Auschwitz Read online

  Lucille Eichengreen20 grew up in a Jewish family in Hamburg during the 1930s and remembers all too well the circumstances under which German Jews were forced to live, saying:Until 1933 it was a very nice comfortable life. ... But once Hitler came to power the children that lived in the same building no longer spoke to us—they threw stones at us and called us names. And we couldn’t understand what we had done to deserve this. So the question was always—why? And when we asked at home the answer was pretty much, “it’s a passing phase—it’ll normalize.”

  In the mid-1930s, the Eichengreens were informed that Jews were no longer permitted to live in the building in which the family then resided. Instead, they were assigned to places called “Jewish houses” that were owned partly by Jewish landlords. The Eichengreens’ first new apartment was nearly as large as their previous one but, over succeeding years, they were forced to move into smaller and smaller accommodations until the entire family ended up in a single furnished room. “I think we more or less accepted it,” says Lucille. “This was the law, those were the rules, and you could do nothing about it.”

  The illusion that Nazi anti-Semitic policy would one day “normalize” was destroyed by Kristallnacht, which occurred on the night of November 9, 1938. Nazi storm troopers destroyed Jewish property and rounded up thousands of German Jews in a revenge action motivated by the news that a Jewish student called Herschel Grynszpan had murdered Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat, in Paris. “Walking to school we saw the synagogues burning,” says Lucille Eichengreen, “the glass of Jewish shops broken, merchandise in the streets, and the Germans laughing.... We were so afraid. We thought they would grab us and do I don’t know what.”

  By the outbreak of war in 1939, Jews could no longer hold German citizenship, marry non-Jews, own businesses or work in certain professions; they could not even hold driving licenses. Discrimination by regulation, coupled with the violent outburst of Kristallnacht—in which more than 1,000 synagogues were destroyed, 400 Jews killed, and approximately 30,000 male Jews imprisoned for months in concentration camps—caused a large number of German Jews to emigrate. Nearly 450,000 of them had left the area of the new “Greater German Reich” (Germany, Austria, and the ethnic German Czech lands)—this amounted to more than half the Jews who’d lived there. The Nazis were pleased; especially because, following the pioneering work of Adolf Eichmann in 1938 after the Anschluss (annexation) with Austria, a system had been devised whereby the Jews were robbed of most of their money before they were allowed to leave the country.

  It was initially difficult, however, for the Nazis to see how the solution they had evolved to their self-created “problem” of the German Jews was transferable to Poland. Not only were there now millions of Jews under their control rather than a few hundred thousand, but most were poor; and, in the midst of a war, where could they be forcibly encouraged to emigrate to? Then, in the autumn of 1939, Adolf Eichmann thought he’d found the answer—the Jews should be made to emigrate not to another country, but to the least hospitable part of the Nazis’ own empire. Moreover, he thought he had found the ideal place—the Lublin district of Poland, near the town of Nisko. This remote area at the far-eastern extreme of Nazi territory seemed to him the perfect location for a “Jewish reservation.” German-occupied Poland would thus be divided into three parts, a German-settled part, a Polish part, and a Jewish part, all set on a neat geographical axis moving from west to east. Eichmann’s ambitious plan was adopted and the Nazis began shipping thousands of Jews from Austria to the area. Conditions were appalling. Little or no preparation was made for the Jews’ arrival, and many died. This was a matter of no concern to the Nazis—indeed it was something to be encouraged. As Hans Frank, one of the most senior Nazis at work in Poland, put it when addressing his staff in November 1939: “Don’t waste any time on the Jews. It is a joy finally to be able to deal with the Jewish race. The more that die the better.”21

  As Himmler sat composing his memorandum in May 1940, however, he knew only too well that the internal emigration of Jews to the far east of Poland had been a dismal failure. To a large extent, this was because the Nazis were attempting three separate emigrations simultaneously. The incoming ethnic Germans had to be transported to Poland and must be found somewhere to live. This meant Poles had to be thrown out of their houses and transported elsewhere. At the same time, Jews were being transported east into property from which Poles also had to be evicted. It was scarcely a wonder that this all led to chaos and confusion on an epic scale.

  By the spring of 1940, Eichmann’s Nisko plan had been abandoned and Poland had finally been divided into just two separate categories of territory. There were the districts that had officially become “German” and were part of the “New Reich”: West Prussia, around Danzig (Gdansk); the Warthegau, in the west of Poland near Posen and Łódź; and Upper Silesia, near Katowice (the area that included Auschwitz). And then there was the biggest single area of all, called the General Government, encompassing the cities of Warsaw, Krakow, and Lublin, which had been designated as living space for the majority of the Poles.

  The most pressing problem Himmler faced was providing suitable housing for the hundreds of thousands of incoming ethnic Germans—a difficulty which would, in turn, impact on the way he thought both Poles and Jews should be dealt with. The case of Irma Eigi and her family illustrates just how ruthlessly the Nazis attempted to solve the seemingly intractable predicament they had maneuvered themselves into—and also how the population problems fed upon themselves, spiraling away towards crisis. In December 1939, Irma Eigi,22 a seventeen-year-old ethnic German from Estonia, found herself, together with the rest of her family, in temporary accommodation in Posen in what had been Poland and was now the part of Germany known as the Warthegau.

  They had thought, when they accepted the offer of safe passage “to the Reich,” that they were going to be sent to Germany: “When we were told we were going to the Warthegau, well, it was quite a shock, I can tell you.” Just before Christmas 1939, a Nazi housing official gave her father keys to a flat which had until hours before belonged to a Polish family. Days later a restaurant was commandeered from its Polish owner so that the newcomers could also have a business to run. The Eigis were appalled. “We had no inkling of that before it happened.... You can’t live with this guilt. But on the other hand, every person has an instinct for self-preservation. What else could we have done? Where were we supposed to go?”

  This individual case of expropriation must be multiplied by a factor of more than 100,000 to give an impression of just what was taking place in Poland during this period. The scale of the relocation operation was enormous—within a year and a half, about half a million ethnic Germans arrived to be resettled in the new part of the Reich, and hundreds of thousands of Poles were dispossessed to make room for them. Many were simply shoved on cattle trucks and taken south to the General Government where they were dumped, without food or shelter. It is not surprising that Goebbels remarked in his diary in January 1940 that “Himmler is presently shifting populations. Not always successfully.”23

  All this still left the question of the Polish Jews. Having discovered that simultaneously attempting to relocate the Jews, the Poles, and the ethnic Germans was simply impractical, Himmler embraced another solution: If space was needed for the ethnic Germans—and it clearly was—then the Jews should be forced to live with a good deal less of it. Ghettos were the answer.

  Ghettos, which were to become such a striking feature of the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Poland, were never intended to have the life they did. Like so much in the history of Auschwitz and the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” they evolved in ways that had not initially been planned. As early as November 1938, when discussing how to deal with the housing issues raised by the eviction of German Jews from their homes, Reinhard Heydrich of the SS had said:As for the question of ghettos, I would like to make my position clear right away. From the point of view of the police, I don’t think a ghetto, in
the form of a completely segregated district where only Jews would live, can be put up. We could not control a ghetto where Jews congregate amid the whole Jewish people. It would remain a hideout for criminals and also for epidemics and the like.24

  Nonetheless, once other avenues seemed closed to them—albeit perhaps temporarily—the Nazis sought to ghettoize Polish Jews. This was not just a practical measure designed to release more housing (even though Hitler remarked in March 1940 that “the solution of the Jewish question is a question of space”25); it was also motivated by the visceral hatred and fear of Jews that had been at the core of Nazism from the beginning. Ideally, the Nazis believed, the Jews should just be made to “go away,” but if that was not immediately practicable then, because they were believed to be carriers of disease (especially Eastern Jews), they should be kept separate from everyone else.

  The Nazis’ intense, physical loathing of Polish Jews was something Estera Frenkiel,26 a teenage Jewish girl living in Łódź, felt from the first: “We were used to anti-Semitism ... Polish anti-Semitism was perhaps more financial. But Nazi anti-Semitism was: ‘Why do you exist? You shouldn’t be! You ought to disappear!’”

  In February 1940, as deportations of Poles to the General Government proceeded apace, it was announced that the Jews of Łódź were to be “relocated” to a ghetto area within the city. From the first, it was intended that such ghettos should only be a temporary measure—a place in which to incarcerate the Jews before they were deported somewhere else. In April 1940, the Łódź ghetto was sealed and Jews could no longer leave the area without permission from the German authorities. That same month the Reich Security Main Office announced that deportations of Jews to the General Government were to be curtailed. Hans Frank, Hitler’s former lawyer who ran the General Government, had been campaigning for months to halt all “unauthorized” forced emigrations because the situation had become untenable. As Dr. Fritz Arlt,27 head of the Department for Population Affairs in the General Government, later put it:The people were thrown out of the trains, whether in the marketplace or on the train station or wherever it was and nobody cared about it.... We received a phone call from the district officer and he said, “I don’t know what to do any more. So and so many hundreds have arrived again. I have neither shelter nor food nor anything.”

  Frank—no friend of Himmler’s—complained to Hermann Goering (who took a keen interest in Poland in his capacity as head of the Economic Four Year Plan) about the deportation policy and the use of the General Government as a “racial dustbin,” and an uneasy truce was arranged whereby Himmler and Frank would “agree upon the procedures of future evacuation.”

  It was this mess that Himmler tried to address in his memorandum of May 1940. In response, he sought to reinforce the division of Poland into German and non-German areas and to define how the Poles and Jews were to be treated. Himmler, in this statement of racial faith, wrote that he wanted the Poles to be turned into a nation of ill-educated slaves and that the General Government should be home to a “leaderless laboring class.”28 Himmler also wrote that:The non-German population of the Eastern territories must not receive any education higher than that of an elementary school.... The objective of this elementary school must simply be to teach: simple arithmetic up to 500 at the most, how to write one’s name, and to teach that it is God’s commandment to be obedient to Germans and to be honest, hard-working and well-behaved. I consider it unnecessary to teach reading.

  Alongside this policy of turning Poland into a nation of illiterates was a proactive attempt to “sift out those with valuable blood and those with worthless blood.” Polish children between the ages of six and ten would be examined, and those who were thought racially acceptable would be snatched from their families and raised in Germany; they would not see their biological parents again. The Nazi policy of stealing children in Poland is significantly less well known than is the extermination of the Jews, but it fits into the same pattern. It demonstrates how seriously a man like Himmler believed in identifying the value of a human being through racial composition. Removing these children was not for him—as it might seem today—some evil eccentricity, but an essential part of his warped worldview. From his standpoint, if such children were allowed to remain, then the Poles “might acquire a leader class from such people of good blood.”

  Significantly, Himmler wrote of these children: “However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physically exterminating a people as fundamentally un-German and impossible, then this method is the mildest and best one.” Although Himmler writes this in the immediate context of the Polish children, it is clear, because he refers to “physically exterminating a people” as being “fundamentally un-German” that he must also extend this admonition to other “peoples”—including the Jews. (Further confirmation of this interpretation is provided by Heydrich’s statement in the summer of 1940, directly in the context of the Jews, that: “Biological extermination is undignified for the German people as a civilized nation.”29)

  In his wide-ranging memorandum, Himmler also announced what he wanted the fate of the Jews to be, saying, “I hope to see the term ‘Jews’ completely eliminated through the possibility of a large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some other colony.” This return to the previously established policy of emigration was available now because of the wider context of the war. Himmler was counting both upon the imminent defeat of France and the consequent swift capitulation of the British, who would then want to sue for a separate peace. With the war over the Polish Jews could be packed on to ships and removed—possibly to one of the former African colonies of the French.

  Far-fetched as the idea of shipping millions of people to Africa seems today, there is no doubt that, at the time, it was taken seriously by the Nazis. Radical anti-Semites had been suggesting the removal of the Jews to Africa for years, and now the course of the war seemed about to make this solution to the Nazis’ Jewish “problem” possible. Six weeks after Himmler’s memo, Franz Rademacher in the German Foreign Office wrote a document that announced the proposed African destination of the Jews—the island of Madagascar.30 It is important to remember, however, that this plan—like all the other wartime solutions to the “Jewish problem”—would have meant widespread death and suffering for the Jews. A Nazi governor of Madagascar would most likely have presided over the gradual elimination of the Jews within a generation or two. The Nazis’ “Final Solution” as we know it would not have occurred, but almost certainly there would still have been another type of genocide.

  Himmler passed his memorandum to Hitler, who read it and told him that in his view it was “gut und richtig” (“good and correct”). Significantly, Hitler never wrote down his views on the memo. It was sufficient for Himmler to be armed with the Führer’s verbal approval for its contents. This was the way that high policy was decided in the Nazi state.

  Rudolf Höss and his embryo concentration camp at Auschwitz were but a small part of this overall picture. Auschwitz was situated in one of the parts of Poland that was to be “Germanized,” and so the immediate future of the camp would be decided, to a large extent, by its location. The Upper Silesia region had passed between the Poles and the Germans a number of times before and, immediately preceding World War I, it had been part of Germany, only to be lost in the Versailles settlement. Now the Nazis wanted to reclaim it for the Reich.

  Unlike the other areas to be “Germanized,” however, Upper Silesia was heavily industrialized and large parts of it were unsuitable for settlement by the incoming ethnic Germans. This meant that many of the Poles would have to remain as a slave workforce which, in turn, meant that a concentration camp was thought particularly necessary in the area in order to subdue the local population. Originally Auschwitz had been conceived as a holding concentration camp—a “quarantine” camp in Nazi jargon—in which to keep prisoners before they were sent on to other concentration camps in the Reich. But, within days, it beca
me clear that the camp would function as a place of permanent imprisonment in its own right.

  Höss knew that the war had radicalized everything, including the concentration camps. Although modeled on a place like Dachau, this new camp would have to deal with a more intractable problem than the institutions in the “Old Reich.” The camp at Auschwitz needed to imprison and terrorize Poles at a time when the whole country was being ethnically reordered and Poland—as a nation—was being intellectually and politically destroyed. Thus, even in its first incarnation as a concentration camp, Auschwitz had a proportionately higher death rate than any “normal” camp in the Reich. Of the 20,000 Poles initially sent to the camp, more than half were dead by the start of 1942.

  The first prisoners to arrive at Auschwitz in June 1940 were not Poles but Germans—thirty criminals transferred from Sachsenhausen concentration camp. They would become the first Kapos, the inmates who would act as agents of control between the SS and the Polish prisoners. The sight of these Kapos was the strongest first impression made on many of the Poles who arrived in the initial transports to the camp. “We thought they were all sailors,” says Roman Trojanowski,31 who arrived at Auschwitz as a nineteen year old in the summer of 1940. “They had berets like mariners–and then it turned out they were criminals. All of them were criminals.”