Auschwitz (27 page)

Christian Wirth, the creator of Bełźec, was appointed that August to a new job—inspector of the three death camps. One of his first tasks was to travel with his boss, SS General Odilo Globocnik, to investigate the state of Treblinka. Josef Oberhauser, who worked for Wirth, later gave evidence about what happened once they arrived: “In Treblinka everything was in chaos.... Dr. Eberl would be dismissed immediately ... Globocnik said in the course of this conversation that if Dr. Eberl were not his fellow countryman, he would arrest him and bring him before an SS and police court.” Eberl was removed and transports to Treblinka temporarily ceased. A new commandant, Franz Stangl, who had previously worked with Wirth and was currently at Sobibór, was appointed to sort the mess out.

Eberl had misunderstood what his bosses wanted. He had delivered them an exceptional killing rate, but he had not organized the murders “properly.” Indeed, one of the most notable aspects of Eberl's sacking is the comment from Globocnik that he would bring him before a “police court” for the way he had run Treblinka. In the perverted morality of the higher reaches of the SS, Eberl deserved prosecution for not organizing the mass murder of men, women, and children in a more effective way. As we look at it today, in the eyes of his superiors Eberl's crime was that he had not committed the crime of mass murder “well enough.”

A crucial part of the killing process was the delivery of Jews to the new death camps. These factories had to be fed—and in gigantic numbers. As a result, throughout the summer and autumn of 1942 a whole series of resettlement “actions” were conducted right across occupied Poland. Himmler's
blanket instruction of July 19 had deliberately encompassed all the Jews of the General Government. He was concerned that, if local officials on the ground were able to exercise discretion, the whole operation would fail. He also feared that while, in theory, all Nazis believed in the necessity of dealing with the “Jewish problem,” individuals might still try to save particular Jews whom they thought “good.” One case in particular highlights the danger that Himmler feared—the impact of the deportation order on a German with a strongly developed sense of humanity.

Lieutenant Albert Battel was a German officer serving in Przemyśl in southern Poland. He was older than most Wehrmacht officers—already past fifty—and had a solid pre-war career as a lawyer behind him. Although a member of the Nazi party, he did not have an unblemished record as a National Socialist because he had been observed treating Jews with civility during the 1930s.

In July 1942, a group of Jews was assigned to Battel and the German army in Przemyśl. Many of the Jews worked in the armaments industry and lived in a nearby ghetto; they considered themselves, in comparison to many other Polish Jews, both privileged and protected. There was gossip towards the end of the month that the SS would shortly mount a “resettlement” action in the town—with the Jews “resettled” to the death camp of Bełźec. The Jews working for the German army viewed this news with a certain degree of equanimity, however, for each possessed an Ausweis—a pass from the army that they thought exempted them from any SS action. They also reasoned that, since they were already working for the German war effort, it made no sense to deport them. They did not, however, reckon with the inflexible ideological theory behind Himmler's order—all Jews were to die, without exception.

On Saturday, July 25th, the Jews of Przemyśl heard a rumor that the SS would start the deportations the following Monday, and that in most cases their German passes would be considered worthless. One of the Jews, Samuel Igiel,
³⁷
managed to reach Lieutenant Battel early on the Sunday and warn him about the impending action. Battel rang the head of the local Gestapo to ask him what was going on, only to have the phone put down on him. Furious, Battel consulted his superior officer, Major Liedtke, and then proceeded to take an army unit and close the bridge across the river
San, which ran through the town—an action that prevented access to the ghetto. As a result, the head of the local Gestapo and the Nazi authorities in Krakow made a concession—2,500 of the Jews of Przemyśl could be issued with passes that gave them a temporary stay of deportation. To ensure that those Jews who worked directly for him were saved, Lieutenant Battel sent trucks to the ghetto to pick them and their families up and then installed them in the basement of the German Kommandantur in town—altogether about 240 Jews were removed from the ghetto in this way.

The SS “resettlement” action against the Przemyśl Jews went ahead as planned on July 27 and the vast majority were transported to Bełźec, but Albert Battel's actions had saved several thousand of them from immediate deportation. A few weeks later, Battel was transferred from his posting in Przemyśl and a secret investigation launched into his conduct by the SS. The papers finally reached Himmler, who noted that Battel should be made to account for his conduct once the war was over. Battel was subsequently discharged from the army because of ill health, joined the local defense unit in his hometown of Breslau, and was eventually captured by the Red Army. After his release from a Soviet POW camp, he returned home and, because of his previous Nazi party membership, was refused permission to resume his career as a lawyer.

Separating out the various motivations that lay behind Battel's actions in saving the Jews of Przemyśl is not easy. But while it is clear that his superiors in the German army supported him primarily out of a desire to prevent the loss of a source of trained labor, it seems Battel was also driven by a sense that the deportations were simply wrong. Thus in 1981, long after his death, Battel's humane actions were recognized when he was awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations” at Yad Vashem in Israel.

There were other German officers, like Battel, who protested the deportation of the Jews during the summer and autumn of 1942, but they represent only a small handful of the Wehrmacht presence in Poland, and their actions did virtually nothing to stop the massive flow of Jews to the death camps. Nevertheless, a small number of Jews
were
saved, and it is important to understand that not all Germans simply adapted to the new reality when asked to participate in the crime.

Oskar Groening, however, was most certainly one of the majority who
had taken part in the process of mass murder during 1942. Once he had been working at Auschwitz for several months, his work, he says, had become “routine.” He sorted out the various currencies that had been taken from the new arrivals, counted the moneys and sent it to Berlin. He still attended selections, not to participate in the decision-making process about who should live and who should die—those decisions were made by SS doctors—but to ensure that the belongings of the Jews were taken away and held securely until they could be sorted. This was done in an area of the camp that came to be called “Canada,” because that country had become a fantasy destination—a land rich in everything.

Groening had thus manufactured for himself what he considered to be a tolerable life at Auschwitz. In his office he was insulated from the brutality, and when he was walking around the camp he could avert his eyes from anything that displeased him. In normal circumstances he had nothing to do with the crude mechanics of the killing process—there was generally no reason for him to visit the remote corner of Birkenau where the murders took place. The only reminder that different nationalities were coming to the camp was the variety of currencies that crossed Groening's desk—one day French francs, another Czech korunas, the next Polish zlotys (and always American dollars)—plus the array of liquor taken from the new arrivals—Greek ouzo, French brandy, and Italian sambuca. Says Groening,

Although Groening does not exactly use the word “enjoyable” to describe his time at Auschwitz, it is hard to see how that is not an apt description of the life he paints.

And then there was the other “positive” side of life at Auschwitz for Oskar Groening—his comrades: “I have to say that many who worked there weren't dull, they were intelligent.” When he eventually left the camp in 1944, he went with some regrets:

But one night, towards the end of 1942, Groening's comfortable life at Auschwitz was disrupted by a sudden glimpse into the nightmare of the actual killing operation. Asleep in his barracks in the SS camp on the perimeter of Birkenau, he and his comrades were woken by the sound of an alarm. They were told that a number of Jews who were being marched to the gas chambers had escaped and run to the nearby woods. “We were told to take our pistols and go through the forest,” says Groening. “We found no one.” Then he and his comrades spread out and moved up towards the extermination area of the camp.

Overcome by curiosity, Groening and his comrades decided not to “go home” but to hang about in the shadows instead. They watched as an SS
man put on a gas mask and placed Zyklon B pellets through a hatch in the side of the cottage wall. There had been a humming noise coming from inside the cottage that now “turned to screaming” for a minute—followed by silence. “Then one man—I don't know whether he was an officer—stood and came to the door where there was a peep-hole, looked in and checked whether everything was OK and the people were dead.” Groening describes his feelings at this moment, when the crude mechanics of murder were placed in front of him, “as if you see two lorries crashing on the motorway. And you ask yourself, ‘Must it be that way? Is this necessary?' And of course it's influenced by the fact that you said before, ‘Yes, well, it's war,' and we said, ‘They were our enemies.'”

Later, Groening witnessed the burning of the bodies.

The sight of the gassing installations and the burning cremation pits momentarily shattered the cozy life that Oskar Groening had created for himself at Auschwitz. So much so that he went once more to his boss, an SS Untersturmführer (lieutenant) who was “an Austrian and basically an honest bloke” and poured out his feelings. “He listened to me and said: ‘My dear Groening, what do you want to do against it? We're all in the same boat. We've given an obligation to accept this—not to even think about it.'” With the words of his superior officer ringing in his ears, Groening returned to work. He had sworn an oath of loyalty, he believed the Jews were Germany's enemy, and he knew that he could still manipulate his life at the camp to avoid encountering the worst of the horror. And so he stayed.

As a rank-and-file member of the SS, Oskar Groening lived in a comfortable barracks with several of his comrades. But life for officers was better
still. Many stayed with their families in requisitioned houses in the center of the town of Auschwitz, or in the immediate vicinity of the main camp by the Sola River, and enjoyed a standard of living that far surpassed anything they could have achieved had they been attached to a fighting unit. The officers lived as conquerors—and as conquerors they needed domestic slaves to cook their meals, clean their houses, and look after their children. But this posed a problem—in Nazi racial theory, Jewish and Polish prisoners were far too inferior to the Germans to make ideal servants and be allowed intimate access to their comfortable private lives and, in any case, the prisoners might use the opportunity of work outside the camp wire (albeit still within the guarded sections of the Auschwitz Zone of Interest) to try and escape—or, worse still, to attack the German families they served.

Ever ingenious, the Nazis hit on a solution to their servant problem. They would employ a category of prisoners who were for the most part German, and who could be guaranteed never to try to hurt their masters or to flee—Jehovah's Witnesses. Known in Germany as “Bible Students,” in 1933 the Jehovah's Witnesses had declared that, in broad terms, they had little against the Nazi state—ideologically they also opposed Jews and Communists (although not in the overtly hostile way the Nazis did). Serious problems only arose when, as pacifists, they refused to join the German armed forces, and as a result they were imprisoned in concentration camps.