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

mass graves. 230 The man appointed to lead the action was Standartenführer Paul Blobel. As a pioneer officer in the First World War, as

well as a former Einsatzkommando leader, he no doubt appeared well qualified for

the task. The Sonderkommandos under him consisted of members of the Security

Police and the SD as well as the Order Police. The removal of the corpses

themselves had to be undertaken by prisoners, who were in turn murdered after

a certain amount of time and replaced by new prisoners. In June 1942 the

first attempts were made to burn the remains in Chelmno extermination camp,

and this activity was then extended to the other extermination camps as well.

In Sobibor this had been happening since the summer of 1942, and in Auschwitz-

Birkenau, where the first crematoria had not been built until July 1942, in the

autumn of 1942, in Belzec, which had been closed in December 1942, between the

end of 1942 and the spring of 1943, and in Treblinka since the spring of 1943. 231

In June 1943 the commandos began to open the mass graves in the occupied

Soviet territories, first in the Ukraine, then in White Russia, and finally in the

Baltic states. To remove the traces of the murders in occupied Poland, in 1944

Sonderkommandos were established under the five commanders of the Security

police and the SD in the General Government, and under the HSSPF responsible

for the annexed Polish territories. Aktion 1005 Sonderkommandos can also be

identified in Yugoslavia. 232

The Sonderkommandos were extraordinarily thorough in the removal of the

corpses: the mass graves were opened up, the corpses were burned on piles of

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wood or steel grilles, then the ashes were examined for valuable objects, gold teeth

above all, before the bones were ground and the ashes scattered or buried. Then all

other traces that could have indicated the places of execution were removed, and

the murder scene dug over and planted.

According to the wishes of the perpetrators, no traces of the extermination

camps themselves were to remain either. The so-called palace, in which the

installations of Chelmno extermination centre were housed, was blown up in

the spring of 1943. 233 On the grounds of Belzec and Treblinka, all buildings were removed after the end of the mass murders, the grounds were planted, and a farm

was built. The same was done in Treblinka, where the murders in the gas

chambers continued until August 1943. In summer 1943, after the mass murders

there were ended, Sobibor was temporarily turned into a concentration camp,

where the prisoners were deployed in the sorting of captured ammunition. After

the uprising of October 1943 this camp too was closed, and here too the grounds

were planted and an agricultural establishment constructed. 234

During the German retreat in July 1944, Majdanek was set on fire, but the gas

chambers and other traces of the mass murders remained, so that as early as the

summer of 1944 the Soviets could begin to document the procedures in this

extermination camp, the first to be seized by Allied troops. In Auschwitz in

November and December technical installations were removed from the gas

chambers and crematoria; the crematoria were blown up and the remains covered

with soil and planted. 235

The fundamental intention of the SS was to clear not only the mass murder sites

but the concentration camps, and where possible to destroy them; all proof of the

crimes was to be destroyed, no witnesses were to fall into the hands of the Allies.

That meant that the prisoners were either to be murdered or ‘evacuated’ from one

camp to the other. The SS saw the prisoners who were ‘fit for work’ as living

capital that would be exploited to the bitter end.

Himmler reserved a special policy for the Jewish prisoners: beginning in mid-

1944 he offered them to the Western Allies as barter, presumably to open up

channels of negotiation which might be used in peace feelers. The extent to

which the SS would really have been prepared to release large numbers of Jewish

prisoners on a quid pro quo basis, which would have meant returning to the

pre-war policy of expulsion, or whether they only appeared to offer such

negotiations in order to construct a dialogue with the Western Allies is impos-

sible to establish beyond doubt. It is also unclear whether Himmler was acting

in accord with Hitler in these complicated manoeuvres, or whether he was from

the outset pursuing a policy of his own to secure his position against the

threatening collapse of the Third Reich, and it is equally unclear whether the

negotiations undertaken by Eichmann and Wisliceny were fully in accord with

Himmler’s plans. But it is also entirely imaginable that these efforts to establish

contacts with the West were part of a double game: if the Western Allies agreed

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to enter negotiations with the Nazi regime over the surviving Jews, either one

could extend such negotiations to other ‘humanitarian’ issues and use them as

peace feelers, or one could abandon the negotiations and effectively compromise

the other side, sowing suspicion between the Western Allies and the Soviet

Union or revealing the USA and Great Britain as stooges of Jewish interests,

thus bolstering the claim of German military propaganda that Germany was

waging a war against world Jewry. 236

Thus, Himmler saw the Jewish prisoners as hostages with whom one could, in

one way or another, exert an influence on the Western Allies. This attitude was

not new: it can already be demonstrated in connection with Kristallnacht; the

reason for taking Jews as hostages to prevent the Americans from entering the

war seems to have played a part in starting the deportations of the German Jews

in the autumn of 1941, and from 1942 the SS leadership repeatedly allowed

individual Jews to travel to neutral countries abroad in return for high payments

in foreign currency. 237 Himmler had received express permission from Hitler for this in December 1942, and in that context pursued the project of holding

around 10,000 Jews back in a special camp as ‘valuable hostages’. 238 It was in accordance with this idea that the ‘holding camp’ at Bergen-Belsen was set up,

which Himmler placed under the control of the Business and Administration

Head Office, to rule out the possibility of agencies outside the SS having access

to the camp. 239 Finally, the