Alex's Wake (45 page)

In early May, Himmler appointed Rudolf Höss, who had served as second in command at the Sachsenhausen camp when Alex was a prisoner there in the weeks after
Kristallnacht
, to be the commandant of Auschwitz, and on June 14, 1940, the camp opened for business. Although Auschwitz is infamous as the epicenter of the Holocaust, its first inmates were not Jews but rather Polish political prisoners. More than seven hundred Poles, mostly students and soldiers, entered Auschwitz on that first day, followed six days later by three hundred felons from nearby Kraków. In August and September, two more transports of more than three thousand prisoners from Warsaw jails were sent to Auschwitz, most to assist in its further construction.

Again, at first the considerable majority of the inmates of Auschwitz were not Jews but Poles who had been persecuted and then arrested for belonging to suspect political organizations or for being involved in the Polish resistance to the Nazi invaders. For nearly two years, most of those unfortunate enough to pass through the iron gates of Auschwitz, which were decorated with the cynical slogan
Arbeit Macht Frei
(“Work Makes You Free”), were dissident doctors, clerics, students, teachers, and scientists. During that time, mass murder had yet to be unleashed upon the inmates; death was caused rather by hunger, disease, overwork, and the brutality of the SS.

To describe life, such as it was, within the barbed wire and electrified fences of Auschwitz, is to exhaust such adjectives as harsh, cruel, savage, barbaric, and sadistic. Upon arrival at the camp, each prisoner was issued a number that replaced his or her name, a number that was tattooed onto the forearm. Prisoners had their heads shaved and, to replace their clothes, were given coarse canvas striped shirts and pants and poorly fitting wooden shoes. They slept, often six to a wooden bunk that had been designed for three, on sacks filled with straw. They were fed weak tea or coffee in the morning, a watery soup of nettles or parsnips for lunch, and moldy bread for the evening meal. A daily ration
of food amounted to no more than seven hundred calories. Days began at 4:30 a.m. during spring and summer, an hour later in the depths of winter. Work in the camp's gravel pits, brick ovens, or lumberyard occupied most prisoners' time, generally twelve hours a day, and woe to anyone who fell ill from malnutrition or exhaustion; an inability to work led to physical punishment or on-the-spot execution. Other offenses such as a missing shirt button, a lost cap, or a misplaced shoe were punished with solitary confinement in a tiny cell that required the prisoner to stand for hours at a time. Other miscreants would be hanged by their wrists with their arms tied behind their backs, resulting in dislocated shoulders. Still others were placed in subterranean cells with no windows and with so little air that the prisoner would gradually suffocate. Particularly sadistic guards would secure a lighted candle to the wall above the prisoner's head to hasten the loss of breathable oxygen.

Auschwitz was by no means the only Nazi concentration camp in which so-called medical research was conducted. But many Nazi doctors regarded it as the preferred place in which to conduct experiments on human beings. The Bayer chemical company, which had invented aspirin in 1897, purchased prisoners to be used as guinea pigs in the testing of new drugs. Dr. Carl Clauberg, a gynecologist from Upper Silesia, attempted to permanently close the uteruses of women prisoners through the use of experimental chemicals. Dr. Horst Schumann murdered hundreds of mentally and physically handicapped prisoners in the service of what was termed a “euthanasia” program; he also used x-rays to sterilize both male and female inmates. Professor Johann Kremer, in the name of an experiment to study the effects of hunger in humans, literally starved his subjects to death in the last five months of 1942. Other prisoners were injected with diseases, including malaria and syphilis, their sufferings duly noted in the doctors' notebooks.

The most infamous doctor at Auschwitz,
SS-Hauptsturmführer
Josef Mengele, thirty-two years old when he arrived at the camp, earned the nickname the “Angel of Death” for his grisly experiments. His specialty was twins—how they were alike and how they differed. Using more than a thousand sets of twins, most of them young children, he would
induce gangrene and other diseases into one twin, wait for him or her to die, and then murder the other twin, to compare autopsies.

Each prisoner was identified by a number tattooed on the forearm and by a colored triangle known as a
Winkel
, sewn on his or her shirt and trouser leg. Red triangles identified the wearer as a political prisoner, green a common criminal, black an “antisocial” offender such as a prostitute or drug addict, blue a foreign laborer, brown a Gypsy, purple a Jehovah's Witness, pink a homosexual, and yellow a Jew.

Eventually, yellow would become the primary color in the grim rainbow of Auschwitz. Although the camp had begun primarily as a prison for Polish enemies of the German invaders, within eighteen months it was deemed ready to assume its role in what came to be known as the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.

Beginning with the Civil Service Law of April 7, 1933—the ordinance that provided the legal justification for the expulsion of Jews from government jobs, police and fire stations, post offices, libraries, and all state-run cultural institutions across Germany—a myriad of judicial solutions to what was termed the Jewish Problem had been devised and implemented. By late 1941, it had become common knowledge in the upper strata of the German government that Chancellor Hitler had decided upon a Final Solution to the problem; it fell to one Reinhard Heydrich to see that the plan would be carried out smoothly and efficiently.

Herr Heydrich was the director of the Head Office of Reich Security (RSHA), the duty of which was to fight all “enemies of the Reich,” both within and without the German border. He called a meeting for December 9, 1941, that was to include representatives of all the significant branches of the Nazi Party apparatus, from the departments of the interior, justice, and the foreign office to the head of the Gestapo. But two days before the meeting was to convene, on December 7, the Japanese air force launched its secret attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor. By virtue of its treaty with Japan, Germany was obliged to declare war on the United States. As a result, Heydrich postponed the conference until January 20, 1942, and named as its venue a villa at 56–58 Am Grossen Wannsee, a quiet residential street on the banks of
Lake Wannsee, on the western outskirts of Berlin. The gathering is now remembered as the Wannsee Conference.

Thanks to the careful notes taken that day by Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich's right-hand man, we know that Heydrich made Hitler's aims perfectly clear. “Under proper guidance,” he declared, “in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor 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 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.” In the course of the “practical execution of the final solution,” Heydrich concluded, “Europe would be combed through from west to east.” There was no ambiguity. This Final Solution called for the systematic extermination of the Jewish population from the continent.

There had already been mass deportations and executions of Jews before the Wannsee Conference convened. Beginning in September and October 1941, Jews in Germany, particularly in large cities, were loaded onto trains, shipped to occupied Poland and Latvia, and shot. But lethal as these actions were, they were judged to be too messy, impractical, and inefficient by the Nazi masterminds, who also took into account the strained nerves of the German soldiers who were charged with pulling the triggers. Himmler issued orders to explore alternative methods, and explosives and poison gas were tried out on Jews and undesirables deemed mentally handicapped. In the words of historian Sybille Steinbacher, the Nazi regime became determined “to find a means of murder that was as efficient as it was discreet and anonymous, and which minimized the psychological burden on those carrying out the executions.”

Thus, a series of mass extermination camps came into existence in the aftermath of Wannsee. The names of these camps resound hollowly in the history of the twentieth century like the tolling of a funeral bell: Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Birkenau.

Brzezinka, which means “birch forest” in Polish, was a small village about two kilometers from the site of the Auschwitz camp. Cleared of its native population by the Nazis, it became the site of the camp known as Auschwitz II or by its German name, Birkenau. Poison gas had been used on prisoners in Auschwitz I as early as September 1941, when about nine hundred Soviet prisoners of war were murdered in the camp's infamous Block 11, known as the “punishment block.” But it was in Birkenau that the Nazis perfected techniques that enabled them to commit murder on a massive scale using technological advances that had been developed to an exacting degree in the service of genocide.

Skilled as they were in exploiting propaganda and euphemism, the authorities at Birkenau referred to the first two gas chambers simply as “the little red house” for a simple structure made of bricks, and “the little white house” for a building with a whitewashed exterior. Beginning in late March 1942, trains from all over Europe began to pull onto the one-way track that led beneath an elevated watchtower to its terminus in an open field. When the trains stopped moving, guards opened the doors of the cattle cars and roughly removed the terrified inhabitants, those who had survived the days-long journeys from Germany, Hungary, Austria, or France. The victims were first separated according to sex and then marched past a phalanx of soldiers and camp doctors, who in those minutes of terror and confusion acted as angels of life and death. If the doctor determined that a new arrival was young and fit enough for work, a wave of his hand to the right would send that prisoner to a barracks to begin his brutal incarceration at Auschwitz I or II. Generally, no more than about a quarter of each convoy was allowed to live. The most wretched of the newcomers, the old, the very young, the sick, the weak, were dispatched to the left, to the little houses.

At the entrance to the houses, the victims were told that they would be showered and deloused in preparation for their life in this work camp. Guards would sometimes welcome them with an elaborate speech. They promised hot soup and coffee after the shower; they requested that their charges remove their clothes and hang them on a hook, making sure to remember the number of the hook so that there would be no confusion when they retrieved their clothes after their shower. Then the naked
prisoners would be ordered into the houses. The little red house could hold around eight hundred people; the white house's capacity was around twelve hundred.

When the rooms were full, the airtight doors were closed and fastened. Then SS men stationed near small holes in the roof and in two of the walls would dump in pellets of a cyanide-based pesticide known by its trademark name, Zyklon-B. Panic ensued within, and the condemned would hurl themselves against the unyielding doors where, in the words of an eyewitness, “they piled up in one blue clammy blood-spattered pyramid, clawing and mauling each other even in death.” To muffle the agonized screams of the victims, the SS would sometimes order motorcycle engines started and gunned, although it is unclear whose sensibilities they were protecting.

After about twenty or thirty minutes, all would fall silent within the little houses. The doors would be opened, and the
Sonderkommandos
, Jewish prisoners who were promised extra food and their ultimate freedom as payment for this horrific detail, would enter wearing gas masks and rubber boots. Gerald Reitlinger, in his study of the Final Solution, wrote, “Their first task was to remove the blood and defecations before dragging the dead bodies apart with nooses and hooks, the prelude to the ghastly search for gold and the removal of teeth and hair which were regarded by the Germans as strategic materials.” Gold fillings were collected, melted down, and turned into ingots for eventual delivery to the Reichsbank. The victims' hair was spun into a fine thread and used to make rope, stuff mattresses, and manufacture felt.

The looted corpses of the murdered were taken to the crematorium of Auschwitz I, tossed into mass graves and covered with quicklime, or simply burned in a nearby field. The ashes from the incinerated bodies were usually dumped into the dark waters of the Vistula and Sola. But they were often sold to a local fertilizer company as human bone meal or used at the camp as insulation for buildings and paving material for the surrounding roads.

By the end of 1942, the little red and white houses were deemed inadequate for the task of murdering Jews on a mass scale, so plans were developed for the construction of higher-capacity crematoria.
By June 1943, Birkenau boasted four fully functional gas chambers that each could execute up to two thousand people a day. These new buildings were not only state-of-the-art killing centers but also landmarks in the cruel and cynical art of deception. The ruse that victims were about to undergo nothing more taxing than a cleansing shower was underscored by freshly painted signs in German, French, Hungarian, and Greek that pointed the way to the “bathroom” and the “disinfection room,” and offered cheerful slogans such as “Through cleanliness to freedom.” The gas chambers themselves were outfitted with dummy shower heads, and guards would distribute soap and towels to their naked charges before locking the airtight doors behind them.