no one survived.

Starting in October 1942, forced labourers began to open up the camp’s mass graves and burn bodies on open-air ‘ovens’ made from rail track. A machine was also used to crush bone to powder. The task was completed, and the camp dismantled, by late spring of 1943. The labourers were killed and the site was built on and planted in order to disguise it as a farm.

We will learn more about Christian Wirth in the next chapter. Kurt Gerstein was found dead in his French military prison cell, where he was being treated as a suspected war criminal, in April 1945. It is thought he committed suicide.

Chelmno

Sometimes, new arrivals at the Chelmno extermination camp were met by a man who had the appearance of a local squire, complete with a traditional felt cap with a feather set into the band. It must have looked convincing, for the prisoners had found themselves in the courtyard of an imposing manor house in the middle of a large estate.

They were welcome to Chelmno, the ‘squire’ said. The deception continued as men in white coats who appeared to be doctors inspected the arrivals as they stepped down from the truck. The squire spoke again to thank them for coming and explain that some would be staying at Chelmno to work while others would be going to Germany. First, though, they would have to bathe and be disinfected.

The Jews who had been chosen for the first Nazi extermination camp to start its horrific work were led into the manor house and upstairs to a room where they were told to undress. Their valuables were handed over to a local civilian, who issued receipts. A driver named Walter Burmeister later recalled that there were signs in the house indicating the way to the ‘baths’. Between fifty and seventy naked prisoners were herded downstairs again, into a cellar and along a ramp that led into the back of a large van.

“The gas vans were large vans, about four to five metres long, 2.2 metres wide and two metres high,” remembered Burmeister. “The interior walls were lined with sheet metal. On the floor there was a wooden grille. The floor of the van had an opening which could be connected to the exhaust by means of a removable metal pipe.”

Further attempts at deception were not necessary. The doors were closed and sealed, the pipe was attached to the van’s exhaust, the engine was started and the lethal fumes were pumped into the van’s interior. The pipe was then detached and the truck driven to a large forest clearing about four kilometres away, where any survivors of the gassing were shot. Huge mass graves awaited the bodies, which were unloaded by a detachment of Sonderkommando workers.

Chelmno, about fifty kilometres north-west of the city of Lodz in west central Poland, was the first stationary extermination facility used by the Nazis in their campaign to murder all the Jews of Europe. As we have seen, it was centred on the manor house of an unused estate, where the preliminaries to slaughter were carried out, and the forest clearing. The SS and police who ran the camp were housed elsewhere in the town of Chelmno.

The killings started on 8 December 1941 and claimed the lives of the Jewish inhabitants of the towns and villages of the surrounding Wartheland district. The following months, deportations from the ghetto in Lodz started, and the murders continued until March 1943. In the middle of that period, the SS, aware that the stench of decomposing bodies pervaded the surrounding area, ordered Jewish workers to exhume the bodies and burn them on open-air ‘ovens’ made, like those at Belzec, from rail track.

The murder stopped in March 1943 and the manor house and ovens in the forest were demolished. But that was not the end of the Chelmno killings, for the deportation of the inhabitants of the Lodz ghetto started again for a while in June and July 1944. Victims were driven to the forest, where they were either gassed in a van or shot.

The Chelmno death toll reached at least 152,000 before the killings stopped for good. In September 1944, forced Jewish labour was used once again, this time to dig up and burn any corpses that remained as the Nazis began a clear-up operation, and this work was complete by November, at which point the workers were shot. The Red Army was approaching Chelmno in January 1945 when the Nazis pulled out and abandoned the site.

If you have noticed some similarities between the operations at Belzec and Chelmno, there might be a good reason. Both camps benefited from the expertise in killing by gas of Christian Wirth, who had been transferred from the T-4 euthanasia programme that put to death up to 200,000 physically or mentally handicapped people in the name of racial hygiene.

Opinions on the number of survivors of Chelmno differ. Some people say there were two; others say three.

Majdanek

The Majdanek labour/extermination camp, which was situated on the outskirts of the Polish city of Lublin, has an unlovely distinction in the history of the Holocaust: it was the scene of the largest massacre to take place in a single day at a single location during the whole of that genocidal campaign.

It happened on 3 November 1943, as part of the SS and police operation that went under the innocent-sounding name of Harvest Festival. The SS bosses had watched with concern the armed resistance to deportations from the Bialystok and Vilnius ghettos in August and September, and Jewish uprisings at the Treblinka and Sobibór extermination camps in August and October. Now they planned to wipe out all the Jews who remained in the Lublin district. On November 3, SS and police units lined up and shot 18,400 Jews – at least 8,000 of them from Majdanek – just outside the camp. The other victims came from labour camps or prisons in Lublin. History records that, to drown out the sound of the slaughter, music was played over the camp’s loudspeakers.

Around twenty-five Jews had managed to hide during the massacre; they were found and shot the next day. The SS forced another 611 prisoners, including 311 women, to sort through the clothes of the dead. After performing that task, the men were ordered to bury the dead, then disinter them and burn them. They were then executed. The women, meanwhile, were sent to Auschwitz, where they were also killed. A mere 71 Jews were left at Majdanek at the end of Operation Harvest Festival.

Majdanek – official name Concentration Camp Lublin – began life in October 1941, originally to hold between 25,000 and 50,000 Soviet prisoners of war captured during the Battle of Kiev. The planned capacity of the camp rose continually in the early days: to 125,000, 150,000 and finally, in March 1942, to 250,000. But the death toll among the prisoners who were forced to work on the construction was appallingly high, and Majdanek’s capacity never did go much higher than 50,000.

The institution served primarily as a labour camp and as a sorting and storage centre for the valuables and clothing taken from the victims of Belzek, Sobibór and Treblinka. Nevertheless, it is believed that a total of 59,000 Jews were killed at Majdanek, by either gassing or shooting. Among the victims of the camp’s three Zyklon B gas chambers were around 18,000 ‘invalids’ and the shootings also continued: firing squads accounted for 600 deaths on 21 January 1944, 180 on January 23 and 200 on March 24, for example.

The camp was evacuated in a hurry in late July 1944, as Red Army forces approached rapidly. There was only time for a thousand prisoners to be forcibly marched towards Auschwitz (half survived the trek), and for the partial destruction of the crematoria, before Majdanek became the first major Nazi concentration camp to be liberated. The liberators found many thousands of prisoners, most of them POWs, at the camp. They also found much distressing evidence of the mass slaughter that had occurred.

Majdanek is unusual, and useful to historians of the Holocaust, in that, unlike most camps used for exterminations, it was not hidden in some remote rural setting but was set up near a large city; and, because the Germans did not have much time to destroy the evidence of their deeds before the camp was liberated by Soviet soldiers, it is well preserved. Little time was lost following liberation before Majdanek was converted into a museum, which it remains today. Also on the site is a mausoleum containing the ashes of victims.

Another museum exhibit testifies to the reality of life in Majdanek during its time as an extermination and labour camp. Civilian workers were allowed in to work with prisoners, and some managed to smuggle out letters. The Polish Red Cross and the Central Welfare Council were also permitted to enter and distribute food packages – another fact documented in the museum.

As always, there is a great deal of debate over the number of deaths at Majdanek. The most recent and seemingly most reasonable estimate, by a historian based at the museum, puts the death toll at 79,000, of which 59,000 were Jews.

Sobibór

One could never be accused of exaggeration in saying that the life of Alexander Pechersky was a remarkable one. During his eighty years in this world, the Ukrainian-born Jew also known as Sasha saved the life of his wounded Soviet army commander, was forced to labour in the infamous Sobibór extermination camp and, after the war, was imprisoned for six years by Stalin. And let us not forget that he masterminded the uprising at Sobibór that saw half of the camp’s prisoners escape.

Pechersky, as a Soviet prisoner of war captured during the Battle of Moscow in 1941, had already seen life in penal, POW and labour camps when he arrived at Sobibór on 23 September 1943. He was one of eighty prisoners who were selected for work and thus avoided the camp’s gas chambers. It wasn’t long, having noticed the smell of burning human bodies, before he determined to escape.

He soon gained a reputation for bravery among his fellow forced labourers when he faced down a bullying SS officer, and his idea of a mass escape and revenge killing of guards began to become a detailed plan. In this he was aided by Leon Feldhendler, the leader of the Polish Jews in the camp. The Poles sensed, from news smuggled in from other camps, that their end was near and they wanted Pechersky to lead their revolt.

Their chance came on 14 October 1943. The working day saw several SS guards lured into workshops, where they were attacked with makeshift knives and axes that had been secretly crafted in the camp’s machine shop. The resulting blood on the floor was covered up with sawdust. The prisoners now found themselves in possession of the SS men’s pistols as well as other handguns stolen from the Germans’ living quarters, rifles, a sub-machine gun and some hand grenades. The time was right for the revolt to proceed.

Or was it? Pechersky had earmarked one SS officer, Oberscharführer Erich Bauer for certain death, but he was not in the camp. Perhaps the plan could not go ahead.

But no. Bauer returned to the camp, discovered the murder of a fellow SS man and began shooting at prisoners. The rebels rose as one man when they heard Pechersky’s cry: “Hurrah, the revolt has begun!”

A survivor of the uprising, Ada Lichtman, later recalled: “Suddenly we heard shots. Mines started to explode. Riot and confusion prevailed, everything was thundering around. The doors of the workshop were opened and everyone rushed through. We ran out of the workshop. All around were the bodies of the dead and the wounded.”

In all that confusion, it is thought that around three hundred prisoners – half of the camp’s inmate population – made good their escape from Sobibór. Eleven SS men and an unknown number of Ukrainian guards lay dead. About eighty escapees lost their lives to machine gun fire or the minefield surrounding the camp, and others were recaptured. Between fifty and seventy went on to survive the war and tell the tale. Pechersky was among them.

The mass escape signalled the end for the Sobibór killing machine. Within days of October 14, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, informed of the events, gave the order for the remaining prisoners to be shot, the camp closed, the buildings destroyed and the site planted with trees. It was the end of a killing centre that had seen the murder of an enormous number of Jews; some estimates put the figure at more than 250,000.

It had started its inglorious life in 1942. Situated near the many labour camps established in the neighbourhood of Lublin in Poland, gassings at Sobibór began in earnest in May of that year, following the experimental killings of 250 Jews the previous month that had been witnessed by the infamous Christian Wirth.

The camp consisted of three areas: one for administration, one for the reception of new inmates and one for killing them. In the reception area were a railway siding, a ramp, rooms where the new arrivals undressed and warehouses to store their possessions. SS Oberscharführer Kurt Bolender, who would later commit suicide during his 1965 trial for war crimes, explained as part of his evidence what happened when a train-load of Jews arrived.

“Before the Jews undressed, Oberscharführer Hermann Michel made a speech to them,” said Bolender. “On these occasions, he used to wear a white coat to give the impression he was a physician. Michel announced to the Jews that they would be sent to work. But before this they would have to take baths and undergo disinfection, so as to prevent the spread of diseases.”

Ada Lichtman, the Sobibór survivor who described the 1943 break-out, provided a distressing description of these moments. Michel, who was nicknamed Preacher because of his refined manner, would calm the arrivals with promises that after their baths all their belongings would be returned to them. “At present, all of them would be going to the Ukraine to live and work,” remembered Lichtman. “This address aroused confidence and enthusiasm among the people. They applauded spontaneously and sometimes even danced and sang.”

Bolender resumed his story at his trial: “After undressing, the Jews were taken through the ‘Tube’ [a narrow, enclosed 100 metre path connecting the reception and killing areas] by an SS man leading the way, with five or six guards at the back hastening the Jews along.

“After the Jews entered the gas chambers, the guards closed the doors. The motor was switched on by the former Soviet soldier Emil Kostenko and by the German driver Erich Bauer from Berlin. After the gassing, the doors were opened and the corpses were removed by a group of Jewish workers.”

As we have seen, deportations to Sobibór continued until October 1943. Between July and September 1942, however, there was a brief lull while trains from the south were halted by repairs being made to the railway. In the autumn of that year, Jewish prisoners were forced to exhume mass graves on the site and cremate the bodies on open-air ‘ovens’ made from rail track of the kind that were used at other extermination camps.

After his escape, Alexander Pechersky resumed his military career, fighting with partisans in Belarus and later being promoted to the rank of captain in the Red Army and decorated for his valiant exploits. But his experience of anti-Semitic prejudice was not over: he was imprisoned in the Soviet Union in 1948 in Stalin’s ‘Rootless cosmopolitan’ campaign, and was not released until 1953. He died in 1990.

His fellow conspirator and escapee Leon Feldhendler managed to find a hiding place in Lublin until the end of German occupation in July 1944. He died in 1945, having been shot through the door of his apartment. The killing is usually attributed to right wing Polish nationalists.

It is said that fragments of the bones of Sobibór victims still litter the area near the burial pits. In the forest nearby, a statue honours the memory of the fighters who dared to challenge the killers of the SS.

Treblinka

The sheer number of Jews and others killed as part of the Final Solution at the Treblinka II extermination camp, situated about 80 kilometres north-east of Warsaw, defies belief. Some estimates are that between July 1942 and November 1943, more than 870,000 – perhaps as many as 925,000 – people were murdered. More than 800,000 of those victims are thought to have been Jews.

We can be fairly certain of some of the numbers of deaths because of the existence of a copy of a decrypted telegram that was discovered among recently declassified material in Britain in 2001. The telegram, from Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle, deputy to Odilo Globocnik in Operation Reinhard, contained the information that 713,555 Jews had been killed in Treblinka before the end of 1942. There were many more killings still to occur.

There is one certainty, at least. SS Obersturmführer Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka from September 1942 onwards, was tried for causing the deaths of around 900,000 people when he appeared before a West German court in 1970. The murky story of Stangl’s involvement in mass murder, his flight from justice and his eventual capture will be told in the next chapter.

But perhaps the murderous toll at Treblinka II would have been even higher had it not been for the heroic actions of the prisoners who, two months before the revolt at Sobibór, mounted an uprising on 2 August 1943. They had been organising and planning since late spring of that year, in anticipation of the end of Treblinka’s operations and the killing of its remaining prisoners.

Seizing weapons from the camp’s armoury, spraying kerosene on buildings and setting them on fire, prisoners stormed the main gate in a desperate and determined bid for liberty. Many fell in a hail of machine gun fire; many more of the three hundred who did manage to escape were hunted down and killed by SS guards, police and soldiers. Around forty are thought to have survived the war while nine hundred are thought to have remained in the camp.

Killings at Treblinka were due to cease anyway, but the uprising had the effect of bringing an immediate halt to the mass gassing programme. Commandant Kurt Franz, who was noted for his particularly sadistic brand of cruelty and was jailed for life in 1965, stated as part of his testimony: “After the uprising in August 1943 I ran the camp single-handedly for a month; however, during that period no gassings were undertaken. It was during that period that the original camp was levelled off and lupins were planted.” The remaining Jewish prisoners were shot, Franz might have added.

And so, with the closing of Treblinka and Sobibór, one of the most incomprehensible periods of man’s inhumanity to man was at an end. Odilo Globocnik was able to write to Heinrich Himmler on 19 October 1943: “I have completed Operation Reinhard and have dissolved all the camps.” Treblinka’s final massacre came with the shooting of a group of thirty Jewish girls at the end of November 1943.

The killings had started on 23 July 1942, after Treblinka II had been constructed not far from the site of the Treblinka I labour camp a few kilometres away. The construction was carried out following the model of Sobibór, with branches intertwined with the barbed wire fences in an attempt to conceal the camp’s horrors from those on the outside. The gas chambers were located in a large brick building in the centre of the site, and the ‘tube’ leading to it, similar to the one at Sobibór, was known as the Himmelstrasse – the Road to Heaven.

Among the archives of Yad Vashem, the official Israeli memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, is the testimony of Abraham Goldfarb, who arrived at Treblinka II on 25 August 1942. When the Germans opened the freight cars of the train, a horrible sight was revealed, he remembered. “The car was full of corpses. The bodies were partly decomposed by chlorine. The stench in the cars made those still alive choke … Waiting SS and Ukrainians beat us and shot at us.

“On the way to the gas chambers Germans with dogs stood along the fence on both sides. The dogs had been trained to attack people; they bit the men’s genitals and the women’s breasts, ripping off pieces of flesh. The Germans hit the people with whips and iron bars to spur them on so that they pressed forward into the ‘showers’ as quickly as possible. The screams of the women could be heard far away, even in the other parts of the camp.

“The Germans drove the running victims on with shouts of: ‘Faster, faster, the water will get cold, others still have to go under the showers!’ To escape from the blows, the victims ran to the gas chambers as quickly as they could, the stronger ones pushing the weaker aside.”

Goldfarb names one of two Ukrainian guards who stood at the entrance to the gas chambers as “Ivan Demaniuk”. John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born former American citizen, has been identified during legal proceedings as Ivan the Terrible, a notorious guard at Sobibór and Treblinka, and has actually at one point faced the death penalty in Israel. Demjanjuk’s guilt, however, has never been proved.

Forces of the Red Army over-ran the site of the former killing centre at Treblinka, as well as its neighbouring labour camp, at the end of July 1944. It is a matter of debate whether the complete truth about that terrible place will ever be known.

Nazi Germany’s planned objective of wiping out the entire remaining Jewish population of Europe came close to being realised, with the industrial-scale massacres of Operation Reinhard making a massive contribution to that genocidal intent. How could human beings bring themselves to participate in such inhuman deeds? The next chapter is devoted to examining the minds, motives and actions of the small band of men who commanded and took part in the killing.

Chapter 5

The executioners

The memorable nickname ‘Angel of Death’ was applied to Josef Mengele, the doctor who carried out appalling medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. Mengele was also known as ‘The White Angel’ because his white coat and outstretched arms as he directed new arrivals left (to the gas chambers) or right brought to mind the outline of an angel.

In truth, the phrase ‘Angel of Death’ could be used of many of the Nazi torturers, abusers and killers whose worthless lives are described in the following pages. So many of these people had the power to grant or deny life, and some exercised it with grim delight.

The Nazis’ murder of Jews, Roma and other unfortunate groups did not start with the enacting of the Final Solution, of course. However, the Final Solution brought into play a ruthless band of men and women who displayed an extraordinary efficiency in killing huge numbers of people. Their stories, when placed on the page, seem scarcely credible; could intelligent human beings really act in this inhuman way?

The tragic answer is yes, they could, and they did. Like their millions of victims, they will never be forgotten.

You could fill a book with descriptions of the executioners of the Holocaust; those mentioned here form just a small selection.

Klaus Barbie

b 25 October 1913, Bad Godesberg, Germany; d 25 September 1991, Lyon, France.

The young Nikolaus Barbie hankered after a career as an academic. Frustrated in that ambition, he instead became the infamous Butcher of Lyon, responsible for the deaths of something like 14,000 people in that French city.

By the time he became head of Lyon’s Gestapo secret police in November 1942, Barbie was a seasoned practitioner of some of the Nazis’ darker arts. His time in the southern French city was notable for the torture of prisoners by vicious methods: electric shock, sexual abuse by dogs, the breaking of bones, for example.

One victim described how he hit her in the face while cuddling a cat, nearly drowned her in a bath and struck her on the back with spiked ball attached to a chain. Another recalled his “pale eyes, extraordinarily mobile, like those of an animal in a cage.” One of Barbie’s most unforgivable acts was the deportation of forty-four Jewish children from an orphanage.

He escaped justice in South America for many years, but was extradited from Bolivia to France in 1983. Sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity, the Butcher of Lyon died of leukaemia in jail.

Erich Bauer

b 26 March 1900, Berlin, Germany; d 4 February 1980, Berlin, Germany.

A heavy drinker with poor personal hygiene skills, Oberscharführer Bauer was in charge of the gas chambers at the Sobibór extermination camp. Small wonder that he was at the top of the death list drawn up by the rebellious Sobibór prisoners in October 1943.

Among other random acts of sadism, Bauer was fond of setting the camp’s savage attack dogs on Jewish prisoners, and of cruel wordplay. One huge dog would be encouraged to attack with the words “Mensch, fass den Hund!” (Man, get that dog!) – the ‘dog’ in this case being the unfortunate Jew.

In 1949, Bauer was recognised in a fairground by former prisoners, and when he came to trial he was identified as the author of those acts of inhumanity. After serving part of a life sentence, he was pardoned and set free.

He once said: “I estimate that the number of Jews gassed at Sobibór was about 350,000. In the canteen I once overheard a conversation between Frenzel, Stangl and Wagner. They were discussing the number of victims in the extermination camps of Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibór and expressed their regret that Sobibór ‘came last’ in the competition.”

Martin Bormann

b 17 June 1900, Halberstadt, Germany; d 2 May 1945, Berlin, Germany.

A scheming, manipulative man who wormed his way into Hitler’s inner circle, Martin Bormann was known as the Brown Eminence. Wielding immense power by controlling access to the Führer, he witnessed Hitler’s last will and testament and his final moments in the Berlin bunker in May 1945.

He attempted to flee the capital and his whereabouts were disputed for decades, but his remains were finally identified in 1998. Bormann, trying to avoid capture, had killed himself by biting into a cyanide capsule.

Head of the Nazi Party’s Chancellery and private secretary to Hitler, Bormann was a man of enormous influence and a master of intrigue. But he seemed driven by intense hatred of Jews and the peoples of eastern Europe as well as by the desire to serve his own interests. He signed a decree on 9 October 1942 that stated “the permanent elimination of the Jews from the territories of Greater Germany can no longer be carried out by emigration but by the use of ruthless force in the special camps of the East”.

It is a pity a war crimes court was never able to examine his true motivations.

Karl Brandt

b 8 January 1904, Mulhouse, Alsace-Lorraine; d 2 June 1948, Landsberg am Lech, Germany.

Karl Brandt served as Adolf Hitler’s personal doctor, but his infamy, prosecution at Nuremberg and execution were due to other activities of his: carrying out medical experimentation on unwilling subjects as well as mass euthanasia.

The Nazis’ Aktion T-4 was instituted in October 1939 and continued until the end of the war. Perhaps as many as 275,000 physically or mentally handicapped people were killed by medication, starvation or gas chamber because they were judged, in Hitler’s words, “incurably sick”. At the head of Aktion T-4 was Brandt.

As well as being a Gruppenführer in the SS and Generalleutnant (Lieutenant-General) in the Waffen-SS, Brandt was the Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation. He was tried at Nuremberg, during the infamous ‘Doctors’ Trial’, for a wide range of horrifying crimes, among which was an astonishing catalogue of medical experiments on prisoners of war and civilians. Experiments were conducted in, among other things: freezing; bone, muscle and nerve tissue regeneration; epidemic jaundice; typhus; malaria; sterilisation; the effects of mustard gas; and the effects of various drugs.

Brandt was found guilty of these crimes and of mass euthanasia, and was hanged.

Adolf Eichmann

b 19 March 1906, Solingen, Germany; d 31 May 1962, Ramla, Israel.

Although there are those who have disagreed, it is difficult to deny that Adolf Eichmann had a pathological hatred of Jews. Fellow SS officer Dieter Wisliceny said Eichmann had once stated “that the knowledge of having five million Jews on his conscience gave him such extraordinary satisfaction that he would leap into his grave laughing”.

As it turned out, Eichmann’s grave was a watery one. After being hanged in an Israeli jail, his body was cremated and his ashes scattered on the Mediterranean Sea. That end had come after he had evaded justice for sixteen post-war years in Argentina before being abducted by agents from Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, in 1960.

Eichmann’s crimes? As SS Obersturmbannführer under Reinhard Heydrich, he was responsible for the practicalities of the mass deportation of Jews to the ghettos and extermination camps of Nazi-occupied eastern Europe. Every train that carried every Jew to his or her death was Eichmann’s responsibility.

He even carried on with his work, contrary to orders, in 1945, when Heinrich Himmler commanded that the slaughter was to stop and evidence of the Final Solution was to be covered up.

Odilo Globocnik

b 21 April 1904, Trieste, Austro-Hungary; d 31 May 1945, Carinthia, Austria.

In the early days of his rise through the ranks of the Nazi Party, Odilo Globocnik gave ample evidence that he espoused the anti-Semitic creed of his masters. “I will not recoil from radical interventions for the solution of Jewish questions,” he is quoted as saying when he was serving as Gauleiter (regional party leader) of Vienna.

His anti-Semitism was to serve him well later when, as SS leader in the Lublin district of occupied Poland, he was charged with the construction of the Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps. He was involved in the death of more than 1.5 million Jews and others in eastern Europe.

Even when he was later transferred to Italy in order to combat Yugoslavian partisans, Globocnik found time to participate in the persecution of Italian Jews. Some rather fanciful tales contend that he was killed, either by partisans or a Jewish revenge squad, in 1945, but the truth is that he was captured by British forces. He was carrying a cyanide capsule to be used in the event of capture, and he duly committed suicide.

Richard Glücks

b 22 April 1889, Odenkirchen, Germany; d 10 May 1945, Flensburg, Germany.

Richard Glücks was largely a desk-bound bureaucrat concerned with procedure and efficiency. He was, however, fully aware of the implications of the thousands of directives and memos that flowed across his desk.

From 1942, Glücks was involved in the implementation of the Final Solution; he was responsible for the organisation of forced labour in concentration camps; he took part in meetings concerning the medical experiments being inflicted on prisoners; he decided that the hair of camp victims should be collected and made into “hair yarn stockings for U-boat crews and hair felt stockings for the railway”; he recommended the Auchwitz site as ideal for a camp; he visited the Auschwitz camps several times and witnessed for himself the appalling conditions; orders for extermination passed through his hands; he authorised the purchase of Zyklon B gas to be used at Auschwitz.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Glücks, a weak man who lived in constant terror of his superior Heinrich Himmler, fled from Berlin with his wife at the end of April 1945. In Flensburg, he let the contents of a suicide capsule do its work.

Irma Grese

b 7 October 1923, Wrechen, Germany; d 13 December 1945, Hamelin, Germany.

Irma Grese moved from job to job in the concentration camps, inflicting pain, misery and death on countless people. As an Aufseherin she saw service in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and, finally, Bergen-Belsen. It was there that she was captured by British troops on 17 April 1945 and it was at Hamelin jail that she met the celebrated British hangman Albert Pierrepoint. He was the last person she saw.

Survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau told her Belsen trial that she seemed to derive sexual pleasure from beating prisoners with the plaited cellophane whip she always carried. They also claimed that everywhere she went, she was accompanied by a savage dog.

The claims continued, the most outlandish of them being that lampshades made from the skins of three women prisoners were found in her room. Witnesses said she beat prisoners to death and shot others in cold blood. Grese denied these charges, but she did not deny the allegation that she was present when Birkenau prisoners were selected for the gas chamber by Josef Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’.

It took fifty-three days for the court to examine the case, and to sentence Grese to death.

Reinhard Heydrich

b 7 March 1904, Halle an der Saale, Germany; d 4 June 1942, Prague, Czechoslovakia.

The high-born Reinhard Heydrich had many official titles: SS-Obergruppenführer (General), Police Chief, Chief of the Reich Main Security Office – including the Sicherheitsdienst security service, the Gestapo secret police and the Kripo criminal investigation agency – and Deputy Reich protector of Bohemia and Moravia. He managed a stint as President of Interpol, too.

He was charged with conceiving, organising and arranging the Final Solution. He chaired the 1942 Wannsee Conference that sealed the fate of millions. He was responsible for the formation of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads that roamed Poland and the Soviet Union Europe exterminating Jews. In other words, the blood of millions of people was on his hands.

It is even said that the art-loving Heydrich designed much of the apparatus used in the extermination camps. This claim was never put to the test in court, for he was ambushed by two Czechs in Prague. Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, who had been trained by the British Special Operations Executive, attacked his car with machine gun and bomb, and Heydrich died a week later in hospital.

Adolf Hitler

b 20 April 1889, Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary; d 30 April 1945, Berlin, Germany.

Historians have not uncovered any specific directive from Adolf Hitler ordering the Holocaust or the Final Solution, although we know he authorised the terrible work of the Einsatzgruppen murder squads in Poland and the Soviet Union.

We also have evidence that Hitler and Heinrich Himmler decided upon mass murder of the Jews by gassing in 1941; that Hitler examined the blueprints for the first gas chambers; and that he knew all about the extermination camps in the East.

Yes, the ultimate responsibility for the Holocaust lies with Hitler. Let him be condemned in his own words: “The Jews are definitely a race, but they are not human.”

And again: “The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”

And yet again: “Was there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate? On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light.”

Rudolf Höss

b 25 November 1900, Baden-Baden, Germany; d 16 April 1947, Auschwitz, Poland.

Rudolf Höss admitted to often feeling queasy before the death by gassing of children who were wide-eyed with fear. “I did, however, always feel ashamed of this weakness of mine after I talked to Adolf Eichmann,” he added. “He explained to me that it was especially the children who have to be killed first, because where was the logic in killing a generation of older people and leaving alive a generation of young people who can be possible avengers of their parents and can constitute a new biological cell for the re-emerging of this people?”

Obersturmbannführer Höss was the first commandant of Auschwitz. He perfected the mass extermination of thousands of people with one fell blow, and it was not until his final days that he recognised he had “sinned gravely against humanity”.

A devoted family man, Höss is said to have written poetry celebrating the beauty of Auschwitz. He estimated at his trial that 2.5 million people were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease.

Captured by British troops despite his disguise as a farmer, Höss was hanged at Auschwitz.

Karl Jäger

b 20 September 1888, Schaffhausen, Switzerland; d 22 June 1959, Hohenasperg, Germany.

The murderous activities of one Einsatzkommando killing squad in Lithuania are detailed in the ‘Jäger Report’, a five-page document written by Karl Jäger, the commander of that squad.

The report dispassionately records running totals of the killing of 137,346 people, most of them Jews, from 2 July 1941 to November 25 of that year. On record are the date and location of each instance of mass slaughter – there were more than a hundred executions in seventy-one places – and the number of deaths. The victims are categorised according to whether they were Jews, criminals, Communists or others.

In a handwritten note, Jäger later refined the totals to make 136,421 Jews, 1,064 Communists, 653 mentally disabled people and 134 others.

When his work was finished, Jäger wrote: “I consider the Jewish action more or less terminated as far as Einsatzkommando 3 is concerned … I am of the view that the sterilisation programme of the male worker Jews should be started immediately so that reproduction is prevented. If despite sterilisation a Jewess becomes pregnant, she will be liquidated.”

This cool recorder of atrocities committed suicide in a prison cell.

Friedrich Jeckeln

b 2 February 1895, Hornberg, Germany; d 3 February 1946, Riga, Latvia.

As the leader of all Einsatzgruppen operations in his district of the occupied Soviet Union, Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln was personally responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 people: Jews, Slavs, Roma and other ‘undesirables’. He was involved in the massacres at Rumbula (25,000 deaths in Riga, Latvia); Babi Yar (perhaps 150,000 murders in Kiev, Ukraine); Kamianets-Podilskyi (up to 25,000 deaths in Ukraine); and many others.

He was known as the developer of his own method of mass murder that carried his name (the Jeckeln System) and was also known as ‘sardine packing’. Victims were led to pre-dug pits where they undressed, were forced to lie face down on the earth or on the bodies of previous victims and were shot in the back of the head by sub-machine gun. If they didn’t die like that, they died when the pit was filled in.

Even hardened Einsatzkommando killers were said to be sickened by the method, but Jeckeln was happy with his achievements and able to watch the massacres dispassionately.

He was captured by the Red Army, tried before a military court in Riga and hanged.

Ilse Koch

b 22 September 1906, Dresden, Germany; d 1 September 1967, Aichach, Germany.

As the wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp and the Majdanek killing centre (the infamous Karl Koch, shot by the SS in 1945), Ilse Koch had ample opportunity to indulge her liking for torture, violence and humiliation. Not for nothing was she known to prisoners as the Witch of Buchenwald.

Koch was said to be fond of riding a horse through the camp and whipping prisoners she chose at random. She was also on the look-out for prisoners sporting distinctive tattoos. They would be killed and their skin flayed and tanned for use as a souvenir, or perhaps as a lampshade, a handbag, a book cover or gloves. Collecting shrunken human skulls was another of her hobbies, as was watching while prisoners were forced to rape each other.

Despite her reputation as perhaps the most notorious of the Nazis’ female concentration camp attendants, Koch had her life sentence, imposed by an American military tribunal in 1947, reduced to four years. However, she was rearrested and tried by a West German court. This time, in 1951, she again received a life sentence. She committed suicide by hanging herself with her bed sheets in 1967.

Karl Koch

b 2 August 1897, Darmstadt, Germany; d 5 April 1945, Buchenwald, Germany.

You might think, given the weight of evidence of atrocities committed by SS personnel in these pages, that it would be difficult to be accused of disgracing that organisation. Karl Otto Koch managed it, however.

The first commandant at Buchenwald, who also served in that capacity at Sachsenhausen and Majdanek, was married to Ilse Koch, the Witch of Buchenwald. That was not enough to condemn him, though; he committed many outrages himself – outrages that even the SS could not condone. In fact, the Nazis did not officially sanction cruelty, and all punishments and executions were supposed to be authorised at a high level.

It was discovered that Koch had ordered the deaths of a doctor and a hospital orderly because he was fearful they might let slip the fact that they had treated him for syphilis. An investigation uncovered orders to kill prisoners and the embezzlement of property stolen from inmates. It emerged that a prisoner who had been ‘shot while trying to escape’ had in fact been commanded to get water from a well outside Buchenwald, only to be shot from behind.

A week before Buchenwald was liberated by American troops, an SS firing squad ended Karl Koch’s evil life.

Wilhelm Koppe

b 15 June 1896, Hildesheim, Germany; d 2 July 1975, Bonn, Germany.

In spite of his lengthy record of atrocities committed in the name of Nazi ideology, Wilhelm Koppe died a free man. After living unrecognised for fifteen years, he finally came to court in Germany in 1964, when he was accused of involvement in the murder of 145,000 people. His ill health caused the court to discontinue his prosecution, however, and was freed in 1966. He lived for a further nine years.

That was much longer than his victims got. Obergruppenführer Koppe was an enthusiastic executioner and deporter of Poles and Polish Jews in the early days of the war, and he also commanded an SS squad that gassed 1,558 mental asylum patients at the Soldau concentration camp in 1940.

Later, he was involved in the operation of the Chelmno extermination camp and the Warsaw concentration camp; he ordered the execution of more than 30,000 Polish tuberculosis patients; and he decided that all male relatives of resistance fighters should be killed.

With the Soviet army approaching Poland, Koppe ordered the execution of all prisoners so that they would not be freed. He was the object of an unsuccessful assassination attempt by Polish underground fighters in 1944.

Josef Mengele

b 16 March 1911, Günzburg, Germany; d 7 February 1979, Brazil.

The ‘Angel of Death’ initially gained notoriety at Auschwitz-Birkenau as one of the doctors who selected new arrivals for either work or death. It is said he drew a line on a wall between 150 and 156 centimetres from the floor; those children who were not tall enough went to the gas chamber. But Mengele’s lasting infamy stemmed from the gruesome and lethal medical experiments he carried out on prisoners.

Among Mengele’s ‘work’ were experiments aimed at changing victims’ eye colour by injecting chemicals, sterilisations, amputations and shock treatments. But Mengele’s real interest lay in heredity, and in particular identical twins.

Many twins were killed and dissected, and in one instance the evil doctor sewed two Roma children together in order to create a pair of conjoined twins. It is thought Mengele experimented on around 3,000 twins, of whom 100 pairs survived.

Prisoner Alex Dekel recalled the doctor performing major operations with no anaesthetic and said: “Mengele was a doctor who became mad because of the power he was given.”

Mengele went on the run after the war and ended up dying in Brazil, despite the best efforts of an international manhunt to bring him to justice.

Otto Ohlendorf

b 4 February 1907, Hoheneggelsen, Germany; d 7 June 1951, Landsberg am Lech, Germany.

A career Nazi who rose steadily through the ranks to become, in 1939, head of Amt III of the Reich Security Head Office, Otto Ohlendorf also later became deputy director general of the Reich Ministry of Economic Affairs. It was his role as commander of Einsatzgruppe D in southern Ukraine and Crimea, however, that mostly interested his Nuremberg trial.

More than 90,000 deaths, mostly of Jews, are attributed to Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppe, and he made no secret of that during his trial. The massacres were a historically necessary task, he contended from the dock, to secure lebensraum for the Reich. He referred to precedents such as the slaughter of Roma during the Thirty Years War and the annihilation by the Biblical Israelites of their enemies. History, said Ohlendorf, would look on the killers under his command as no worse than the “push-button killers” who dropped the atom bombs on Japan.

The judges, perhaps thinking of the deaths of 14,300 people, mostly Jews at Simferopol on 13 December 1941, described him as a Jekyll and Hyde character, some of whose acts defied belief. Despite the evidence he had given in the trials of other war criminals, they sentenced Ohlendorf to death by hanging.

Joachim von Ribbentrop

b 30 April 1893, Wesel, Prussia; d 16 October 1946, Nuremberg, Germany.

The Foreign Minister of Nazi Germany from 1938 until 1945, Joachim von Ribbentrop denied at his war crimes trial that he had any sympathy for the Final Solution – the mass murder of European Jewry. Indeed, he said, he was opposed to the genocide and had done everything in his power to halt it.

But even at the last, he maintained that he remained dedicated to serving the will of Adolf Hitler, stating: “Even with all I know, if in this cell Hitler should come to me and say, ‘Do this,’ I would still do it.”

The Allies’ international military tribunal, in session at Nuremberg, found Ribbentrop guilty of all the charges laid against him – crimes against peace, deliberately planning a war of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This was a man who had said that the Jews in Germany were “without exception, pickpockets and thieves”; who was found to have been actively involved in the planning for the deportation of Jews to extermination camps; who advocated the killing of Allied airmen shot down over Germany.

Ribbentrop was the first politician to be executed by hanging in Nuremberg prison on 16 October 1946.

Fritz Sauckel

b 27 October 1894, Hassfurt, Germany; d 16 October 1946, Nuremberg, Germany.

Fritz Sauckel was the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment in Germany from 1942 until 1945. In other words, he was responsible for the organisation of slave labour involving millions of people from countries occupied by the Nazis. Many of those people died.

To serve the needs of Germany’s military industry during the war, five million workers were deported from the occupied lands and forced to work. Around 200,000 of them went to Germany of their own free will; the methods used to ‘recruit’ the others were severe. It is said Sauckel ordered that these slaves be exploited “to the highest degree possible at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure”.

But at his Nuremberg trial for crimes against peace, wars of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity, he defended his record in organising the forced labour. It was nothing to do with exploitation, simply an economic process for supplying labour, he insisted. He also denied there had been any slave labour, any mistreatment or any ‘extermination by labour’.

To the end, on the gallows, he continued to deny his guilt. “I die an innocent man, my sentence is unjust. God protect Germany!” he declared.

Walter Stahlecker

b 10 October 1900, Sternenfels, Germany; d 23 March 1942, Krasnogvardeysk, Russia.

As part of his duties as commander of the security police and intelligence agency in occupied ‘Ostland’ (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, parts of eastern Poland and parts of Western Belarus), Walter Stahlecker was in charge of Einsatzgruppe A. He was therefore the commander of the most efficient of the murder squads active in German-occupied eastern Europe.

A German soldier recalled one particular day during one particular massacre, at Ponary in Lithuania. “The ditch was about 1.5 metres deep and about the same again in width,” he said. “As the Jews were being led in groups into the pit an elderly man stopped in front of the entrance for a moment and said in good German: ‘What do you want from me? I am only a poor composer.’”

The soldier described the subsequent shootings and added: “The 400 Jews were shot in exactly the same way over a period of about an hour. The shooting happened very quickly. If any of the men in the pit were still moving, a few more single shots were fired on them.”

These killings occurred after Stahlecker had ordered a ‘cleansing action’. The Ponary massacre is thought to have accounted for the murder of 100,000 people, mostly Polish Jews. Altogether, Einsatzgruppe A ended a quarter of a million lives.

Stahlecker was 41 years old when he was killed by partisans.

Franz Stangl

b 26 March 1908, Altmünster, Austria; d 28 June 1971, Düsseldorf, Germany.

They say that Franz Stangl was always impeccably dressed when he was supervising the unloading of trains at the Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps. Dedicated to making the camps run like clockwork, he was nevertheless softly spoken and polite as the thousands went to their deaths.

As commandant at Sobibór, he was responsible for around 100,000 deaths and when he transferred to Treblinka in September 1942, his grim efficiency went with him. He was recognised as the best camp commander in Poland.

After the war he escaped justice before being tracked down to Brazil by Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Arrested in 1967, he was tried for the murder of 900,000 Jews at Treblinka and sentenced to life, only to die in prison in 1971.

Historian Gitta Sereny asked Stangl in 1970 when he first started thinking of the humans he was murdering as ‘cargo’. “I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager [death camp] in Treblinka,” he replied.

“I remember [Christian] Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity, it couldn’t have; it was a mass – a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said: ‘What shall we do with this garbage?’”

Christian Wirth

b 24 November 1885, Oberbalzheim, Germany; d 26 May 1944, Kozina, Slovenia.

His fellow murderer Franz Stangl was damning in his description of the vile Christian Wirth, aide to the notorious Odilo Globocnik and roving inspector of the latter’s Aktion Reinhard extermination camps. “He was a gross and florid man and my heart sank when I met him,” Stangl told Gitta Sereny. “When he spoke about the necessity of this euthanasia operation, he wasn’t speaking in humane or scientific terms, the way Dr Werner at T-4 had described it to me.

“He laughed. He spoke of ‘doing away with useless mouths’, and that ‘sentimental slobber’ about such people made him ‘puke’.”

Wirth was known to inmates and guards at the Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps as Christian the Terrible, and with good reason. SS-Oberscharführer Josef Oberhauser said of him: “His dominant features were an iron hardness, unconditional obedience, belief in the Führer, absolute heartlessness and ruthlessness.” Belzec survivor Rudolf Rener stated: “He was a born criminal, the ‘extreme beast’.”

When the death camps were dismantled, many Aktion Reinhard staff were given dangerous duties in order, perhaps, to reduce the number of witnesses of the mass slaughter. Wirth’s task was to combat Yugoslav partisans, by whom he was killed in May 1944.

Chapter 6

The bearers of secrets

Pity the poor, hopeless workers of the Sonderkommandos. Theirs was the gruesome task of aiding and abetting the SS extermination camp guards in their filthy work: guiding inmates to their deaths in the gas chambers or dealing with the resultant piles of corpses.

They had no choice in the matter. Sonderkommando members, almost all of whom were Jews, were chosen for duty in these ‘special units’, as soon as they arrived at a camp, if they were judged young enough, strong enough, fit enough and healthy enough to carry out the work. If they refused, they would be killed. Sometimes, their first allotted task would be to dispose of the bodies of the men who had preceded them in a Sonderkommando.

The Nazis decreed they were Geheimnisträger (bearers of secrets) and it was essential that they were not allowed to pass on their knowledge of the death camps’ atrocities to the outside world. The life of a Sonderkommando worker was, therefore, usually nasty, brutish and short: you either committed suicide or you died in a gas chamber or at the hands of a gun-wielding SS guard. Sometimes, however, the sheer number of killings in a camp was so high that the Germans were forced to keep their Sonderkommandos alive for longer periods to cope with the workload.

The life of a Sonderkommando worker had small compensations: as long as you were kept alive, you would benefit from slightly better living conditions than those endured by other prisoners. The Nazis needed the men who did their dirty work to remain reasonably fit, after all, even if they were not going to live long. Sonderkommandos were housed in barracks that were less like fatally overcrowded pigsties than those of their compatriots. They were sometimes allowed to wear normal clothing. Guards were less likely to shoot a Sonderkommando worker than other prisoners. The bearers of secrets were also sometimes allowed to bear other things: food, cigarettes or medicines taken from arrivals at the camps.

For these tiny rewards, the Sonderkommandos worked on until it was their turn to die. The task of some would be to greet the new arrivals at a camp, playing a part in the cruel deception by telling them they had to be disinfected and showered before being assigned to work units and reunited with friends, family and possessions. Once the gas chambers had done their work, other Sonderkommando workers would enter to sort through the jumble of bodies, extracting gold teeth, taking away any remaining clothes or valuables. Then the corpses would be taken away for burning. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the remains would be ground to dust and mixed with the ashes, and when the mounds of ash got too high, the Sonderkommandos would be forced to dispose of them in the nearby River Vistula.

Not many survived working in a Sonderkommando, of course, although some came through the experience to tell their awful tales. Others left accounts of their lives buried or hidden in the camps, to be found later by disbelieving liberators or historians. One of the survivors was Filip Müller, a Czech who survived the terrors of Auschwitz but witnessed the annihilation of a million Jews along the way. He told his story in his book Eyewitness Auschwitz – Three Years in the Gas Chambers.

The twenty-year-old Müller was on one of the very first transports to Auschwitz-Birkenau in April 1942 and was instantly assigned to work on the building of crematoriums and the installation of gas chambers. Later, he took part in the cremation of bodies, and somehow he survived for nearly three years. Not surprisingly, he was struck by the worthlessness of his life and decided to end it by getting himself into one of the gas chambers as it carried out its deadly work.

Hearing a group of compatriots about to enter a gas chamber singing the Czech national anthem and the Hatikva – the song that was to become the national anthem of Israel – Müller attempted to join them, he wrote. But he was stopped by people who recognised him, who said: “So you want to die? But that’s senseless. Your death won’t give us back our lives. That’s no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering and to the injustice done to us.”

Müller realised the truth of their words – perhaps the last those people ever uttered – and continued his work in the Sonderkommando. He was there at Auschwitz when it was liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945, and went on to give evidence at the trials in the mid-1960s that led to the imprisonment of many perpetrators of crimes at the camp.

Among Müller’s heartbreaking memories are the following: “ … As the doors [of the gas chambers] opened, the top layer of corpses tumbled out like the contents of an overloaded truck when the tailboard is let down. They were the strongest who, in their mortal terror, had instinctively fought their way to the door, the one and only way out, had there been even the remotest possibility of getting out … the bottom layer of corpses always consisted of children as well as the old and the weak, while the tallest and strongest lay on top.”

Müller continued: “No doubt the ones on top had climbed up there over bodies already lying on the floor because they still had the strength to do so and perhaps also because they had realised that the deadly gas was spreading from the bottom upwards … many had their mouths wide open, on their lips traces of whitish, dried-up spittle. Many had turned blue, and many faces were disfigured almost beyond recognition from blows.

“Almost all of them were wet with sweat and urine, filthy with blood and excrement, while the legs of many women were streaked with menstrual blood. Among them lay the bodies of pregnant women, some of whom had expressed the head of their baby just before they died …”

David Olère, another survivor of the Auschwitz Sonderkommandos, found a different way to express the horror of his recollections. The Polish-born French artist cleared corpses from the gas chambers and took them for burning for nearly two years, before taking part in a death march and, eventually, being liberated from Ebensee concentration camp in May 1945.

After the war, Olère began to testify to what he had witnessed in a grim outpouring of art, created from an obligation he felt to the victims whose deaths he had facilitated. His own face is sometimes to be seen in his paintings. It is a ghostly presence, a silent, tragic observer of obscenities he would never forget.

Chapter 7

Never forget?

There is a lot of guesswork involved in estimating the number of murders during the Holocaust, as we have seen. The consensus of most historians is, however, that around six million Jews perished, along with between two and three million prisoners of war from the Soviet Union, up to two million ethnic Poles, perhaps as many as one and a half million Romani people, up to a quarter of a million sick and disabled, around 80,000 freemasons, 20,000 Slovenes, up to 15,000 homosexuals and up to five thousand Jehovah’s Witnesses. In other words, according to some estimates the Nazis’ long campaign of hate and slaughter could have resulted in the death of eleven million people.

The historian Lucy Dawidowicz has stated that Europe’s Jewish population before World War II stood at around 8.9 million. After the war, it had been reduced by 5.9 million, or 67 per cent. In Germany, Austria, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bohemia and Moravia, the percentage of the Jewish population killed was around the 90 per cent mark, according to Dawidowicz’s figures.

In the aftermath of the genocides, as the true scale of the horror began to emerge and ever since, the earnest hope of right-minded people has been that the human race should forget neither those victims nor the lessons learned from the Holocaust. Subsequent events in Cambodia (two million victims of execution, forced labour and starvation during the 1970s), Rwanda (800,000 slain in 1994), Bosnia (up to 200,000 killings between 1992 and 1995) and Darfur (400,000 deaths from 2003 onwards) indicate few lessons, if any, have been learned.

Even after the end of World War II, as Jewish survivors attempted to return to their homes and rebuild their broken lives, anti-Semitic feelings arose once again and violence re-emerged. Among several pogroms recorded in Poland was one in the town of Kielce on 4 July 1946, when at least forty-two Jews were killed.

The Jews continued to wander. One recent estimate is that there were 200,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and while many attempted to return home, many others did not, fearful of anti-Semitism. It is fairly certain that more than a quarter of a million people were left for years after the end of the war in camps set up by the Allies for ‘Displaced Persons’. Palestine was the desired home for many and, despite Arab opposition and British unwillingness to let Jews into the territory, many Jews made a new home there.

The state of Israel was established in 1948 and by 1951, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates, perhaps as many as 170,000 displaced Jewish people and refugees had emigrated there. Many other European Jews emigrated to western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, Central and South America and South Africa. The diaspora spread ever wider.

Everywhere the survivors of the Holocaust went, they took their memories with them. Even as many of the perpetrators of genocide were being judged at Nuremberg and elsewhere; as many others were fleeing justice or ending their own wretched lives; as some kind of compensation for the victims of Nazi crimes was being made in the form of loans from West Germany to the state of Israel, the stories of survival in unimaginable hardship were emerging.

Richard Glazar told his story in his book Trap with a Green Fence. Born Richard Goldschmid in Prague and growing up able to speak both Czech and German, he was among those transported, along with friend Carel Unger, to Treblinka on 8 October 1942. He was spared the gas chamber.

“It was around twenty minutes after we reached Treblinka,” he recalled of his reunion in the camp with Unger, who had also been spared. “Then I left the barracks and had my first look at the vast space that I soon learned was called ‘the sorting place’. It was buried under mountains of objects of all kinds. Mountains of shoes, of clothes, thirty feet high.”

Glazar turned to Unger. “It’s a hurricane, a raging sea,” he told his friend. “We’re shipwrecked. And we are still alive. We must do nothing … but watch for every new wave, float on it, get ready for the next wave and ride the wave at all costs.”

Nobody would be left to bear witness to the awful events of Treblinka, Glazar soon realised. He described the ‘infirmary’, the site of executions. “In the middle of it was a pit, and to the left as one came in, there was a little booth with a kind of wooden plank in it, like a springboard. If people were too weak to stand on it, they would have to sit on it, and then, as the saying went in Treblinka jargon, SS man [August] Miete would ‘cure each one with a single pill’, a shot in the neck …

“In those days the pit – and it was at least ten to twelve feet deep – was full of corpses. There were also cases of children who for some reason arrived alone, or got separated from their parents. These children were led to he infirmary and shot there. The infirmary was also for us, the Treblinka slaves, the last stop.”

When Glazar got back to Prague in 1945, the only member of his family still alive was his mother. She had survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

Abraham Lewent, born in 1924 in Warsaw, was confined with his family in that city’s ghetto until he and his father were transported to Majdanek in 1943. He described the randomness of death in the death camps: “We were standing in a ditch and digging, and my father was standing next to me. A Pole passes by, grabs a stone and throws it on to my father. And he was a prisoner too, you know. The stone hit his leg.

“I don’t know what happened, if he broke a bone or something happened. In the night when we went home to the barracks, he couldn’t walk … All of a sudden [his foot] swelled up. So one guy said we should go and call a medic or a doctor or somebody … Well, I didn’t realise what’s going to happen if somebody gets sick …

“[The medic] wore a red cross. He came. He took my father. He says to him: ‘You know what, you have to go on ‘Revier’ [hospital]. And he took him away.

“I never saw my father any more. And this is for no reason at all. Pick up a stone and throw on somebody … The stone could have hit me, but it hit him.”

The stories of the victims of the Holocaust remain with us. The survivors are victims, too. Survivor or victim … is there a difference?

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter 1 The background to genocide

Chapter 2 Repression and persecution

Chapter 3 Arbeit macht frei

Chapter 4 The final solution

Chapter 5 The executioners

Chapter 6 The bearers of secrets

Chapter 7 Never forget?