The Second World War (99 page)

The extermination camp of Che
mno (Kulmhof) was already in operation, Be
ec soon followed and so did the complex at Auschwitz-Birkenau. At Che
mno, gas vans were used for killing Jews from towns in the region. In January 1942, some 4,400 Roma brought from Austria were also taken there and gassed. The corpses were buried in the forest by teams of selected Jews guarded by Ordnungspolizei. Che
mno would be the centre
for the mass killing of the Jews still packed into the ghetto at Łód
, fifty-five kilometres to the south.

The camp at Be
ec, between Lublin and Lwów, was considered a step forward, since it had gas chambers constructed to use carbon monoxide from vehicles stationed outside. After the test killing in January of 150 Jews, the gassing of mainly Galician Jews began there in mid-March. The camp of Majdanek was built on the very edge of Lublin.

Auschwitz, or O
wi
cim in its Polish version, had been a Silesian town near Kraków, with a nineteenth-century cavalry barracks from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The barracks had been taken over in 1940 as a prison camp by the SS to hold Polish prisoners. This was known as Auschwitz I. It was here that the first tests of Zyklon B–pellets of hydrogen cyanide designed to gas vermin–had been carried out in September 1941 on Soviet and Polish prisoners.

At the end of 1941 work began at nearby Birkenau, known as Auschwitz II. A pair of peasant houses were converted into improvised gas chambers, which were put to use in March 1942. Only in May did the killings start on a significant scale, but by October it became clear to the SS commandant Rudolf Höss that the facilities were totally insufficient and that mass burial was polluting the groundwater. A completely new system of gas chambers and furnaces was built during the winter.

Although Auschwitz was isolated in an area of swamp, rivers and birchwoods, the site had good access to rail communications. This was one of the reasons why the chemical conglomerate IG Farben became interested in establishing a factory there for the production of buna, or synthetic rubber. Himmler, wanting to Germanize the region, promoted the idea enthusiastically, offering labour from the concentration camp prisoners. He even went in person to brief Höss and liaise with representatives of IG Farben. Surprised by the immense size of the project and the large number of slave labourers required, Himmler told Höss that his camp would have to triple in size from its present strength of 10,000 prisoners. The SS treasury stood to gain up to 4 Reichsmark a day for each slave provided to IG Farben. In return, the SS would select violent and ruthless
kapos
from among criminal prisoners elsewhere to beat the Jewish slaves and make them work harder.

Construction of the vast Buna-Werke went ahead in the summer of 1941, while German divisions to the east appeared to be triumphing over the Soviet Union. Still short of labour, Himmler arranged to take an initial 10,000 Red Army prisoners off the Wehrmacht in October. Höss himself wrote before his execution for war crimes that they had arrived in very poor condition. ‘
They had been given
hardly any food on the march, during halts on the way being simply turned out into the nearest fields
and there told to “graze” like cattle on anything edible they could find.’ Working through the depths of the winter, with little clothing and reduced in some cases to cannibalism, all of the exhausted and diseased prisoners ‘died like flies’, as Höss wrote. ‘
They were no longer human beings
,’ he explained. ‘They had become animals, who sought only food.’ Not surprisingly, they had been unable to construct more than a couple of barrack blocks, instead of the twenty-eight laid down.

The SS strategy of death through labour was even less cost-effective than in Beria’s Gulag punishment camps. The Nazis’ only concession to pragmatism was to build a new camp–Auschwitz III or Monowitz–adjoining the Buna-Werke, so that IG Farben’s slaves did not have to waste time marching so far. Yet SS guards and
kapos
in this semi-privatized concentration camp continued to beat their labourers, as if that could force them to complete projects far beyond their means and strength.

After the war the directors of IG Farben, which partly owned the manufacturer of Zyklon B, claimed to have known nothing about the mass murder of Jews. Yet IG Farben’s huge Buna-Werke complex was managed by 2,500 German employees from the Reich, who lived in the town and associated with the SS guards at Auschwitz-Birkenau. One of them, just after he arrived, asked an SS guard about the appalling smell which spread over the whole area. The SS man replied that it was Bolshevik Jews ‘
going up the chimney
at Birkenau’.