Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

1941, during an experiment in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, around thirty prisoners

were killed in one of these vehicles. 16

In the occupied Soviet territories the gas vans were first used to murder people

around November, early December. By the end of 1941 an estimated total of six of

these original-series gas vans was deployed by all four Einsatzgruppen. 17

At around the same time, from October/November 1941, gas vans were also

deployed in the murder of Jews in the Warthegau by Sonderkommando Lange.

For 8 December there is evidence of the use of gas vans in Chelmno, a gas-van

station that had been built in the meantime. 18 In this territory, as already described in detail, they were familiar with this killing technology, since as early as 1940 and

again in the summer of 1941 mental institution inmates had been murdered using

gas vans. 19

In parallel with the development of gas vans, however, steps were taken to set

up stationary gas chambers in the occupied Eastern territories. There exists a

letter, dated 25 October 1941, from the Adviser on Racial Issues in the Eastern

Ministry, Wetzel, to Reichskommissar Lohse concerning these preparations.

Wetzel was responding to a report from Lohse on 4 October ‘concerning the

solution of the Jewish question’:20

With reference to my letter of 18 October I wish to inform you that Oberdienstleiter Brack of the Führer’s Chancellery has already declared himself willing to work on the production 280

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

of the required accommodation as well as the gassing apparatus. At present, the apparatus in question is not available in sufficient numbers. It must first be manufactured. Since in Brack’s view the manufacture of the apparatus in the Reich presents far greater difficulties than on the spot, Brack considers it most expedient to send his people, especially his

chemist Dr Kallmeyer, to Riga forthwith, and take charge of everything else.

Lohse was to request this staff from Brack. Eichmann had agreed to the procedure:

‘According to Sturmbannführer Eichmann, camps for Jews are to be set up in Riga

and Minsk to which Jews from the Old Reich may also be sent. At present, Jews

are being evacuated from the Old Reich, to Litzmannstadt but also to other camps,

before later being sent to the East, if fit for work, for work deployment.’ According

to ‘circumstances . . . there is no objection to those Jews who are not fit for work

being removed with Brack’s aids’. Those ‘fit for work, on the other hand, will be

transported East for work deployment. It should be taken as read that among the

Jews who are fit for work men and women are to be kept separate.’

In fact, however, in Riga it was not gas chambers (described as ‘accommodation’)

that were used but, as mentioned above, gas vans.

The decision to build a first extermination camp in Belzec in the district of

Lublin, where murder was to be carried out with exhaust fumes from a solidly

mounted engine, may be assumed to have been made in mid-October, and

building work began in early November. At the end of 1941, the construction of

a second extermination camp in the district of Lublin, Sobibor, may have been

prepared. 21 It is possible that in November/December 1941 the installation of a further extermination camp in Lemberg (district of Galicia) was being considered. 22 In fact Brack made staff from the T4 Action available for Belzec, Sobibor, and the camp at Treblinka which was built later—the extermination camps of

what would later be known as ‘Aktion Reinhardt’. There were around ninety-two

people whom Brack sent to the General Government in stages. The basic agree-

ment that this work should go ahead appears to have been made with Himmler on

14 December 1941. In December 1941 Christian Wirth arrived in Lublin, further

groups in March 1942, and in June 1942, a time when the systematic murder of the

Jews in the districts of Lublin and Galicia had already begun, or was being

extended to the remaining districts of the General Government. 23

While in Belzec, the Warthegau, and the occupied Eastern territories mass

murders were in preparation or had already been carried out using engine

exhausts, the leadership of Auschwitz concentration camp chose a different path.

Various categories of prisoners were systematically murdered in Auschwitz in

the autumn of 1941: Soviet prisoners of war who had already been shot or beaten

by guards since first arriving in the summer, also, from the summer of 1941, sick

prisoners (as part of Action 14f13), Jewish forced labourers from Upper Silesia who

were regularly handed over as ‘unfit for work’ by ‘Organisation Schmelt’, and

Poles handed over for execution by the Kattowitz Gestapo. 24 The plan to expand Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders

281

Auschwitz concentration camp to a capacity of 30,000 prisoners was followed, at

the end of September 1941, by the order to construct another camp for prisoners of

war in Auschwitz and, early in October, its capacity was raised from an initial

50,000 to 100,000 prisoners. 25 In the wake of these measures the camp leadership decided to undertake a far larger number of executions.

To this end, alongside experiments with fatal injections, 26 tests were begun with the poison gas Zyklon B, which had been used in Auschwitz for disinfection since

July 1941.27 It appears that in early September 600 Soviet prisoners of war who had been deemed by a Gestapo commission to be ‘fanatical Communists’, as well as

250 sick prisoners, were murdered with Zyklon B in a cellar in block 11. Later,

presumably in the middle of September 1941, a further 900 Soviet prisoners of war

were murdered with the gas after the ‘morgue’ (‘Leichenkammer’) in the crema-

torium had been provisionally converted for this purpose. 28 There is a series of indications that even before the end of the year several smaller groups of Jews were

also murdered in Auschwitz with Zyklon B; presumably they were the ones who

had been selected from the Schmelt camps as no longer fit for work. 29

The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höß, states in his memoir written in

Cracow prison that the question of a suitable poison gas was discussed during a

visit by Eichmann. However, the dating of this visit is uncertain. Some statements

by Höß suggest the autumn of 1941, others suggest a later