Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (82 page)

The figure is not so fantastic as it appears: in August 1944, there were 7,652,000 foreigners working in German industry alone, consisting of 1,930,000 prisoners of war, and over 5 million forced deportees or slaves.
⁷⁰
Himmler wanted to use the war to create the nucleus of his slave empire and was not therefore anxious to kill Jews if he could get work out of them, particularly since he could get hard cash for his ss coffers from Krupps, Siemens, I.G.Farben, Rheinmetall, Messerschmidt, Heinkel and other big firms in return for concentration camp labour. By the end of 1944 over 500,000 camp inmates were being ‘leased out’ to private industry, and in addition Himmler was running his own factories, often with the use of ‘hoarded’ Jews whose very existence he concealed from Hitler.
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Himmler resolved the dilemma by a compromise, brought German industry into the death-camp system, and then worked the slaves until they were fit only to be exterminated in the ovens. Auschwitz occupies a peculiar place of dishonour in this horror story not only because of its unique size but because it was deliberately designed to embody this compromise. It was created jointly by the ss and I.G.Farben as a synthetic rubber
(Buna)
and fuel centre. The vast
complex consisted of Al, the original concentration camp; A2, the extermination plant at Birkenau; A3, the
Buna
and synthetic fuel plant; and A4, I.G.Farben’s own concentration camp at Monowitz. Farben had its special ‘Auschwitz division’, with its own firemen and camp police, armed with whips, though management complained of the noise and number of floggings carried out by the
Kapos
, demanding that these take place within the concentration camp proper and not on the work-sites.

When trains of victims arrived, they were divided into the healthy, who went to Monowitz, and the weak, sick, women and children, who went straight into the death-camp. The
Buna—
Monowitz workers started each day at 3 am, moving at the ‘ss trot’, even when carrying heavy materials, and confined at work in ten-metre-square zones. There were no rest-periods and anyone leaving his zone was shot, ‘attempting to escape’. There were floggings every day and ‘several hangings a week’. Potato-turnip soup was served at midday, a piece of bread in the evening. Fritz Saukel, head of the slave-labour system, had laid down: ‘All the inmates must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the fullest possible extent, at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure.’
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They were in fact worse than slaves: 25,000 were literally worked to death at Auschwitz alone. Each morning the labour allocation officer picked out the sickly for gassing. Farben kept the records, including the terminal instruction,
Nach Birkenau.
The average weight-loss was six and a half to nine pounds a week, so the hitherto normally nourished could make up the deficiency from his own body for up to three months (longer than in most Russian camps of this type). The slaves burned up their own body-weight and finally died of exhaustion. As one historian has put it:

I.G.Farben reduced slave-labour to a consumable raw material, a human one from which the mineral of life was systematically extracted. When no usable energy remained, the living dross was shipped to the gassing chambers and cremation furnaces of the extermination centre at Birkenau, where the ss recycled it into the German war economy – gold teeth for the Reichbank, hair for mattresses and fat for soap.
⁷³

The meagre possessions the dead brought to Auschwitz were officially ‘confiscated’ and sent to Germany. Over one six-week period, 1 December 1944–15 January 1945, these included 222,269 sets of men’s suits and underclothes, 192,652 sets of women’s clothing, and 99,922 sets of children’s clothes.
⁷⁴
Yet despite all this gruesome meanness, so characteristic of the totalitarian state, Auschwitz was a complete economic failure: very little synthetic fuel and no
Buna
at all were produced.

Within the general framework of genocide, which engulfed millions of Poles and Russians as well as Jews, many bizarre forms of cruelty were practised. Himmler’s
Lebensborn
decree of 28 October 1939 set up stud-farms for the breeding of ‘ideal Aryans’, and women ss officers scoured the concentration camps to kidnap Aryan-type children to stock them, ‘so that during our lifetime we shall become a people of 120 million Germanic souls’. Himmler, who admired Lord Halifax’s slim figure, ordered women-breeders to be fed porridge:

Englishmen, and particularly English lords and ladies, are virtually brought up on this type of food …. To consume it is considered most correct. It is precisely these people, both men and women, who are conspicuous for their slender figures. For this reason the mothers in our homes should get used to porridge and be taught to feed their children on it.
Heil Hitler!
⁷⁵

At the other end of the spectrum, 350 ss doctors (one in 300 of those practising in Germany) took part in experiments on camp inmates. Dr Sigmund Rascher, for instance, conducted low-temperature tests at Dachau, killing scores, and asked to be transferred to Auschwitz: ‘The camp itself is so extensive that less attention will be attracted to the work. For the subjects howl so when they freeze!’ Polish girls, termed ‘rabbits’, were infected with gas-gangrenous wounds for sulphonamides tests. There was mass sterilization of Russian slave-labourers, using X-rays. Other projects included injection of hepatitis virus at Sachsenhausen, of inflammatory liquids into the uterus to sterilize at Ravensbruck, the all-women camp, phlegmon-induction experiments on Catholic priests at Dachau, injections of typhus-vaccine at Buchenwald, and experimental bone-transplants and the forced drinking of seawater by gypsies. At Oranienburg selected Jews were gassed to provide specimens for Himmler’s skeleton collection of ‘Jewish-Bolshevik commissars who personify a repulsive yet characteristic sub-humanity’.
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There is a sense in which ‘the crime without a name’, as Churchill termed it, was a national act of wrongdoing. True, the genocide programme from first to last, despite its immense scale, was furtive. Hitler never once referred to it, even in the endless harangues to intimates which form the subjects of his
Table-talk
and other documents. Though he exulted in the slaughter of the July 1944 plotters and had film of their horrific executions played to him again and again, he never visited any of the camps, let alone the death-camps. His huge, hate-filled will set the whole process in motion and kept it going until the purpose was virtually accomplished. But the hate was abstract. It was as though he felt that even his will would dissolve if he saw the doomed millions as individual human faces:
then his capacity to carry through what he saw as his supreme service to German ‘culture’ would collapse. He relished his murders of the well-born generals he knew and loathed; but the massacre of entire categories of mankind was nothing more than a distasteful duty. Lenin seems to have cultivated exactly the same attitude. Even Stalin, who peered through his peep-hole at the trial-agonies of his old comrades, never visited the Lubyanka cellars or set foot in his death-camps.

From Hitler’s silence downwards, the entire operation of genocide was permeated by unspoken, unspeakable guilt. Even Himmler, the archetype of the sacerdotal revolutionary, who superintended all the details of the crime, only visited Auschwitz twice. As in all totalitarian systems, a false vernacular had to be created to conceal the concrete horrors of moral relativism, ss terms for murder included ‘special treatment’, ‘resettlement’, ‘the general line’, ‘sovereign acts beyond the reach of the judiciary’, above all ‘sending East’.
⁷⁷
As with the murders of 1934, the major crime which was progenitor of the colossal crime, a conspiracy of silence must envelop the nation. Himmler told his ss major-generals, 4 October 1943: ‘Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly – but we will never speak of it publicly.’ Just as in 1934 it had been their duty ‘to stand comrades who had lapsed up against a wall and shoot them’, so now it was their duty ‘to exterminate the Jewish race’. They had never referred publicly to the 1934 killings, and now too they must keep silent. Again, he told
Gauleiters
on 29 May 1944 that before the end of the year all the Jews would be dead:

You know all about it now, and you had better keep it all to yourselves. Perhaps at some later, some very much later period we might consider whether to tell the German people a little more about this. But I think we had better not! It is we here who have shouldered the responsibility, for action as well as for an idea, and I think we had better take this secret with us into our graves.
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Hence security around the death-camps was elaborate. The wife of a German officer, who at a confused railway junction got onto a death-train by mistake, was ordered to the ovens nonetheless so that she could not relate what she had seen. No victim emerged alive from Auschwitz until two Slovak Jews escaped in August 1944. All the same, millions of Germans knew that something horrible was being done to the Jews. There were 900,000 people in the ss alone. Countless Germans heard and saw the endless trains rattling through the night, and knew their significance, as one recorded remark suggests: ‘Those damned Jews – they won’t even let one sleep at night.’
⁷⁹
There was a huge overlap between the slave system and German industry. It might be recalled that the Germans had used
slave-labour and working-to-exhaustion in 1916–18; it was a national response to war, a salient part of the ‘war socialism’ Lenin so much admired. Race paranoia was deeply rooted in German culture and had been fostered by generations of intellectuals. It antedated Hitler; dwarfed him. Forty years later it is difficult to conceive of the power and ubiquity of inter-white racism, especially anti-Semitism (and not in Germany alone). In a sense, then, it was the German people who willed the end; Hitler who willed the means.
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In another sense the crime had accessories throughout the civilized world. There were 150,000 non-German members of the ss. The worst massacres of Poles, for instance, were carried out by an ss division of 6,500 White Russian
POWS
.
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Hitler often found willing collaborators in hunting down non-German Jews. Ironically, the safest places in Europe for Jews were fascist Spain and Portugal, and Italy until Hitler set up his puppet regime. The most dangerous was France, where the Vichy regime, anti-Semitic from the outset, became steadily more so with time. There were two types of French Jews, the assimilated Sephardis and Alsacians, and the new arrivals and refugees. In November 1941 Vichy set up the Union Générale des Israelites de France, largely staffed from the first group, which constituted a bureaucratic machine to ship the second group into the concentration camps – a miniature Jewish Vichy.
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Vichy, in effect, took an eager part in hustling its foreign-born Jews into the death-camps; and its claim that it protected its own Jews was false, since of 76,000 Jews handed over by France to the Nazis (of whom less than 2,000 survived), a third were French by birth. Those murdered included 2,000 under six and 6,000 under thirteen.
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The penumbra of guilt spread wider still. In the years 1933–9, when Hitler was ambivalent about emigration and the Jews could still escape, nobody wanted them. Virtually all European governments had an anti-Semitic problem and were terrified of aggravating it. Britain firmly closed the open door to Palestine, for fear of the Arabs: the 1939 White Paper limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years. Roosevelt, as usual, devoted a good deal of rhetorical sympathy to the Jews but did nothing practical to help them get into America. The first reports of genocide reached the World Jewish Congress in Lausanne in August 1942. Even Jewish officials, inured to horror, were sceptical at first. In April 1943 an Anglo—American meeting of officials in Bermuda decided, in effect, that neither nation would do anything to help the Jews and would not criticize each other for doing nothing – a mutual anti-conscience pact. By August 1943 it was known, and published, that 1,702,500 Jews had already been exterminated. On 1 November Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill jointly warned the German leaders that they would be tried for such
crimes. On 24 March 1944 Roosevelt issued a further public warning. But that was all. Though America had the space and food, he would not give asylum. Churchill alone supported action at any cost. He was overruled by his united colleagues led by Anthony Eden, whose secretary noted: ‘Unfortunately A.E. is immovable on the subject of Palestine. He loves Arabs and hates Jews.’ On 6 July 1944 Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Jewish Agency, begged Eden to use Allied bombers to stop the movement of Hungarian Jews, then being incinerated at the rate of 12,000 a day. Churchill minuted: ‘Get anything out of the Air Force you can, and invoke me if necessary.’ But nothing was done; and it is unclear whether anything effective could have been done by bombing.
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By this time most of the Jews were dead. What the survivors wanted was evidence that the civilized world had not forgotten them: ‘We didn’t pray for our life,’ said a survivor, ‘we had no hopes for that, but for revenge, for human dignity, for punishment to the murderers.’
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The Jews asked for recognition of the unique enormity of the crime. It cannot be said that they got it, either from the Germans themselves, who might have absolved their shared guilt by acknowledging it, or from the Allies. The history of the punishment of German war crimes is almost as complicated and confused as the crimes themselves. Because Stalin believed, as Lenin had once done, that a Soviet Germany would emerge from the war, he underplayed German war-guilt in his public statements and encouraged his Western supporters to do the same. His private feelings were quite different. At the Teheran Conference he rebuked Churchill for distinguishing between the German leaders and the mass of the people. Equally, for home consumption he instructed Ehrenburg and other writers to publish violently racist attacks on the Germans in
Pravda, Red Star
and other papers.
⁸⁶
Publicly, however, the Communist line in the West was to treat war-crime as a political not a moral issue. In 1942 Victor Gollancz, Britain’s leading left-wing publicist, coined a famous phrase with his tract
Shall our Children Live or Die?
, which argued that guilt for the war must be placed mainly on imperialism: therefore ‘everyone of us is “guilty”’, though capitalists were guiltier than the mass of ordinary people.
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