[b]Book Five: BEGINNING OF THE END

 

 

27: THE NEW ORDER[/b]

 

 

No COMPREHENSIVE BLUEPRINT for the New Order was ever drawn up, but it is clear from the captured documents and from what took place that Hitler knew very well what he wanted it to be: a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources would be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people would be made ,he slaves of the German master race and whose "undesirable elements" -- above all, the Jews, but also many Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them -- would be exterminated.

 

 

The Jews and the Slavic peoples were the Untermenschen -- subhumans. To Hitler they had no right to live, except as some of them, among the Slavs, might be needed to toil in the fields and the mines as slaves of their German masters. Not only were the great cities of the East, Moscow, Leningrad and Warsaw, to be permanently erased* but the culture of the Russians and Poles and other Slavs was to be stamped out and formal education denied them. Their thriving industries were to be dismantled and shipped to Germany and the people themselves confined to the pursuits of agriculture so that they could grow food for Germans, being allowed to keep for themselves just enough to subsist on. Europe itself, as the Nazi leaders put it, must be made "Jew-free."

 

"What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest," declared Heinrich Himmler on October 4, 1943, in a confidential address to his S.S. officers at Posen. By this time Himmler, as chief of the S.S. and the entire police apparatus of the Third Reich, was next to Hitler in importance, holding the power of life and death not only over eighty million Germans but over twice that many conquered people.

 

[quote]What the nations [Himmler continued] can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnaping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death like cattle interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves to our Kultur; otherwise it is of no interest to me.

 

Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only in so far as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished ... [1][/quote]

 

Long before Himmler's Posen speech in 1943 (to which we shall return, for it covers other aspects of the New Order) the Nazi chiefs had laid down their thoughts and plans for enslaving the people of the East.

 

By October 15, 1940, Hitler had decided on the future of the Czechs, the first Slavic people he had conquered. One half of them were to be "assimilated," mostly by shipping them as slave labor to Germany. The other half, "particularly" the intellectuals, were simply to be, in the words of a secret report on the subject, "eliminated." [2]

 

A fortnight before, on October 2, the Fuehrer had clarified his thoughts about the fate of the Poles, the second of the Slavic peoples to be conquered. His faithful secretary, Martin Bormann, has left a long memorandum on the Nazi plans, which Hitler outlined to Hans Frank, the Governor General of rump Poland, and to other officials. [3]

 

[quote]The Poles [Hitler "emphasized"] are especially born for low labor ... There can be no question of improvement for them. It is necessary to keep the standard of life low in Poland and it must not be permitted to rise ... The Poles are lazy and it is necessary to use compulsion to make them work ... The Government General [of Poland] should be used by us merely as a source of unskilled labor ... Every year the laborers needed by the Reich could be procured from there.[/quote]

 

As for the Polish priests,

 

[quote]they will preach what we want them to preach. If any priest acts differently, we shall make short work of him. The task of the priest is to keep the Poles quiet, stupid and dull-witted.[/quote]

 

There were two other classes of Poles to be dealt with and the Nazi dictator did not neglect mention of them.

 

[quote]It is indispensable to bear in mind that the Polish gentry must cease to exist; however cruel this may sound, they must be exterminated wherever they are ...

 

There should be one master only for the Poles, the German. Two masters, side by side, cannot and must not exist. Therefore, all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia are to be exterminated. This sounds cruel, but such is the law of life.[/quote]

 

This obsession of the Germans with the idea that they were the master race and that the Slavic peoples must be their slaves was especially virulent in regard to Russia. Erich Koch, the roughneck Reich Commissar for the Ukraine, expressed it in a speech at Kiev on March 5, 1943.

 

[quote]We are the Master Race and must govern hard but just ... I will draw the very last out of this country. I did not come to spread bliss ... The population must work, work, and work again ... We definitely did not come here to give out manna. We have come here to create the basis for victory.

 

We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here. [4][/quote]

 

Nearly a year before, on July 23, 1942, when the German armies in Russia were nearing the Volga and the oil fields of the Caucasus, Martin Bormann, Hitler's party secretary and, by now, right-hand man, wrote a long letter to Rosenberg reiterating the Fuehrer's views on the subject. The letter was summed up by an official in Rosenberg's ministry:

 

[quote]The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we don't need them, they may die. Therefore compulsory vaccination and German health services are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives or practice abortion -- the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to 100... . Every educated person is a future enemy. Religion we leave to them as a means of diversion. As for food they won't get any more than is absolutely necessary. We are the masters. We come first. [5][/quote]

 

When the German troops first entered Russia they were in many places hailed as liberators by a population long ground down and terrorized by Stalin's tyranny. There were, in the beginning, wholesale desertions among the Russian soldiers. Especially in the Baltic, which had been under Soviet occupation but a short time, and in the Ukraine, where an incipient independence movement had never been quite stamped out, many were happy to be freed from the Soviet yoke -- even by the Germans.

 

There were a few in Berlin who believed that if Hitler played his cards shrewdly, treating the population with consideration and promising relief from Bolshevik practices (by granting religious and economic freedom and making true co-operatives out of the collectivized farms) and eventual self-government, the Russian people could be won over. They might then not only co-operate with the Germans in the occupied regions but in the unoccupied ones strive for liberation from Stalin's harsh rule. If this were done, it was argued, the Bolshevik regime itself might collapse and the Red Army disintegrate, as the Czarist armies had done in 1917.

 

But the savagery of the Nazi occupation and the obvious aims of the German conquerors, often publicly proclaimed, to plunder the Russian lands, enslave their peoples and colonize the East with Germans soon destroyed any possibility of such a development.

 

No one summed up this disastrous policy and all the opportunities it destroyed better than a German himself, Dr. Otto Brautigam, a career diplomat and the deputy leader of the Political Department of Rosenberg's newly created Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. In a bitter confidential report to his superiors on October 25, 1942, Brautigam dared to pinpoint the Nazi mistakes in Russia.

 

[quote]In the Soviet Union we found on our arrival a population weary of Bolshevism, which waited longingly for new slogans holding out the prospect of a better future for them. It was Germany's duty to find such slogans, but they remained unuttered. The population greeted us with joy as liberators and placed themselves at our disposal.[/quote]

 

Actually, there was a slogan but the Russian people soon saw through it.

 

[quote]With the inherent instinct of the Eastern peoples [Brautigam continued], the primitive man soon found out that for Germany the slogan "Liberation from Bolshevism" was only a pretext to enslave the Eastern peoples according to her own methods ... The worker and peasant soon perceived that Germany did not regard them as partners of equal rights but considered them only as the objective of her political and economic aims ... With unequaled presumption, we put aside all political knowledge and ... treat the peoples of the occupied Eastern territories as "Second-Class Whites" to whom Providence has merely assigned the task of serving as slaves for Germany ...[/quote]

 

There were two other developments, Brautigam declared, which had turned the Russians against the Germans: the barbaric treatment of Soviet prisoners of war and the shanghaiing of Russian men and women for slave labor.

 

[quote]It is no longer a secret from friend or foe that hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners of war have died of hunger or cold in our camps ... We now experience the grotesque picture of having to recruit millions of laborers from the occupied Eastern territories after prisoners of war have died of hunger like flies ...

 

In the prevailing limitless abuse of the Slavic humanity, "recruiting" methods were used which probably have their origin only in the blackest periods of the slave traffic. A regular man hunt was inaugurated. Without consideration of health or age the people were shipped to Germany ...[i] [/quote]

 

German policy and practice in Russia had "brought about the enormous resistance of the Eastern peoples," this official concluded.

 

[quote]Our policy has forced both Bolshevists and Russian nationalists into a common front against us. The Russian fights today with exceptional bravery and self-sacrifice for nothing more or less than recognition of his human dignity.[/quote]

 

Closing his thirteen-page memorandum on a positive note Dr. Brautigam asked for a complete change of policy. "The Russian people," he argued, "must be told something concrete about their future." [6]

 

But this was a voice in the Nazi wilderness. Hitler, as we have seen, already had laid down, before the attack began, his directives on what would be done with Russia and the Russians * and he was not a man who could be persuaded by any living German to change them by one iota.

 

On July 16, 1941, less than a month after the commencement of the Russian campaign but when it was already evident from the initial German successes that a large slice of the Soviet Union would soon be within grasp, Hitler convoked Goering, Keitel, Rosenberg, Bormann and Lammers (the last, head of the Reich Chancellery) to his headquarters in East Prussia to remind them of his aims in the newly conquered land. At last his goal so clearly stated in Mein Kampf of securing a vast German Lebensraum in Russia was in sight and it is clear from the confidential memorandum of the meeting drawn up by Bormann (which showed up at Nuremberg) [7] that he wanted his chief lieutenants to understand well what he intended to do with it. His intentions, he admonished, must however not be "publicized."

 

[quote]There is no need for that [Hitler said] but the main thing is that we ourselves know what we want ... Nobody must be able to recognize that it initiates a final settlement. This need not prevent our taking all necessary measures -- shooting, resettling, etc. -- and we shall take them.[/quote]

 

In principle, Hitler continued,

 

[quote]we now have to face the task of cutting up the cake according to our needs in order to be able:

 

first, to dominate it;

second, to administer it;

third, to exploit it.[/quote]

 

He did not mind, he said, that the Russians had ordered partisan warfare behind the German lines; "it enables us to eradicate everyone who opposes us."

 

In general, Hitler explained, Germany would dominate the Russian territory up to the Urals. None but Germans would be permitted to carry weapons in that vast space. Then Hitler went over specifically what would be done with various slices of the Russian cake.

 

[quote]The entire Baltic country will have to be incorporated into Germany The Crimea has to be evacuated by all foreigners and settled by Germans only, [becoming] Reich territory ... The Kola Peninsula will be taken by Germany because of the large nickel mines there. The annexation of Finland as a federated state should be prepared with caution ... The Fuehrer will raze Leningrad to the ground and then hand it over to the Finns.[/quote]

 

The Baku oil fields, Hitler ordered, would become a "German concession" and the German colonies on the Volga would be annexed outright. When it came to a discussion as to which Nazi leaders would administer the new territory a violent quarrel broke out.

 

[quote]Rosenberg states he intends to use Captain von Petersdorff, owing to his special merits; general consternation; general rejections. The Fuehrer and the Reich Marshal [Goering] both emphasize there was no doubt that Von Petersdorff was insane.[/quote]

 

There was also an argument on the best methods of policing the conquered Russian people. Hitler suggested the German police be equipped with armored cars. Goering doubted that they would be necessary. His planes could "drop bombs in case of riots," he said.

 

[quote]Naturally [Goering added] this giant area would have to be pacified as quickly as possible. The best solution would be to shoot anybody who looked sideways. [ii] [/quote]

 

Goering, as head of the Four-Year Plan, was also put in charge of the economic exploitation of Russia. [iii] "Plunder" would be a better word, as Goering made clear in a speech to the Nazi commissioners for the occupied territories on August 6,1 942. "It used to be called plundering," he said. "But today things have become more humane. In spite of that, I intend to plunder and to do it thoroughly." [8] On this, at least, he was as good as his word, not only in Russia but throughout Nazi-conquered Europe. It was all part of the New Order.

 

[b]THE NAZI PLUNDER OF EUROPE[/b]

 

The total amount of loot will never be known; it has proved beyond man's capacity to accurately compute. But some figures are available, many of them from the Germans themselves. They show with what Germanic thoroughness the instructions which Goering once gave to his subordinates were carried out.

 

[quote]Whenever you come across anything that may be needed by the German people, you must be after it like a bloodhound. It must be taken out ... and brought to Germany. [9][/quote]

 

A great deal was taken out, not only in goods and services but in banknotes and gold. Whenever Hitler occupied a country, his financial agents seized the gold and foreign holdings of its national bank. That was a mere beginning. Staggering "occupation costs" were immediately assessed. By the end of February 1944, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the Nazi Minister of Finance, put the total take from such payments at some 48 billion marks (roughly $12,000,000,000), of which France, which was milked heavier than any other conquered country, furnished more than half. By the end of the war, receipts from occupation assessments amounted to an estimated 60 billion marks ($15,000,000,000).

 

France was forced to pay 31.5 billions of this total, its annual contributions of more than 7 billions coming to over four times the yearly sums which Germany had paid in reparations under the Dawes and Young plans after the first war -- a tribute which had seemed such a heinous crime to Hitler. In addition the Bank of France was forced to grant "credits" to Germany totaling 4.5 billion marks and the French government to pay a further half billion in "fines." At Nuremberg it was estimated that the Germans extracted in occupation costs and "credits" two thirds of Belgium's national income and a similar percentage from the Netherlands. Altogether, according to a study by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Germany extracted in tribute from the conquered nations a total of 104 billion marks ($26,000,000,000). [iv]

 

But the goods seized and transported to the Reich without even the formality of payment can never possibly be estimated. Figures kept pouring in at Nuremberg until they overwhelmed one; but no expert, so far as I know, was ever able to straighten them out and compute totals. In France, for example, it was estimated that the Germans carted off (as "levies in kind") 9 million tons of cereals, 75 per cent of the total production of oats, 80 per cent of oil, 74 per cent of steel, and so on, for a grand total of 184.5 billion francs.

 

Russia, devastated by warfare and German savagery, proved harder to milk. Nazi documents are full of reports of Soviet "deliveries." In 1943, for example, 9 million tons of cereals, 2 million tons of fodder, 3 million tons of potatoes, 662,000 tons of meat were listed by the Germans among the "deliveries," to which the Soviet Committee of Investigation added -- for the duration of the occupation -- 9 million cattle, 12 million pigs, 13 million sheep, to mention a few items. But Russian "deliveries" proved much less than expected; the Germans calculated them as worth a net of only some 4 billion marks ($1,000,000,000). [v]

 

Everything possible was squeezed out of Poland by the greedy Nazi conquerors. "I shall endeavor," said Dr. Frank, the Governor General, "to squeeze out of this province everything that is still possible to squeeze out." This was at the end of 1942, and in the three years since the occupation he had already squeezed out, as he continually boasted, a great deal, especially in foodstuffs for hungry Germans in the Reich. He warned, however, that "if the new food scheme is carried out in 1943 a half-million people in Warsaw and its suburbs alone will be deprived of food." [10]

 

The nature of the New Order in Poland had been laid down as soon as the country was conquered. On October 3, 1939, Frank informed the Army of Hitler's orders.

 

[quote]Poland can only be administered by utilizing the country through means of ruthless exploitation, deportation of all supplies, raw materials, machines, factory installations, etc., which are important for the German war economy, availability of all workers for work within Germany, reduction of the entire Polish economy to absolute minimum necessary for bare existence of the population, closing of all educational institutions, especially technical schools and colleges in order to prevent the growth of the new Polish intelligentsia. Poland shall be treated as a colony. The Poles shall be the slaves of the Greater German Reich. [11][/quote]

 

Rudolf Hess, the Nazi deputy Fuehrer, added that Hitler had decided that "Warsaw shall not be rebuilt, nor is it the intention of the Fuehrer to rebuild or reconstruct any industry in the Government General." [12]

 

By decree of Dr. Frank, all property in Poland belonging not only to Jews but to Poles was subject to confiscation without compensation. Hundreds of thousands of Polish-owned farms were simply grabbed and handed over to German settlers. By May 31, 1943, in the four Polish districts annexed to Germany (West Prussia, Posen, Zichenau, Silesia) some 700,000 estates comprising 15 million acres were "seized" and 9,500 estates totaling 6.5 million acres "confiscated." The difference between "seizure" and "confiscation" is not explained in the elaborate table prepared by the German "Central Estate Office," [13] and to the dispossessed Poles it must not have mattered.

 

Even the art treasures in the occupied lands were looted, and, as the captured Nazi documents later revealed, on the express orders of Hitler and Goering, who thereby greatly augmented their "private" collections. The corpulent Reich Marshal, according to his own estimate, brought his own collection up to a value of 50 million Reichsmarks. Indeed, Goering was the driving force in this particular field of looting. Immediately upon the conquest of Poland he issued orders for the seizure of art treasures there and within six months the special commissioner appointed to carry out his command could report that he had taken over "almost the entire art treasury of the country." [14]

 

But it was in France where the bulk of the great art treasures of Europe lay, and no sooner was this country added to the Nazi conquests than Hitler and Goering decreed their seizure. To carry out this particular plunder Hitler appointed Rosenberg, who set up an organization called Einsatzstab Rosenberg, and who was assisted not only by Goering but by General Keitel. Indeed one order by Keitel to the Army in France stated that Rosenberg "is entitled to transport to Germany cultural goods which appear valuable to him and to safeguard them there. The Fuehrer has reserved for himself the decision as to their use." [15]

 

An idea of Hitler's decision "as to their use" is revealed in a secret order issued by Goering on November 5, 1940, specifying the distribution of art objects being collected at the Louvre in Paris. They were "to be disposed of in the following way":

 

[quote]1. Those art objects about which the Fuehrer has reserved for himself the decision as to their use.

 

2. Those ... which serve the completion of the Reich Marshal's [i.e., Goering's] collection ...

 

4. Those ... that are suited to be sent to German museums ... [16][/quote]

 

The French government protested the looting of the country's art treasures, declaring that it was a violation of the Hague convention, and when one German art expert on Rosenberg's staff, a Herr Bunjes, dared to call this to the attention of Goering, the fat one replied:

 

"My dear Bunjes, let me worry about that. I am the highest jurist in the state. It is my orders which are decisive and you will act accordingly."

 

And so according to a report of Bunjes -- it is his only appearance in the history of the Third Reich, so far as the documents show --

 

 

[quote]those art objects collected at the Jeu de Paume which are to go into the Fuehrer's possession and those which the Reich Marshal claims for himself will be loaded into two railroad cars which will be attached to the Reich Marshal's special train ... to Berlin. [17][/quote]

 

Many more carloads followed. According to a secret official German report some 137 freight cars loaded with 4,174 cases of art works comprising 21,903 objects, including 10,890 paintings, made the journey from the West to Germany up to July 1944.18 They included works of, among others, Rembrandt, Rubens, Hals, Vermeer, Velazquez, Murillo, Goya, Vecchio, Watteau, Fragonard, Reynolds and Gainsborough. As early as January 1941, Rosenberg estimated the art loot from France alone as worth a billion marks. [19]

 

The plunder of raw materials, manufactured goods and food, though it reduced the occupied peoples to impoverishment, hunger and sometimes starvation and violated the Hague Convention on the conduct of war, might have been excused, if not justified, by the Germans as necessitated by the harsh exigencies of total war. But the stealing of art treasures did not help Hitler's war machine. It was a case merely of avarice, of the personal greed of Hitler and Goering.

 

All this plunder and spoliation the conquered populations could have endured -- wars and enemy occupation had always brought privation in their wake. But this was only a part of the New Order -- the mildest part. It was in the plunder not of material goods but of human lives that the mercifully short-lived New Order will be longest remembered. Here Nazi degradation sank to a level seldom experienced by man in all his time on earth. Millions of decent, innocent men and women were driven into forced labor, millions more tortured and tormented in the concentration camps and millions more still, of whom there were four and a half million Jews alone, were massacred in cold blood or deliberately starved to death and their remains -- in order to remove the traces -- burned.

 

This incredible story of horror would be unbelievable were it not fully documented and testified to by the perpetrators themselves. What follows here -- a mere summary, which must because of limitations of space leave out a thousand shocking details -- is based on that incontrovertible evidence, with occasional corroboration from the eyewitness accounts of the few survivors.

 

[b]SLAVE LABOR IN THE NEW ORDER[/b]

 

By the end of September 1944, some seven and a half million civilian foreigners were toiling for the Third Reich. Nearly all of them had been rounded up by force, deported to Germany in boxcars, usually without food or water or any sanitary facilities, and there put to work in the factories, fields and mines. They were not only put to work but degraded, beaten and starved and often left to die for lack of food, clothing and shelter.

 

In addition, two million prisoners of war were added to the foreign labor force, at least a half a million of whom were made to work in the armaments and munitions industries in flagrant violation of the Hague and Geneva conventions, which stipulated that no war prisoners could be employed in such tasks. [vi] This figure did not include the hundreds of thousands of other POWs who were impressed into the building of fortifications and in carrying ammunition to the front lines and even in manning antiaircraft guns in further disregard of the international conventions which Germany had signed. [vii]

 

In the massive deportations of slave labor to the Reich, wives were tom away from their husbands, and children from their parents, and assigned to widely separated parts of Germany. The young, if they were old enough to work at all, were not spared. Even top generals of the Army co-operated in the kidnaping of children, who were carted off to the homeland to perform slave labor. A memorandum from Rosenberg's files of June 12,1944, reveals this practice in occupied Russia.

 

[quote]Army Group Center intends to apprehend forty to fifty thousand youths from the age of 10 to 14 ... and transport them to the Reich. The measure was originally proposed by the Ninth Army ... It is intended to allot these juveniles primarily to the German trades as apprentices... . This action is being greatly welcomed by the German trade since it represents a decisive measure for the alleviation of the shortage of apprentices.

 

This action is not only aimed at preventing a direct reinforcement of the enemy's strength but also as a reduction of his biological potentialities.[/quote]

 

The kidnaping operation had a code name: "Hay Action." It was also being carried out, the memorandum added, by Field Marshal Model's Army Group Ukraine-North. [22]

 

Increasing terrorization was used to round up the victims. At first. comparatively mild methods were used. Persons coming out of church or the movies were nabbed. In the West especially, S.S. units merely blocked off a section of a town and seized all able-bodied men and women. Villages were surrounded and searched for the same purposes. In the East, when there was resistance to the forced-labor order, villages were simply burned down and their inhabitants carted off. Rosenberg's captured files are replete with German reports of such happenings. In Poland, at least one German official thought things were going a little too far.

 

[quote]The wild and ruthless man hunt [he wrote to Governor Frank], as exercised everywhere in towns and country, in streets, squares, stations, even in churches, at night in homes, has badly shaken the feeling of security of the inhabitants. Everybody is exposed to the danger of being seized anywhere and at any time by the police, suddenly and unexpectedly, and of being sent to an assembly camp. None of his relatives knows what has happened to him. [23][/quote]

 

But rounding up the slave workers was only the first step. [viii] The condition of their transport to Germany left something to be desired. A certain Dr. Gutkelch described one instance in a report to Rosenberg's ministry on September 30, 1942. Recounting how a train packed with returning worked-out Eastern laborers met a train at a siding near Brest Litovsk full of "newly recruited" Russian workers bound for Germany, he wrote:

 

[quote]Because of the corpses in the trainload of returning laborers a catastrophe might have occurred ... In this train women gave birth to babies who were thrown out of the windows during the journey. Persons having tuberculosis and venereal diseases rode in the same car. Dying people lay in freight cars without straw, and one of the dead was thrown on the railway embankment. The same must have occurred in other returning transports. [25][/quote]

 

This was not a very promising introduction to the Third Reich for the Ostarbeiter, but at least it prepared them somewhat for the ordeal that lay ahead. Hunger lay ahead and beatings and disease and exposure to the cold, in unheated quarters and in their thin rags. Long hours of labor lay ahead that were limited only by their ability to stand on their feet.

 

The great Krupp works, makers of Germany's guns and tanks and ammunition, was a typical place of employment. Krupp employed a large number of slave laborers, including Russian prisoners of war. At one point during the war, six hundred Jewish women from the Buchenwald concentration camp were brought in to work at Krupp's, being "housed" in a bombed-out work camp from which the previous inmates, Italian POWs, had been removed. Dr. Wilhelm Jaeger, the "senior doctor" for Krupp's slaves, described in an affidavit at Nuremberg what he found there when he took over.

 

[quote]Upon my first visit I found these females suffering from open festering wounds and other diseases. I was the first doctor they had seen for at least a fortnight ... There were no medical supplies ... They had no shoes and went about in their bare feet. The sole clothing of each consisted of a sack with holes for their arms and head. Their hair was shorn. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire and closely guarded by S.S. guards.

 

The amount of food in the camp was extremely meager and of very poor quality. One could not enter the barracks without being attacked by fleas ... I got large boils on my arms and the rest of my body from them ...[/quote]

 

Dr. Jaeger reported the situation to the directors of Krupp and even to the personal physician of Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the owner -- but in vain. Nor did his reports on other Krupp slave labor camps bring any alleviation. He recalled in his affidavit some of these reports of conditions in eight camps inhabited by Russian and Polish workers: overcrowding that bred disease, lack of enough food to keep a man alive, lack of water, lack of toilets.

 

[quote]The clothing of the Eastern workers was likewise completely inadequate. They worked and slept in the same clothing in which they had arrived from the East. Virtually all of them had no overcoats and were compelled to use their blankets as coats in cold and rainy weather. In view of the shortage of shoes many workers were forced to go to work in their bare feet, even in winter ...

 

Sanitary conditions were atrocious. At Kramerplatz only ten children's toilets were available for 1,200 inhabitants ... Excretion contaminated the entire floors of these lavatories ... The Tartars and Kirghiz suffered most; they collapsed like flies [from] bad housing, the poor quality and insufficient quantity of food, overwork and insufficient rest.

 

These workers were likewise afflicted with spotted fever. Lice, the carrier of the disease, together with countless fleas, bugs and other vermin tortured the inhabitants of these camps ... At times the water supply at the camps was shut off for periods of from eight to fourteen days ...[/quote]

 

On the whole, Western slave workers fared better than those from the East -- the latter being considered by the Germans as mere scum. But the difference was only relative, as Dr. Jaeger found at one of Krupp's work camps occupied by French prisoners of war in Nogerratstrasse at Essen.

 

[quote]Its inhabitants were kept for nearly half a year in dog kennels, urinals and in old baking houses. The dog kennels were three feet high, nine feet long, six feet wide. Five men slept in each of them. The prisoners had to crawl into these kennels on all fours ... There was no water in the camp. [ix] [26][/quote]

 

Some two and a half million slave laborers -- mostly Slavs and Italians -- were assigned to farm work in Germany and though their life from the very force of circumstances was better than that of those in the city factories it was far from ideal -- or even humane. A captured directive on the "Treatment of Foreign Farm Workers of Polish Nationality" gives an inkling of their treatment. And though applied to Poles -- it is dated March 6, 1941, before Russians became available -- it was later used as guidance for those of other nationalities.

 

[quote]Farm workers of Polish nationality no longer have the right to complain, and thus no complaints will be accepted by any official agency ... The visit of churches is strictly prohibited ... Visits to theaters, motion pictures or other cultural entertainment are strictly prohibited ...

 

Sexual intercourse with women and girls is strictly prohibited.[/quote]

 

If it was with German females, it was, according to an edict of Himmler in 1942, punishable by death. [x]

 

The use of "railroads, buses or other public conveyances" was prohibited for slave farm workers. This apparently was ordained so that they would not escape from the farms to which they were bound.

 

[quote]Arbitrary change of employment [the directive stated] is strictly prohibited. The farm workers have to labor as long as is demanded by the employer. There are no time limits to the working time.

 

Every employer has the right to give corporal punishment to his farm workers ... They should, if possible, be removed from the community of the home and they can be quartered in stables, etc. No remorse whatever should restrict such action. [28][/quote]

 

Even the Slav women seized and shipped to Germany for domestic service were treated as slaves. As early as 1942 Hitler had commanded Sauckel to procure a half million of them "in order to relieve the German housewife." The slave labor commissar laid down the conditions of work in the German households.

 

[quote]There is no claim to free time. Female domestic workers from the East may leave the household only to take care of domestic tasks ... It is prohibited for them to enter restaurants, movies, theaters and similar establishments. Attending church is also prohibited ... [29][/quote]

 

Women, it is obvious, were almost as necessary as men in the Nazi slave labor program. Of some three million Russian civilians pressed into service by the Germans, more than one half were women. Most of them were assigned to do heavy farm work and to labor in the factories.

 

The enslavement of millions of men and women of the conquered lands as lowly toilers for the Third Reich was not just a wartime measure. From the statements of Hitler, Goering, Himmler and the others already cited -- and they are only a tiny sampling -- it is clear that if Nazi Germany had endured, the New Order would have meant the rule of the German master race over a vast slave empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Ural mountains. To be sure, the Slavs in the East would have fared the worst.

 

As Hitler emphasized in July 1941, scarcely a month after he had attacked the Soviet Union, his plans for its occupation constituted "a final settlement." A year later, at the high tide of his Russian conquests, he admonished his aides:

 

[quote]As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mold the best of them to the shape that suits us, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pigsties; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and civilizing him, goes straight off to a concentration camp! [30][/quote]

 

[b]THE PRISONERS OF WAR[/b]

 

Though it was a flagrant violation of the Hague and Geneva conventions to use prisoners of war in armament factories or in any labor connected with the fighting at the front such employment, massive as it was, constituted the least of worries for the millions of soldiers captured by the Third Reich.

 

Their overwhelming concern was to survive the war. If they were Russian the odds were greatly against them. There were more Soviet war prisoners than all others put together -- some five and three-quarter million of them. Of these barely one million were found alive when Allied troops liberated the inmates of the POW camps in 1945. About a million had either been released during the war or allowed to serve in the collaborator units set up by the German Army. Two million Russian prisoners of war died in German captivity -- from starvation, exposure and disease. The remaining million have never been accounted for and at Nuremberg a good case was made that most of them either had died from the above causes or had been exterminated by the S.D. (S.S. Security Service). According to the German records 67,000 were executed, but this is most certainly a partial figure. [31]

 

The bulk of the Russian war prisoners -- some 3,800,000 of them -- were taken by the Germans in the first phase of the Russian campaign, in the great battles of encirclement which were fought from June 21 to December 6, 1941. Admittedly it was difficult for an army in the midst of combat and rapid advance to care adequately for such a large number of captives. But the Germans made no effort to. Indeed the Nazi records show, as we have seen, that the Soviet prisoners were deliberately starved and left out in the open without shelter to die in the terrible subzero snowbound winter of 1941-42.

 

"The more of these prisoners who die, the better it is for us," was the attitude of many Nazi officials according to no less an authority than Rosenberg.

 

The clumsy Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories was not a humane Nazi, particularly in regard to the Russians, with whom, as we have seen, he had grown up. But even he was moved to protest the treatment of Russian prisoners in a long letter to General Keitel, the Chief of OKW, dated February 28, 1942. This was the moment when the Soviet counteroffensive which had hurled the Germans back before Moscow and Rostov had reached its farthest penetrations that winter and when the Germans had realized at last that their gamble of destroying Russia in one short campaign -- or perhaps ever -- had failed and that just possibly, now that the U.S.A. had been added to Russia and Britain as their enemies, they might not win the war, in which case they would be held accountable for their war crimes.

 

[quote]The fate of the Soviet prisoners of war in Germany [Rosenberg wrote Keitel] is a tragedy of the greatest extent. Of the 3,600,000 of them, only several hundred thousand are still able to work fully. A large part of them have starved, or died because of the hazards of the weather.[/quote]

 

This could have been avoided, Rosenberg continued. There was food enough in Russia to provide them.

 

[quote]However, in the majority of cases the camp commanders have forbidden food to be put at the disposal of the prisoners; they have rather let them starve to death. Even on the march to the camps, the civilian population was not allowed to give the prisoners food. In many cases when the prisoners could no longer keep up on the march because of hunger and exhaustion. they were shot before the eyes of the horrified civilian population and the corpses were left. In numerous camps no shelter for the prisoners was provided at all. They lay under the open sky during rain or snow ...

 

Finally, the shooting of prisoners of war must be mentioned. These ... ignore all political understanding. For instance, in various camps all the "Asiatics" were shot ... [32][/quote]

 

Not only Asiatics. Shortly after the beginning of the Russian campaign an agreement was reached between OKW and the S.S. Security Service for the latter to "screen" Russian prisoners. The objective was disclosed in an affidavit by Otto Ohlendorf, one of the S.D.s great killers and like so many of the men around Himmler a displaced intellectual, for he had university degrees both in the law and in economics and had been a professor at the Institute for Applied Economic Science.

 

[quote]All Jews and Communist functionaries [Ohlendorf testified] were to be removed from the prisoner-of-war camps and were to be executed. To my knowledge this action was carried out throughout the entire Russian campaign. [33][/quote]

 

But not without difficulties. Sometimes the Russian captives were so exhausted that they could not even walk to their execution. This brought a protest from Heinrich Mueller, the chief of the Gestapo, a dapper-looking fellow but also a cold, dispassionate killer. [xi]

 

[quote]The commanders of the concentration camps are complaining that 5 to 10 per cent of the Soviet Russians destined for execution are arriving in the camps dead or half dead ... It was particularly noted that when marching, for example, from the railroad station to the camp, a rather large number of prisoners collapsed on the way from exhaustion, either dead or half dead, and had to be picked up by a truck following the convoy. It cannot be prevented that the German people take notice of these occurrences. [/quote]

 

 

The Gestapo didn't care a rap about the Russian captives falling dead from starvation and exhaustion, except that it robbed the executioners of their prey. But they didn't want the German people to see the spectacle. "Gestapo Mueller," as he was known in Germany, therefore ordered that

 

[quote]effective from today [November 9, 1941] Soviet Russians obviously marked by death and who therefore are not able to withstand the exertions of even a short march shall in the future be excluded from the transport into the concentration camps for execution. [34][/quote]

 

Dead prisoners or even starved and exhausted ones could not perform work and in 1942, when it became obvious to the Germans that the war was going to last considerably longer than they had expected and that the captive Soviet soldiers constituted a badly needed labor reservoir, the Nazis abandoned their policy of exterminating them in favor of working them. Himmler explained the change in his speech to the S.S. at Posen in 1943.

 

[quote]At that time [1941] we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it today, as raw material, as labor. What after all, thinking in terms of generations, is not to be regretted but is now deplorable by reason of the loss of labor, is that the prisoners died in tens and hundreds of thousands of exhaustion and hunger. [35][/quote]

 

They were now to be fed enough to enable them to work. By December 1944, three quarters of a million of them, including many officers, were toiling in the armament factories, the mines (where 200,000 were assigned) and on the farms. Their treatment was harsh, but at least they were allowed to live. Even the branding of the Russian war captives, which General Keitel had proposed, was abandoned. [xii]

 

The treatment of Western prisoners of war, especially of the British and Americans, was comparatively milder than that meted out by the Germans to the Russians. There were occasional instances of the murder and massacre of them but this was due usually to the excessive sadism and cruelty of individual commanders. Such a case was the slaughter in cold blood of seventy-one American prisoners of war in a field near Malmedy, Belgium, on December 17, 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge.

 

There were other occasions when Hitler himself ordered the murder of Western prisoners, as he did in the case of fifty British flyers who were caught in the spring of 1944, after escaping from a camp at Sagan. At Nuremberg Goering said he "considered it the most serious incident of the whole war" and General Jodl called it "sheer murder."

 

Actually it seemed to be part of a deliberate German policy, adopted after Anglo-American bombing of Germany became so extensive from 1943 on, to encourage the killing of Allied airmen who had bailed out over Germany. Civilians were encouraged to lynch the flyers as soon as they had parachuted to the ground and a number of these Germans were tried after the war for having done so. In 1944 when the Anglo-American bombings were reaching their peak Ribbentrop urged that airmen shot down be summarily executed but Hitler took a somewhat milder view. On May 21, 1944, in agreement with Goering, he merely ordered that captured flyers who had machine-gunned passenger trains or civilians or German planes which had made emergency landings be shot without court-martial.

 

Sometimes captured flyers were simply turned over to the S.D. for "special treatment." Thus some forty-seven American, British and Dutch flyers, all officers, were brutally murdered at Mauthausen concentration camp in September 1944. An eyewitness, Maurice Lampe, a French inmate at the camp, described at Nuremberg how it was done.

 

[quote]The forty-seven officers were led barefooted to the quarry ... At the bottom of the steps the guards loaded stones on the backs of these poor men and they had to carry them to the top. The first journey was made with stones weighing about sixty pounds and accompanied by blows ... The second journey the stones were still heavier, and whenever the poor wretches sank under their burden they were kicked and hit with a bludgeon ... in the evening twenty-one bodies were strewn along the road. The twenty-six others died the following morning. [37][/quote]

 

This was a familiar form of "execution" at Mauthausen and was used on, among others, a good many Russian prisoners of war.

 

From 1942 on -- that is, when the tide of war began to surge against him -- Hitler ordered the extermination of captured Allied commandos, especially in the West. (Captured Soviet partisans were summarily shot as a matter of course.) The Fuehrer's "Top-Secret Commando Order" of October 18, 1942, is among the Nazi documents.

 

[quote]From now on all enemies on so-called commando missions in Europe or Africa challenged by German troops, even if they are in uniform, whether armed or unarmed, in battle or in flight, are to be slaughtered to the last man. [38][/quote]

 

In a supplementary directive issued the same day Hitler explained to his commanders the reason for his order. Because of the success of the Allied commandos, he said,

 

[quote]I have been compelled to issue strict orders for the destruction of enemy sabotage troops and to declare noncompliance with these orders severely punishable ... It must be made clear to the enemy that all sabotage troops will be exterminated, without exception, to the last man.

 

This means that their chance of escaping with their lives is nil ... Under no circumstances can [they] expect to be treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention ... If it should become necessary for reasons of interrogation to initially spare one man or two, then they are to be shot immediately after interrogation. [39][/quote]

 

This particular crime was to be kept strictly secret. General Jodi appended instructions to Hitler's directive, underlining his words: "This order is intended for commanders only and must not under any circumstances fall into enemy hands." They were directed to destroy all copies of it after they had duly taken note.

 

It must have remained imprinted on their minds, for they proceeded to carry it out. A couple of instances, of many, may be given.

 

On the night of March 22, 1944, two officers and thirteen men of the 267th Special Reconnaissance Battalion of the U.S. Army landed from a naval craft far behind the German lines in Italy to demolish a railroad tunnel between La Spezia and Genoa. They were all in uniform and carried no civilian clothes. Captured two days later they were executed by a firing squad on March 26, without trial, on the direct orders of General Anton Dostler, commander of the LXXVth German Army Corps. Tried by a U.S. military tribunal shortly after the war, General Dostler justified his action by contending that he was merely obeying Hitler's Commando Order. He argued that he himself would have been court-martialed by the Fuehrer if he had not obeyed. [xiii]

 

Some fifteen members of an Anglo-American military mission -- including a war correspondent of the Associated Press, and all in uniform -- which had parachuted into Slovakia in January 1945 were executed at Mauthausen concentration camp on the orders of Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the successor of Heydrich as head of the S.D. and one of the defendants at Nuremberg. [xiv] Had it not been for the testimony of a camp adjutant who witnessed their execution, their murder might have remained unknown, for most of the files of the mass executions at this camp were destroyed.  [40]

 

[b]NAZI TERROR IN THE CONQUERED LANDS[/b]

 

On October 22, 1941, a French newspaper Le Phare published the following notice:

 

[quote]Cowardly criminals in the pay of England and Moscow killed the Feldkommandant of Nantes on the morning of October 20. Up to now the assassins have not been arrested.

 

As expiation for this crime I have ordered that 50 hostages be shot, to begin with ... Fifty more hostages will be shot in case the guilty should not be arrested between now and October 23 by midnight.[/quote]

 

This became a familiar notice in the pages of the newspapers or on red posters edged with black in France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Poland and Russia. The proportion, publicly proclaimed by the Germans, was invariably 100 to I -- a hundred hostages shot for every German killed.

 

Though the taking of hostages was an ancient custom, much indulged in for instance by the Romans, it had not been generally practiced in modem times except by the Germans in the First World War and by the British in India and in South Africa during the Boer War. Under Hitler, however, the German Army carried it out on a large scale during the second war. Dozens of secret orders signed by General Keitel and lesser commanders were produced at Nuremberg ordering the taking -- and shooting -- of hostages. "It is important," Keitel decreed on October 1, 1941, "that these should include well-known leading personalities or members of their families"; and General von Stuelpnagel, the German commander in France, a year later stressed that "the better known the hostages to be shot the greater will be the deterrent effect on the perpetrators."

 

In all, 29,660 French hostages were executed by the Germans during the war and this figure did not include the 40,000 who "died" in French prisons. The figure for Poland was 8,000 and for Holland some 2,000. In Denmark what became known as a system of "clearing murders" was substituted for the publicly proclaimed shooting of hostages. On Hitler's express orders reprisals for the killing of Germans in Denmark were to be carried out in secret "on the proportion of five to one."41 Thus the great Danish pastor-poet-playwright, Kaj Munk, one of the most beloved men in Scandinavia, was brutally murdered by the Germans, his body left on the road with a sign pinned to it: "Swine, you worked for Germany just the same."

 

Of all the war crimes which he claimed he had to commit on the orders of Hitler "the worst of all," General Keitel said on the stand at Nuremberg, stemmed from the Nacht und Nebel Erlass -- "Night and Fog Decree." This grotesque order, reserved for the unfortunate inhabitants of the conquered territories in the West, was issued by Hitler himself on December 7, 1941. Its purpose, as the weird title indicates, was to seize persons "endangering German security" who were not to be immediately executed and make them vanish without a trace into the night and fog of the unknown in Germany. No information was to be given their families as to their fate even when, as invariably occurred, it was merely a question of the place of burial in the Reich.

 

On December 12, 1941, Keitel issued a directive explaining the Fuehrer's orders. "In principle," he said, "the punishment for offenses committed against the German state is the death penalty." But

 

[quote]if these offenses are punished with imprisonment, even with hard labor for life, this will be looked upon as a sign of weakness. Efficient intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and the population do not know his fate. [42][/quote]

 

The following February Keitel enlarged on the Night and Fog Decree. In cases where the death penalty was not meted out within eight days of a person's arrest,

 

[quote]the prisoners are to be transported to Germany secretly ... these measures will have a deterrent effect because

 

(a) the prisoners will vanish without leaving a trace,

 

(b) no information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate. [43][/quote]

 

The S.D. was given charge of this macabre task and its captured files are full of various orders pertaining to "NN" (for Nacht und Nebel), especially in regard to keeping the burial places of the victims strictly secret. How many Western Europeans disappeared into "Night and Fog" was never established at Nuremberg but it appeared that few emerged from it alive.

 

Some enlightening figures, however, were obtainable from the S.D. records concerning the number of victims of another terror operation in conquered territory which was applied to Russia. This particular exercise was carried out by what was known in Germany as the Einsatzgruppen --  Special Action Groups, or what might better be termed, in view of their performance, Extermination Squads. The first round figure of their achievement came out, as if by accident, at Nuremberg.

 

One day some time before the trial began a young American naval officer, Lieutenant Commander Whitney R. Harris, of the American prosecution staff, was interrogating Otto Ohlendorf on his wartime activities. It was known that this attractive-looking German intellectual of youthful appearance -- he was 38 -- had been head of Amt llT of Himmler's Central Security Office (R.S.H.A.) but during the last years of the war had spent most of his time as a foreign trade expert in the Ministry of Economics. He told his interrogator that apart from one year he had spent the war period on official duty in Berlin. Asked what he had done during the year away, he replied, "I was chief of Einsatzgruppe D."

 

Harris, a lawyer by training and by this time something of an intelligence authority on German affairs, knew quite a bit about the Einsatz groups. So he asked promptly:

 

"During the year you were chief of Einsatzgruppe D, how many men, women and children did your group kill?"

 

Ohlendorf, Harris later remembered, shrugged his shoulders and with only the slightest hesitation answered:

 

"Ninety thousand!" [44]

 

The Einsatz groups had first been organized by Himmler and Heydrich to follow the German armies into Poland in 1939 and there round up the Jews and place them in ghettos. It was not until the beginning of the Russian campaign nearly two years later that, in agreement with the German Army, they were ordered to follow the combat troops and to carry out one phase of the "final solution." Four Einsatzgruppen were formed for this purpose, Groups A, B, C, D. It was the last one which Ohlendorf commanded between June 1941 and June 1942, and it was assigned the southernmost sector in the Ukraine and attached to the Eleventh Army. Asked on the stand by Colonel John Harlan Amen what instructions it received, Ohlendorf answered:

 

"The instructions were that the Jews and the Soviet political commissars were to be liquidated."

 

"And when you say 'liquidated,' do you mean 'killed'?" Amen asked.

 

"Yes, I mean killed," Ohlendorf answered, explaining that this took in the women and children as well as the men.

 

"For what reason were the children massacred?" the Russian judge, General I. T. Nikitchenko, broke in to ask.

 

[quote]OHLENOORF: The order was that the Jewish population should be totally exterminated.

 

THE JUDGE: Including the children?

 

OHLENOORF: Yes.

 

THE JUDGE: Were all the Jewish children murdered?

 

OHLENOORF: Yes.[/quote]

 

In response to further questioning by Amen and in his affidavit, Ohlendorf described how a typical killing took place.

 

[quote]The Einsatz unit would enter a village or town and order the prominent Jewish citizens to call together all Jews for the purpose of "resettlement." [xv] They were requested to hand over their valuables and shortly before execution to surrender their outer clothing. They were transported to the place of executions, usually an antitank ditch, in trucks -- always only as many as could be executed immediately. In this way it was attempted to keep the span of time from the moment in which the victims knew what was about to happen to them until the time of their actual execution as short as possible.

 

Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, by firing squads in a military manner and the corpses thrown into the ditch. I never permitted the shooting by individuals, but ordered that several of the men should shoot at the same time in order to avoid direct personal responsibility. Other group leaders demanded that the victims lie down flat on the ground to be shot through the nape of the neck. I did not approve of these methods.[/quote]

 

"Why?" asked Amen.

 

"Because," replied Ohlendorf, "both for the victims and for those who carried out the executions, it was, psychologically, an immense burden to bear."

 

In the spring of 1942, Ohlendorf then recounted, an order came from Himmler to change the method of execution of the women and children. [xvi] Henceforth they were to be dispatched in "gas vans" specially constructed for the purpose by two Berlin firms. The S.D. officer described to the tribunal how these remarkable vehicles worked.

 

[quote]The actual purpose of these vans could not be seen from the outside. They looked like closed trucks and were so constructed that at the start of the motor the gas [exhaust] was conducted into the van causing death in ten to fifteen minutes.[/quote]

 

"How were the victims induced to enter the vans?" Colonel Amen wanted to know.

 

"They were told they were to be transported to another locality," Ohlendorf replied. [xvii]

 

The burial of the victims of the gas vans, he went on to complain, was a "great ordeal" for the members of the Einsatzgruppen. This was confirmed by a certain Dr. Becker, whom Ohlendorf identified as the constructor of the vans, in a document produced at Nuremberg. In a letter to headquarters Dr. Becker objected to German S.D. men having to unload the corpses of the gassed women and children, calling attention to

 

[quote]the immense psychological injuries and damage to their health which that work can have for these men. They complained to me about headaches which appeared after each unloading.[/quote]

 

Dr. Becker also pointed out to his superiors that

 

[quote]the application of gas usually is not undertaken correctly. In order to come to an end as fast as possible, the driver presses the accelerator to the fullest extent. The persons to be executed suffer death from suffocation and not death by dozing off, as was planned.[/quote]

 

Dr. Becker was quite a humanitarian -- in his own mind -- and ordered a change in technique.

 

[quote]My directions now have proved that by correct adjustment of the levers death comes faster and the prisoners fall asleep peacefully. Distorted faces and excretions, such as could be seen before, are no longer noticed. [45][/quote]

 

But the gas vans, as Ohlendorf testified, could dispatch only from fifteen to twenty-five persons at a time, and this was entirely inadequate for the massacres on the scale which Hitler and Himmler had ordered. Inadequate, for example, for the job that was done at Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, in just two days, September 29 and 30, 1941, when according to an official Einsatz report 33,771 persons, mostly Jews, were "executed." [46]

 

An eyewitness report by a German of how a comparatively minor mass execution was carried out in the Ukraine brought a hush of horror over the Nuremberg courtroom when it was read by the chief British prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross. It was a sworn affidavit by Hermann Graebe, the manager and engineer of a branch office in the Ukraine of a German construction firm. On October 5, 1942, he witnessed the Einsatz commandos, supported by Ukrainian militia, in action at the execution pits at Dubno in the Ukraine. It was a matter, he reported, of liquidating the town's 5,000 Jews.

 

[quote]... My foreman and I went directly to the pits. I heard rifle shots in quick succession from behind one of the earth mounds. The people who had got off the trucks -- men, women and children of all ages -- had to undress upon the order of an S.S. man, who carried a riding or dog whip. They had to put down their clothes in fixed places, sorted according to shoes, top clothing and underclothing. I saw a heap of shoes of about 800 to 1,000 pairs, great piles of under-linen and clothing.

 

Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells and waited for a sign from another S.S. man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes that I stood near the pit I heard no complaint or plea for mercy ...

 

An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him.

 

At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound ... I well remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself and said: "twenty-three years old."

 

I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette.

 

The people, completely naked, went down some steps and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the S.S. man directed them. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or the heads lying already motionless on top of the bodies that lay beneath them. Blood was running from their necks.

 

The next batch was approaching already. They went down into the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot.[/quote]

 

And so it went, batch after batch. The next morning the German engineer returned to the site.

 

[quote]I saw about thirty naked people lying near the pit. Some of them were still alive ... Later the Jews still alive were ordered to throw the corpses into the pit. Then they themselves had to lie down in this to be shot in the neck I swear before God that this is the absolute truth. [47][/quote]

 

How many Jews and Russian Communist party functionaries (the former vastly outnumbered the latter) were massacred by the Einsatzgruppen in Russia before the Red Army drove the Germans out? The exact total could never be computed at Nuremberg but Himmler's records, uncoordinated as they were, give a rough idea.

 

Ohlendorf's Einsatzgruppen D, with its 90,000 victims, did not do as well as some of the other groups. Group A, for instance, in the north reported on January 31, 1942, that it had "executed" 229,052 Jews in the Baltic region and in White Russia. Its commander, Franz Stahlecker, reported to Himmler that he was having difficulty in the latter province because of a late start "after the heavy frost set in, which made mass executions much more difficult. Nevertheless," he reported, "41,000 Jews [in White Russia] have been shot up to now." Stahlecker, who was disposed of later in the year by Soviet partisans, enclosed with his report a handsome map showing the number of those done to death -- symbolized by coffins -- in each area under his command. In Lithuania, alone, the map showed, 136,421 Jews had been slain; some 34,000 had been spared for the time being "as they were needed for labor." Estonia, which had relatively few Jews, was declared in this report to be "Jew-free." [48]

 

The Einsatzgruppen firing squads, after a letup during the severe winter, banged away all through the summer of 1942. Some 55,000 more Jews were exterminated in White Russia by July 1, and in October the remaining 16,200 inhabitants of the Minsk ghetto were dispatched in one day. By November Himmler could report to Hitler that 363,211 Jews had been killed in Russia from August through October, though the figure was probably somewhat exaggerated to please the bloodthirsty Fuehrer. [49] [xviii]

 

All in all, according to Karl Eichmann, the head of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo, two million persons, almost all Jews, were liquidated by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. But this is almost certainly an exaggeration; it is strange but true that the S.S. bigwigs were so proud of their exterminations that they often reported swollen figures to please Himmler and Hitler. Himmler's own statistician, Dr. Richard Korherr, reported to his chief on March 23, 1943, that a total of 633,300 Jews in Russia had been "resettled" --  a euphemism for massacre by the Einsatzgruppen. [51] Surprisingly enough this figure tallies fairly well with exhaustive studies later made by a number of experts. Add another hundred thousand slain in the last two years of the war and the figure is probably as accurate as we will ever have. [xix]

 

High as it is, it is small compared to the number of Jews who were done to death in Himmler's extermination camps when the "final solution" came to be carried out.

 

[b]THE "FINAL SOLUTION"[/b]

 

One fine June day of 1946 at Nuremberg three members of the American prosecution staff were interrogating S.S. Obergruppenfuehrer Oswald Pohl, who, among other things, had been in charge of work projects for the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps. Pohl, a naval officer before he joined the S.S., had gone into hiding after the German collapse and had not been apprehended until a year later -- in May 1946 -- when he was discovered working on a farm disguised as a farmhand. [xx]

 

 

 

In answer to one question Pohl used a term with which the Nuremberg prosecution, busy for months in poring over millions of words from the captured documents, had begun to become familiar. A certain colleague by the name of Hoess had, Pohl said, been employed by Himmler "in the final solution of the Jewish question."

 

"And what was that?" Pohl was asked.

 

"The extermination of Jewry," he answered.

 

The expression crept with increasing frequency into the vocabulary and the files of the leading Nazis as the war progressed, its seeming innocence apparently sparing these men the pain of reminding one another what it meant and perhaps too, they may have thought, furnishing a certain cover for their guilt should the incriminating papers ever come to light. Indeed at the Nuremberg trials most of the Nazi chiefs denied that they knew what it signified, and Goering contended he had never used the term, but this pretense was soon exploded. In the case against the fat Reich Marshal a directive was produced which he had sent Heydrich, the chief of the S.D., on July 31, 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen were already falling with gusto to their extermination tasks in Russia.

 

[quote]I herewith commission you [Goering instructed Heydrich] to carry out all preparations with regard to ... a total solution of the Jewish question in those territories of Europe which are under German influence ...

 

I furthermore charge you to submit to me as soon as possible a draft showing the ... measures already taken for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question. [xxi] [52] [/quote]

 

Heydrich knew very well what Goering meant by the term for he had used it himself nearly a year before at a secret meeting after the fall of Poland, in which he had outlined "the first step in the final solution," which consisted of concentrating all the Jews in the ghettos of the large cities, where it would be easy to dispatch them to their final fate.  [xxii]

 

As it worked out, the "final solution" was what Adolf Hitler had long had in mind and what he had publicly proclaimed even before the war started. In his speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, he had said:

 

[quote]If the international Jewish financiers ... should again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war the result will be ... the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe.[/quote]

 

This was a prophecy, he said, and he repeated it five times, verbatim, in subsequent public utterances. It made no difference that not the "international Jewish financiers" but he himself plunged the world into armed conflict. What mattered to Hitler was that there was now a world war and that it afforded him, after he had conquered vast regions in the East where most of Europe's Jews lived, the opportunity to carry out their "annihilation." By the time the invasion of Russia began, he had given the necessary orders.

 

What became known in high Nazi circles as the "Fuehrer Order on the Final Solution" apparently was never committed to paper -- at least no copy of it has yet been unearthed in the captured Nazi documents. All the evidence shows that it was most probably given verbally to Goering, Himmler and Heydrich, who passed it down during the summer and fall of 1941. A number of witnesses testified at Nuremberg that they had "heard" of it but none admitted ever seeing it. Thus Hans Lammers, the bullheaded chief of the Reich Chancellery, when pressed on the witness stand replied:

 

[quote]I knew that a Fuehrer order was transmitted by Goering to Heydrich ... This order was called "Final Solution of the Jewish Problem." [53][/quote]

 

But Lammers claimed, as did so many others on the stand, that he did not really know what it was all about until Allied counsel revealed it at Nuremberg. [xxiii]

 

By the beginning of 1942 the time had come, as Heydrich said, "to clear up the fundamental problems" of the "final solution" so that it could at last be carried out and concluded. For this purpose Heydrich convened a meeting of representatives of the various ministries and agencies of the S.S. -- S.D. at the pleasant Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942, the minutes of which played an important part in some of the later Nuremberg trials. [54] Despite the current setback of the Wehrmacht in Russia the Nazi officials believed that the war was almost won and that Germany would shortly be ruling all of Europe, including England and Ireland. Therefore, Heydrich told the assembly of some fifteen high officials, "in the course of this Final Solution of the European Jewish problem, approximately eleven million Jews are involved." He then rattled off the figures for each country. There were only 131,800 Jews left in the original Reich territory (out of a quarter of a million in 1939), but in the U.S.S.R., he said, there were five million, in the Ukraine three million, in the General Government of Poland two and a quarter million, in France three quarters of a million and in England a third of a million. The clear implication was that all eleven million must be exterminated. He then explained how this considerable task was to be carried out.

 

[quote]The Jew should now in the course of the Final Solution be brought to the East ... for use as labor. In big labor gangs, with separation of sexes, the Jews capable of work are brought to these areas and employed in road building, in which task undoubtedly a great part will fall through natural diminution.

 

The remnant that finally is able to survive all this -- since this is undoubtedly the part with the strongest resistance -- must be treated accordingly, since these people, representing a natural selection, are to be regarded as the germ cell of a new Jewish development.[/quote]

 

In other words, the Jews of Europe were first to be transported to the conquered East, then worked to death, and the few tough ones who survived simply put to death. And the Jews -- the millions of them -- who resided in the East and were already on hand? State Secretary Dr. Josef Buehler, representing the Governor General of Poland, had a ready suggestion for them. There were nearly two and a half million Jews in Poland, he said, who "constituted a great danger." They were, he explained, "bearers of disease black-market operators and furthermore unfit for work." There was no transportation problem with these two and a half million souls. They were already there.

 

[quote]I have only one request [Dr. Buehler concluded], that the Jewish problem in my territory be solved as quickly as possible.[/quote]

 

The good State Secretary betrayed an impatience which was shared in high Nazi circles right up to Hitler. None of them understood at this time -- not, in fact, until toward the end of 1942, when it was too late -- how valuable the millions of Jews might be to the Reich as slave labor. At this point they only understood that working millions of Jews to death on the roads of Russia might take some time. Consequently long before these unfortunate people could be worked to death -- in most cases the attempt was not even begun -- Hitler and Himmler decided to dispatch them by quicker means.

 

There were two -- principally. One of them, as we have seen, had begun shortly after the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941. This was the method of mass slaughter of the Polish and Russian Jews by the flying firing squads of the Einsatzgruppen, which accounted for some three quarters of a million.

 

It was this method of achieving the "final solution" that Himmler had in mind when he addressed the S.S. generals at Posen on October 4, 1943.

 

[quote]... I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly ...

 

I mean ... the extermination of the Jewish race ... Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time -- apart from exceptions caused by human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written ... [55][/quote]

 

No doubt the bespectacled S.S. Fuehrer, who had almost fainted at the sight of a hundred Eastern Jews, including women, being executed for his own delectation, would have seen in the efficient working by S.S. officers of the gas chambers in the extermination camps an even more glorious page in German history. For it was in these death camps that the "final solution" achieved its most ghastly success.

 

[b]THE EXTERMINATION CAMPS[/b]

 

All the thirty odd principal Nazi concentration camps were death camps and millions of tortured, starved inmates perished in them. [xxiv] Though the authorities kept records -- each camp had its official Totenbuch (death book) -- they were incomplete and in many cases were destroyed as the victorious Allies closed in. Part of one Totenbuch that survived at Mauthausen listed 35,318 deaths from January 1939 to April 1945. [xxv] At the end of 1942 when the need of slave labor began to be acute, Himmler ordered that the death rate in the concentration camps "must be reduced." Because of the labor shortage he had been displeased at a report received in his office that of the 136,700 commitments to concentration camps between June and November 1942, some 70,610 had died and that in addition 9,267 had been executed and 27,846 "transferred." [57] To the gas chamber, that is. This did not leave very many for labor duties.

 

But it was in the extermination camps, the Vernichtungslager, where most progress was made toward the "final solution." The greatest and most renowned of these was Auschwitz, whose four huge gas chambers and adjoining crematoria gave it a capacity for death and burial far beyond that of the others -- Treblinka, Belsec, Sibibor and Chelmno, all in Poland. There were other minor extermination camps near Riga, Vilna, Minsk, Kaunas and Lwow, but they were distinguished from the main ones in that they killed by shooting rather than by gas.

 

For a time there was quite a bit of rivalry among the S.S. leaders as to which was the most efficient gas to speed the Jews to their death. Speed was an important factor, especially at Auschwitz, where toward the end the camp was setting new records by gassing 6,000 victims a day. One of the camp's commanders for a period was Rudolf Hoess, an ex-convict once found guilty of murder, who deposed at Nuremberg on the superiority of the gas he employed. [xxvi]

 

[quote]The "Final Solution" of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time there were already in the General Government of Poland three other extermination camps: Belzec, Treblinka and Wolzek ...

 

I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their extermination. The camp commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of half a year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto. [xxvii]

 

He used monoxide gas and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Zyklon B, which was a crystallized prussic acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from three to fifteen minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon climatic conditions.

 

We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about a half hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.

 

Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their ten gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each.[/quote]

 

Hoess then explained how the victims were "selected" for the gas chambers, since not all the incoming prisoners were done away with -- at least not at once, because some of them were needed to labor in the I.G. Farben chemical works and Krupp's factory until they became exhausted and were ready for the "final solution."

 

[quote]We had two S.S. doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. These would be marched by one of the doctors, who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit to work were sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work.[/quote]

 

Always Herr Hoess kept making improvements in the art of mass killing.

 

[quote]Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated, while at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated.

 

We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.[/quote]

 

Sometimes, Hoess explained, a few "special prisoners" -- apparently Russian prisoners of war -- were simply killed by injections of benzine. "Our doctors," he added, "had orders to write ordinary death certificates and could put down any reason at all for the cause of death. [xxviii] [58]

 

To Hoess's blunt description may be added a brief composite picture of death and disposal at Auschwitz as testified to by surviving inmates and jailers. The "selection," which decided which Jews were to be worked and which ones immediately gassed, took place at the railroad siding as soon as the victims had been unloaded from the freight cars in which they had been locked without food or water for as much as a week -- for many came from such distant parts as France, Holland and Greece. Though there were heart-rending scenes as wives were torn away from husbands and children from parents, none of the captives, as Hoess testified and survivors agree, realized just what was in store for them. In fact some of them were given pretty picture postcards marked "Waldsee" to be signed and sent back home to their relatives with a printed inscription saying:

 

[quote]We are doing very well here. We have work and we are well treated. We await your arrival.[/quote]

 

The gas chambers themselves and the adjoining crematoria, viewed from a short distance, were not sinister-looking places at all; it was impossible to make them out for what they were. Over them were well-kept lawns with flower borders; the signs at the entrances merely said BATHS. The unsuspecting Jews thought they were simply being taken to the baths for the delousing which was customary at all camps. And taken to the accompaniment of sweet music!

 

For there was light music. An orchestra of "young and pretty girls all dressed in white blouses and navy-blue skirts," as one survivor remembered, had been formed from among the inmates. While the selection was being made for the gas chambers this unique musical ensemble played gay tunes from The Merry Widow and Tales of Hoffmann. Nothing solemn and somber from Beethoven. The death marches at Auschwitz were sprightly and merry tunes, straight out of Viennese and Parisian operetta.

 

To such music, recalling as it did happier and more frivolous times, the men, women and children were led into the "bath houses," where they were told to undress preparatory to taking a "shower." Sometimes they were even given towels. Once they were inside the "shower-room" -- and perhaps this was the first moment that they may have suspected something was amiss, for as many as two thousand of them were packed into the chamber like sardines, making it difficult to take a bath -- the massive door was slid shut, locked and hermetically sealed. Up above where the well-groomed lawn and flower beds almost concealed the mushroom-shaped lids of vents that ran up from the hall of death, orderlies stood ready to drop into them the amethyst-blue crystals of hydrogen cyanide, or Zyklon B, which originally had been commercially manufactured as a strong disinfectant and for which, as we have seen, Herr Hoess had with so much pride found a new use.

 

Surviving prisoners watching from blocks nearby remembered how for a time the signal for the orderlies to pour the crystals down the vents was given by a Sergeant Moll. "Na, gib ihnen schon zu fressen" ("All right, give 'em something to chew on"), he would laugh and the crystals would be poured through the openings, which were then sealed.

 

Through heavy-glass portholes the executioners could watch what happened. The naked prisoners below would be looking up at the showers from which no water spouted or perhaps at the floor wondering why there were no drains. It took some moments for the gas to have much effect. But soon the inmates became aware that it was issuing from the perforations in the vents. It was then that they usually panicked, crowding away from the pipes and finally stampeding toward the huge metal door where, as Reitlinger puts it, "they piled up in one blue clammy blood-spattered pyramid, clawing and mauling each other even in death."

 

Twenty or thirty minutes later when the huge mass of naked flesh had ceased to writhe, pumps drew out the poisonous air, the large door was opened and the men of the Sonderkommando took over. These were Jewish male inmates who were promised their lives and adequate food in return for performing the most ghastly job of all. [xxix] Protected with gas masks and rubber boots and wielding hoses they went to work. Reitlinger has described it.

 

[quote]Their first task was to remove the blood and defecations before dragging the clawing dead 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. Then the journey by lift or rail-wagon to the furnaces, the mill that ground the clinker to fine ash, and the truck that scattered the ashes in the stream of the Sola. [xxx]

 

There had been, the records show, some lively competition among German businessmen to procure orders for building these death and disposal contraptions and for furnishing the lethal blue crystals. The firm of I. A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, manufacturers of heating equipment, won out in its bid for the crematoria at Auschwitz. The story of its business enterprise was revealed in a voluminous correspondence found in the records of the camp. A letter from the firm dated February 12, 1943, gives the tenor.

 

[quote]TO THE CENTRAL CONSTRUCTION OFFICE OF THE S.S. AND POLICE, AUSCHWITZ:

 

SUBJECT: Crematoria 2 and 3 for the camp.

 

We acknowledge receipt of your order for five triple furnaces, including two electric elevators for raising the corpses and one emergency elevator. A practical installation for stoking coal was also ordered and one for transporting ashes. [60][/quote]

 

The correspondence of two other firms engaged in the crematorium business popped up at the Nuremberg trials. The disposal of the corpses at a number of Nazi camps had attracted commercial competition. One of the oldest German companies in the field offered its drawings for crematoria to be built at a large S.S. camp in Belgrade.

 

[quote]For putting the bodies into the furnace, we suggest simply a metal fork moving on cylinders.

 

Each furnace will have an oven measuring only 24 by 18 inches, as coffins will not be used. For transporting the corpses from the storage points to the furnaces we suggest using light carts on wheels, and we enclose diagrams of these drawn to scale. [61][/quote]

 

Another firm, C. H. Kori, also sought the Belgrade business, emphasizing its great experience in this field since it had already constructed four furnaces for Dachau and five for Lublin, which, it said, had given "full satisfaction in practice."

 

[quote]Following our verbal discussion regarding the delivery of equipment of simple construction for the burning of bodies, we are submitting plans for our perfected cremation ovens which operate with coal and which have hitherto given full satisfaction.

 

We suggest two crematoria furnaces for the building planned, but we advise you to make further inquiries to make sure that two ovens will be sufficient for your requirements.

 

We guarantee the effectiveness of the cremation ovens as well as their durability, the use of the best material and our faultless workmanship.

 

Awaiting your further word, we will be at your service.

 

Heil Hitler!

 

C. H. KORI, G.M.B.H. [62][/quote]

 

In the end even the strenuous efforts of German free enterprise, using the best material and providing faultless workmanship, proved inadequate for burning the corpses. The well-constructed crematoria fell far behind at a number of camps but especially at Auschwitz in 1944 when as many as 6,000 bodies (Hoess put it at as many as !6,000) had to be burned daily. For instance, in forty-six days during the summer of 1944 between 250,000 and 300,000 Hungarian Jews alone were done to death at this camp. Even the gas chambers fell behind and resort was made to mass shootings in the Einsatzkommando style. The bodies were simply thrown into ditches and burned, many of them only partly, and then earth was bulldozed over them. The camp commanders complained toward the end that the crematoria had proved not only inadequate but "uneconomical."

 

The Zyklon-B crystals that killed the victims in the first place were furnished by two German firms which had acquired the patent from I. G. Farben. These were Tesch and Stabenow of Hamburg, and Degesch of Dessau, the former supplying two tons of the cyanide crystals a month and the latter three quarters of a ton. The bills of lading for the deliveries showed up at Nuremberg.

 

The directors of both concerns contended that they had sold their product merely for fumigation purposes and were unaware that lethal use had been made of it, but this defense did not hold up. Letters were found from Tesch and Stabenow offering not only to supply the gas crystals but also the ventilating and heating equipment for extermination chambers. Besides, the inimitable Hoess, who once he started to confess went the limit, testified that the directors of the Tesch company could not have helped knowing how their product was being used since they furnished enough to exterminate a couple of million people. A British military court was convinced of this at the trial of the two partners, Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher, who were sentenced to death in 1946 and hanged. The director of the second firm, Dr. Gerhard Peters of Degesch of Dessau, got off more lightly. A German court sentenced him to five years' imprisonment.  [63]

 

Before the postwar trials in Germany it had been generally believed that the mass killings were exclusively the work of a relatively few fanatical S.S. leaders. But the records of the courts leave no doubt of the complicity of a number of German businessmen, not only the Krupps and the directors of the I. G. Farben chemical trust but smaller entrepreneurs who outwardly must have seemed to be the most prosaic and decent of men, pillars -- like good businessmen everywhere -- of their communities.

 

How many hapless innocent people -- mostly Jews but including a fairly large number of others, especially Russian prisoners of war -- were slaughtered at the one camp of Auschwitz? The exact number will never be known. Hoess himself in his affidavit gave an estimate of "2,500,000 victims executed and exterminated by gassing and burning, and at least another half million who succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000." Later at his own trial in Warsaw he reduced the figure to 1,135,000. The Soviet government, which investigated the camp after it was overrun by the Red Army in January 1945, put the figure at four million. Reitlinger, on the basis of his own exhaustive study, doubts that the number gassed at Auschwitz was "even as high as three quarters of a million." He estimates that about 600,000 died in the gas chambers, to which he adds "the unknown proportion" of some 300,000 or more "missing," who were shot or who died of starvation and disease. By any estimate the figure is considerable. [64]

 

The bodies were burned, but the gold fillings in the teeth remained and these were retrieved from the ashes if they had not already been yanked out by special squads working over the clammy piles of corpses. [xxxi] The gold was melted down and shipped along with other valuables snatched from the condemned Jews to the Reichsbank, where under a secret agreement between Himmler and the bank's president, Dr. Walther Funk, it was deposited to the credit of the S.S. in an account given the cover name of "Max Heiliger." This prize booty from the extermination camps included, besides gold from dentures, gold watches, earrings, bracelets, rings, necklaces and even spectacles frames -- for the Jews had been encouraged to bring all their valuables with them for the promised "resettlement." There were also great stocks of jewelry, especially diamonds and much silverware. And there were great wads of banknotes.

 

The Reichsbank, in fact, was overwhelmed by the "Max Heiliger" deposits. With its vaults filled to overflowing as early as 1942, the bank's profit-minded directors sought to turn the holdings into cold cash by disposing of them through the municipal pawnshops. One letter from the Reichsbank to the Berlin municipal pawnshop dated September 15 speaks of a "second shipment" and begins, "We submit to you the following valuables with the request for the best possible utilization." The list is long and itemized and includes 154 gold watches, 1,601 gold earrings, 132 diamond rings, 784 silver pocket watches and "160 diverse dentures, partly of gold." By the beginning of 1944 the Berlin pawnshop itself was overwhelmed by the flow of these stolen goods and informed the Reichsbank it could accept no more. When the Allies overran Germany they discovered in some abandoned salt mines, where the Nazis had hidden part of their records and booty, enough left over from the "Max Heiliger" account to fill three huge vaults in the Frankfurt branch of the Reichsbank.  [66]

 

Did the bankers know the sources of these unique "deposits"? The manager of the Precious Metals Department of the Reichsbank deposed at Nuremberg [said] that he and his associates began to notice that many shipments came from Lublin and Auschwitz.

 

[quote]We all knew that these places were the sites of concentration camps. It was in the tenth delivery in November, 1943, that dental gold appeared. The quantity of dental gold became unusually great. [67][/quote]

 

At Nuremberg the notorious Oswald Pohl, chief of the Economic Office of the S.S., who handled the transactions for his organization, emphasized that Dr. Funk and the officials and directors of the Reichsbank knew very well the origins of the goods they were trying to pawn. He explained in some detail "the business deal between Funk and the S.S. concerning the delivery of valuables of dead Jews to the Reichsbank." He remembered a conversation with the bank's vice-president, Dr. Emil Pohl.

 

[quote]In this conversation no doubt remained that the objects to be delivered [came from] Jews who had been killed in concentration camps. The objects in question were rings, watches, eyeglasses, gold bars, wedding rings, brooches, pins, gold fillings and other valuables.[/quote]

 

Once, Pohl related, after an inspection tour through the vaults of the Reichsbank where the valuables "from the dead Jews" were inspected, Dr. Funk tendered the party a pleasant dinner in which the conversation turned around the unique origins of the booty. [68] [xxxii]

 

[b]"THE WARSAW GHETTO IS NO MORE"[/b]

 

More than one eyewitness has commented on the spirit of resignation with which so many Jews met their deaths in the Nazi gas chambers or in the great execution pits of the Einsatz squads. Not all Jews submitted to extermination so gently. In the spring days of 1943 some 60,000 Jews walled up in the Warsaw ghetto -- all that remained of 400,000 who had been herded into this place like cattle in 1940 -- turned on their Nazi tormentors and fought.

 

Perhaps no one has left a more grisly -- and authoritative -- account of the Warsaw ghetto rebellion than the proud S.S. officer who put it down. [xxxiii] This German individual was Juergen Stroop, S.S. Brigadefuehrer and Major General of Police. His eloquent official report, bound in leather, profusely illustrated and typed on seventy-five pages of elegant heavy bond paper has survived. [xxxiv] It is entitled The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More. [69]

 

By the late autumn of 1940, a year after the Nazi conquest of Poland, the S.S. had rounded up some 400,000 Jews and sealed them off within a high wall from the rest of Warsaw in an area approximately two and a half miles long and a mile wide around the old medieval ghetto. The district normally housed 160,000 persons, so there was overcrowding, but this was the least of the hardships. Governor Frank refused to allot enough food to keep even half of the 400,000 barely alive. Forbidden to leave the enclosure on the pain of being shot on sight, the Jews had no employment except for a few armament factories within the wall run by the Wehrmacht or by rapacious German businessmen who knew how to realize large profits from the use of slave labor. At least 100,000 Jews tried to survive on a bowl of soup a day, often boiled from straw, provided by the charity of the others. It was a losing struggle for life.

 

But the ghetto population did not die fast enough from starvation and disease to suit Himmler, who in the summer of 1942 ordered the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto to be removed altogether "for security reasons." On July 22 a great "resettlement" action was instituted. Between then and October 3 a total of 310,322 Jews, according to Stroop, were "resettled." That is, they were transported to the extermination camps, most of them to Treblinka, where they were gassed.

 

Still Himmler was not satisfied. When he paid a surprise visit to Warsaw in January 1943 and discovered that 60,000 Jews were still alive in the ghetto he ordered that the "resettlement" be completed by February 15. This proved to be a difficult task. The severe winter and the demands of the Army, whose disaster at Stalingrad and whose consequent retreats in southern Russia gave it first claim to transportation facilities, made it difficult for the S.S. to obtain the necessary trains to carry out the final "resettlement." Also, Stroop reported, the Jews were resisting their final liquidation "in every possible way." It was not until spring that Himmler's order could be carried out. It was decided to clear out the ghetto in a "special action" lasting three days. As it turned out, it took four weeks.

 

The deportation of more than 300,000 Jews had enabled the Germans to reduce the size of the walled-in ghetto and as S.S. General Stroop turned his tanks, artillery, flame throwers and dynamite squads on it on the morning of April 19, 1943, it comprised an area measuring only 1,000 by 300 yards. It was honeycombed, though, with sewers, vaults and cellars which the desperate Jews had converted into fortified points. Their arms were few: some pistols and rifles, a dozen or two machine guns that had been smuggled in, and homemade grenades. But they were now on that April morning determined to use them -- the first time and the last in the history of the Third Reich that the Jews resisted their Nazi oppressors with arms.

 

Stroop had 2,090 men, about half of them Regular Army or Waffen-S.S. troops, and the rest S.S. police reinforced by 335 Lithuanian militia and some Polish police and firemen. They ran into unexpected resistance the first day.

 

[quote]Hardly had operation begun [Stroop reported in the first of his many teletyped daily reports], than we ran into strong concerted fire by the Jews and bandits. The tank and two armored cars pelted with Molotov cocktails Owing to this enemy counterattack we had to withdraw.[/quote]

 

The German attack was renewed but found heavy going.

 

[quote]About 1730 hours we encountered very strong resistance from one block of buildings, including machine-gun fire. A special raiding party defeated the enemy but could not catch the resisters. The Jews and criminals resisted from base to base and escaped at the last moment ... Our losses in first attack: 12 men.[/quote]

 

And so it went for the first few days, the poorly armed defenders giving ground before the attacks of tanks, flame throwers and artillery but keeping up their resistance. General Stroop could not understand why "this trash and subhumanity," as he referred to the besieged Jews, did not give up and submit to being liquidated.

 

[quote]Within a few days [he reported] it became apparent that the Jews no longer had any intention to resettle voluntarily, but were determined to resist evacuation ... Whereas it had been possible during the first days to catch considerable numbers of Jews, who are cowards by nature, it became more and more difficult during the second half of the operation to capture the bandits and Jews. Over and over again new battle groups consisting of 20 to 30 Jewish men, accompanied by a corresponding number of women, kindled new resistance.[/quote]

 

The women belonged to the Chalutzim, Stroop noted, and had the habit, he said, of "firing pistols with both hands" and also of unlimbering hand grenades which they concealed in their bloomers.

 

On the fifth day of the battle, an impatient and furious Himmler ordered Stroop to "comb out" the ghetto "with the greatest severity and relentless tenacity."

 

[quote]I therefore decided [Stroop related in his final report] to destroy the entire Jewish area by setting every block on fire.[/quote]

 

He then described what followed.

 

[quote]The Jews stayed in the burning buildings until because of the fear of being burned alive they jumped down from the upper stories ... With their bones broken, they still tried to crawl across the street into buildings which had not yet been set on fire ... Despite the danger of being burned alive the Jews and bandits often preferred to return into the flames rather than risk being caught by us.[/quote]

 

It was simply incomprehensible to a man of Stroop's ~tripe that men and women preferred to die in the flames fighting rather than to die peacefully in the gas chambers. For he was shipping off the captured whom he did not slaughter to Treblinka. On April 25 he sent a teletype to S.S. headquarters reporting that 27,464 Jews had been captured.[/quote]

 

[quote]I am going to try to obtain a train for T2 [Treblinka] tomorrow. Otherwise liquidation will be carried out here tomorrow.[/quote]

 

Often it was, on the spot. The next day Stroop informed his superiors: "1,330 Jews pulled out of dugouts and immediately destroyed; 362 Jews killed in battle." Only thirty prisoners were "evacuated."

 

Toward the end of the rebellion the defenders took to the sewers. Stroop tried to flush them out by flooding the mains but the Jews managed to stop the flow of water. One day the Germans dropped smoke bombs into the sewers through 183 manholes but Stroop ruefully reported that they failed to "have the desired results."

 

The final outcome could never be in doubt. For a whole month the cornered Jews fought with reckless courage though Stroop, in one daily report, put it differently, complaining about the "cunning fighting methods and tricks used by the Jews and bandits." By April 26 he reported that many of the defenders were "going insane from the heat, the smoke and the explosions."

 

[quote]During the day several more blocks of buildings were burned down. This is the only and final method which forces this trash and subhumanity to the surface.[/quote]

 

The last day was May 16. That night Stroop got off his last daily battle report.

 

[quote]One hundred eighty Jews, bandits and subhumans were destroyed. The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence. The large-scale action was terminated at 2015 hours by blowing up the Warsaw synagogue ...

 

Total number of Jews dealt with: 56,065, including both Jews caught and Jews whose extermination can be proved.[/quote]

 

A week later he was asked to explain that figure, and he replied:

 

[quote]Of the total of 56,065 caught, about 7,000 were destroyed in the former ghetto during large-scale operation. 6,929 Jews were destroyed by transporting them to Treblinka; the sum total of Jews destroyed is therefore 13,929. Beyond that, from five to six thousand Jews were destroyed by being blown up or by perishing in the flames.[/quote]

 

General Stroop's arithmetic is not very clear since this report leaves some 36,000 Jews unaccounted for. But there can be little doubt that he was telling the truth when he wrote in his handsomely bound final report that he had caught "a total of 56,065 Jews whose extermination can be proved." The gas chambers no doubt accounted for the 36,000.

 

German losses, according to Stroop, were sixteen killed and ninety wounded. Probably the true figures were much higher, given the nature of the savage house-to-house fighting which the general himself described in such lurid detail, but were kept low so as not to disturb Himmler's fine sensibilities. The German troops and police, Stroop concluded, "fulfilled their duty indefatigably in faithful comradeship and stood together as exemplary models of soldiers."

 

The "final solution" went on to the very end of the war. How many Jews did it massacre? The figure has been debated. According to two S.S. witnesses at Nuremberg the total was put at between five and six millions by one of the great Nazi experts on the subject, Karl Eichmann, chief of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo, who carried out the "final solution" under the prodding hand of its originator, Heydrich. [xxxv] The figure given in the Nuremberg indictment was 5,700,000 and it tallied with the calculations of the World Jewish Congress. Reitlinger in his prodigious study of the Final Solution concluded that the figure was somewhat less -- between 4,194,200 and 4,581,200. [71]

 

There were some ten million Jews living in 1939 in the territories occupied by Hitler's forces. By any estimate it is certain that nearly half of them were exterminated by the Germans. This was the final consequence and the shattering cost of the aberration which came over the Nazi dictator in his youthful gutter days in Vienna and which he imparted to -- or shared with -- so many of his German followers.

 

[b]THE MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS[/b]

 

There were some practices of the Germans during the short-lived New Order that resulted from sheer sadism rather than a lust for mass murder. Perhaps to a psychiatrist there is a difference between the two lusts though the end result of the first differed from the second only in the scale of deaths.

 

The Nazi medical experiments are an example of this sadism, for in the use of concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war as human guinea pigs very little, if any, benefit to science was achieved. It is a tale of horror of which the German medical profession cannot be proud. Although the "experiments" were conducted by fewer than two hundred murderous quacks -- albeit some of them held eminent posts in the medical world -- their criminal work was known to thousands of leading physicians of the Reich, not a single one of whom, so far as the record shows, ever uttered the slightest public protest. [xxxvi]

 

In the murders in this field the Jews were not the only victims. The Nazi doctors also used Russian prisoners of war, Polish concentration camp inmates, women as well as men, and even Germans. The "experiments" were quite varied. Prisoners were placed in pressure chambers and subjected to high-altitude tests until they ceased breathing. They were injected with lethal doses of typhus and jaundice. They were subjected to "freezing" experiments in icy water or exposed naked in the snow outdoors until they froze to death. Poison bullets were tried out on them as was mustard gas. At the Ravensbrueck concentration camp for women hundreds of Polish inmates -- the "rabbit girls" they were called -- were given gas gangrene wounds while others were subjected to "experiments" in bone grafting. At Dachau and Buchenwald gypsies were selected to see how long, and in what manner, they could live on salt water. Sterilization experiments were carried out on a large scale at several camps by a variety of means on both men and women; for, as an S.S. physician, Dr. Adolf Pokorny, wrote Himmler on one occasion, "the enemy must be not only conquered but exterminated." If he could not be slaughtered -- and the need for slave labor toward the end of the war made that practice questionable, as we have seen -- then he could be prevented from propagating. In fact Dr. Pokorny told Himmler he thought he had found just the right means, the plant Caladium seguinum, which, he said, induced lasting sterility.

 

[quote]The thought alone [the good doctor wrote the S.S. Fuehrer] that the three million Bolsheviks now in German captivity could be sterilized, so that they would be available for work but precluded from propagation, opens up the most far-reaching perspectives. [72][/quote]

 

Another German doctor who had "far-reaching perspectives" was Professor August Hirt, head of the Anatomical Institute of the University of Strasbourg. His special field was somewhat different from those of the others and he explained it in a letter at Christmas time of 1941 to S.S. Lieutenant General Rudolf Brandt, Himmler's adjutant.

 

[quote]We have large collections of skulls of almost all races and peoples at our disposal. Of the Jewish race, however, only very few specimens of skulls are available ... The war in the East now presents us with the opportunity to overcome this deficiency. By procuring the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevik commissars, who represent the prototype of the repulsive, but characteristic, subhuman, we have the chance now to obtain scientific material.[/quote]

 

Professor Hirt did not want the skulls of "Jewish-Bolshevik commissars" already dead. He proposed that the heads of these persons first be measured while they were alive. Then --

 

[quote]Following the subsequently induced death of the Jew, whose head should not be damaged, the physician will sever the head from the body and will forward it ... in a hermetically sealed tin can.[/quote]

 

Whereupon Dr. Hirt would go to work, he promised, on further scientific measurements. [73] Himmler was delighted. He directed that Professor Hirt "be supplied with everything needed for his research work."

 

He was well supplied. The actual supplier was an interesting Nazi individual by the name of Wolfram Sievers, who spent considerable time on the witness stand at the main Nuremberg trial and at the subsequent "Doctors' Trial," in the latter of which he was a defendant. [xxxvii] Sievers, a former bookseller, had risen to be a colonel of the S.S. and executive secretary of the Ahnenerbe, the Institute for Research into Heredity, one of the ridiculous "cultural" organizations established by Himmler to pursue one of his many lunacies. It had, according to Sievers, fifty "research branches," of which one was called the "Institute for Military Scientific Research," which Sievers also headed. He was a shifty-eyed, Mephistophelean-looking fellow with a thick, ink-black beard and at Nuremberg he was dubbed the "Nazi Bluebeard," after the famous French killer. Like so many other characters in this history, he kept a meticulous diary, and this and his correspondence, both of which survived, contributed to his gallows end.

 

By June 1943 Sievers had collected at Auschwitz the men and women who were to furnish the skeletons for the "scientific measurements" of Professor Dr. Rirt at the University of Strasbourg. "A total of 115 persons, including 79 Jews, 30 Jewesses, 4 'Asiatics' and 2 Poles were processed," Sievers reported, requesting the S.S. main office in Berlin for transportation for them from Auschwitz to the Natzweiler concentration camp near Strasbourg. The British cross-examiner at Nuremberg inquired as to the meaning of "processing."

 

"Anthropological measurements," Sievers replied.

 

"Before they were murdered they were anthropologically measured? That was all there was to it, was it?"

 

"And casts were taken," Sievers added.

 

What followed was narrated by S.S. Captain Josef Kramer, himself a veteran exterminator from Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau and other camps and who achieved fleeting fame as the "Beast of Belsen" and was condemned to death by a British court at Lueneburg.

 

[quote]Professor Hirt of the Strasbourg Anatomical Institute told me of the prisoner convoy en route from Auschwitz. He said these persons were to be killed by poison gas in the gas chamber of the Natzweiler camp, their bodies then to be taken to the Anatomical Institute for his disposal. He gave me a bottle containing about half a pint of salts -- I think they were cyanide salts -- and told me the approximate dosage 1 would have to use to poison the arriving inmates from Auschwitz.

 

Early in August 1943, I received eighty inmates who were to be killed with the gas Hirt had given me. One night I went to the gas chamber in a small car with about fifteen women this first time. I told the women they had to go into the chamber to be disinfected. I did not tell them, however, that they were to be gassed.[/quote]

 

By this time the Nazis had perfected the technique.

 

[quote]With the help of a few S.S. men [Kramer continued] I stripped the women completely and shoved them into the gas chamber when they were stark naked.

 

When the door closed they began to scream. I introduced a certain amount of salt through a tube ... and observed through a peephole what happened inside the room. The women breathed for about half a minute before they fell to the floor. After I had turned on the ventilation I opened the door. I found the women lying lifeless on the floor and they were covered with excrements.[/quote]

 

Captain Kramer testified that he repeated the performance until all eighty inmates had been killed and turned the bodies over to Professor Hirt, "as requested." He was asked by his interrogator what his feelings were at the time, and he gave a memorable answer that gives insight into a phenomenon in the Third Reich that has seemed so elusive of human understanding.

 

[quote] I had no feelings in carrying out these things because I had received an order to kill the eighty inmates in the way I already told you.

 

That, by the way, was the way I was trained. [74][/quote]

 

Another witness testified as to what happened next. He was Henry Herypierre, a Frenchman who worked in the Anatomical Institute at Strasbourg as Professor Hirt's laboratory assistant until the Allies arrived.

 

[quote]The first shipment we received was of the bodies of thirty women ... These thirty female bodies arrived still warm. The eyes were wide open and shining. They were red and bloodshot and were popping from their sockets. There were also traces of blood about the nose and mouth. No rigor mortis was evident.[/quote]

 

Herypierre suspected that they had been done to death and secretly copied down their prison numbers which were tattooed on their left arms. Two more shipments of fifty-six men arrived, he said, in exactly the same condition. They were pickled in alcohol under the expert direction of Dr. Hirt. But the professor was a little nervous about the whole thing. "Peter," he said to Herypierre, "if you can't keep your trap shut, you'll be one of them."

 

Professor Dr. Hirt went about his work nonetheless. According to the correspondence of Sievers, the professor severed the heads and, as he wrote, "assembled the skeleton collection which was previously nonexistent." But there were difficulties and after hearing them described by Dr. Hirt -- Sievers himself had no expert medical or anatomical knowledge --  the chief of the Ahnenerbe reported them to Himmler on September 5, 1944.

 

[quote]In view of the vast amount of scientific research involved, the job of reducing the corpses has not yet been completed. This requires some time for 80 corpses.[/quote]

 

And time was running out. Advancing American and French troops were nearing Strasbourg. Hirt requested "directives as to what should be done with the collection."

 

[quote]The corpses can be stripped of the flesh and thereby rendered unidentifiable [Sievers reported to headquarters on behalf of Dr. Hirt]. This would mean, however, that at least part of the whole work had been done for nothing and that this unique collection would be lost to science, since it would be impossible to make plaster casts afterwards.

 

The skeleton collection as such is inconspicuous. The flesh parts could be declared as having been left by the French at the time we took over the Anatomical Institute [xxxviii] and would be turned over for cremating. Please advise me which of the following three proposals is to be carried out: 1. The collection as a whole to be preserved; 2. The collection to be dissolved in part; 3. The collection to be completely dissolved.[/quote]

 

"Why were you wanting to deflesh the bodies, witness?" the British prosecutor asked in the stillness of the Nuremberg courtroom. "Why were you suggesting that the blame should be passed on to the French?"

 

"As a layman I could have no opinion in this matter," the "Nazi Bluebeard" replied. "I merely transmitted an inquiry from Professor Hirt. I had nothing to do with the murdering of these people. I simply carried through the function of a mailman."

 

"You were the post office," the prosecutor rejoined, "another of these distinguished Nazi post offices, were you?"

 

It was a leaky defense offered by many a Nazi at the trials and on this occasion, as on others, the prosecution nailed it. [75]

 

The captured S.S. files reveal that on October 26, 1944, Sievers reported that "the collection in Strasbourg has been completely dissolved in accordance with the directive. This arrangement is for the best in view of the whole situation." [76]

 

Herypierre later described the attempt -- not altogether successful -- to hide the traces.

 

[quote]In September, 1944, the Allies made an advance on Belfort, and Professor Hirt ordered Bong and Herr Maier to cut up these bodies and have them burned in the crematory ... I asked Herr Maier the next day whether he had cut up all the bodies, but Herr Bong replied: "We couldn't cut up all the bodies, it was too much work. We left a few bodies in the storeroom."[/quote]

 

They were discovered there by an Allied team when units of the U.S. Seventh Army, with the French 2nd Armored Division in the lead, entered Strasbourg a month later.  [xxxix] [77]

 

Not only skeletons but human skins were collected by the masters of the New Order though in the latter case the pretense could not be made that the cause of scientific research was being served. The skins of concentration camp prisoners, especially executed for this ghoulish purpose, had merely decorative value. They made, it was found, excellent lamp shades, several of which were expressly fitted up for Frau Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald and nicknamed by the inmates the "Bitch of Buchenwald." [lv] Tattooed skins appear to have been the most sought after. A German inmate, Andreas Pfaffenberger, deposed at Nuremberg on this.

 

[quote]... All prisoners with tattooing on them were ordered to report to the dispensary ... After the prisoners had been examined the ones with the best and most artistic specimens were killed by injections. The corpses were then turned over to the pathological department where the desired pieces of tattooed skin were detached from the bodies and treated further. The finished products were turned over to Koch's wife, who had them fashioned into lamp shades, and other ornamental household articles. [78][/quote]

 

One piece of skin which apparently struck Frau Koch's fancy had the words "Haensel and Gretel" tattooed on it.

 

At another camp, Dachau, the demand for such skins often outran the supply. A Czech physician prisoner, Dr. Frank Blaha, testified at Nuremberg as to that.

 

[quote]Sometimes we would not have enough bodies with good skin and Dr. Rascher would say, "All right, you will get the bodies." The next day we would receive twenty or thirty bodies of young people. They would have been shot in the neck or struck on the head, so that the skin would be uninjured ... The skin had to be from healthy prisoners and free from defects. [79][/quote]

 

It was this Dr. Sigmund Rascher who seems to have been responsible for the more sadistic of the medical experiments in the first place. This horrible quack had attracted the attention of Himmler, among whose obsessions was the breeding of more and more superior Nordic offspring, through reports in S.S. circles that Frau Rascher had given birth to three children after passing the age of forty-eight, although in truth the Raschers had simply kidnaped them at suitable intervals from an orphanage.

 

In the spring of 1941, Dr. Rascher, who was attending a special medical course at Munich given by the Luftwaffe, had a brain storm. On May 15, 1941, he wrote Himmler about it. He had found to his horror that research on the effect of high altitudes on flyers was at a standstill because "no tests with human material had yet been possible as such experiments are very dangerous and nobody volunteers for them."

 

[quote]Can you make available two or three professional criminals for these experiments ... The experiments, by which the subjects can of course die, would take place with my co-operation. [80][/quote]

 

The S.S. Fuehrer replied within a week that "prisoners will, of course, be made available gladly for the high-flight research."

 

They were, and Dr. Rascher went to work. The results may be seen from his own reports and from those of others, which showed up at Nuremberg and at the subsequent trial of the S.S. doctors.

 

Dr. Rascher's own findings are a model of scientific jargon. For the high-altitude tests he moved the Air Force's decompression chamber at Munich to the nearby Dachau concentration camp where human guinea pigs were readily available. Air was pumped out of the contraption so that the oxygen and air pressure at high altitudes could be simulated. Dr. Rascher then made his observations, of which the following one is typical.

 

[quote]The third test was without oxygen at the equivalent of 29,400 feet altitude conducted on a 37-year-old Jew in good general condition. Respiration continued for 30 minutes. After four minutes the TP [test person] began to perspire and roll his head.

 

After five minutes spasms appeared; between the sixth and tenth minute respiration increased in frequency, the TP losing consciousness. From the eleventh to the thirtieth minute respiration slowed down to three inhalations per minute, only to cease entirely at the end of that period ... About half an hour after breathing had ceased, an autopsy was begun. [81][/quote]

 

An Austrian inmate, Anton Pacholegg, who worked in Dr. Rascher's office, has described the "experiments" less scientifically.

 

[quote]I have personally seen through the observation window of the decompression chamber when a prisoner inside would stand a vacuum until his lungs ruptured ... They would go mad and pull out their hair in an effort to relieve the pressure. They would tear their heads and face with their fingers and nails in an attempt to maim themselves in their madness. They would beat the walls with their hands and head and scream in an effort to relieve pressure on their eardrums. These cases usually ended in the death of the subject. [82][/quote]

 

Some two hundred prisoners were subjected to this experiment before Dr. Rascher was finished with it. Of these, according to the testimony at the "Doctors' Trial," about eighty were killed outright and the remainder executed somewhat later so that no tales would be told.

 

This particular research project was finished in May 1942, at which time Field Marshal Erhard Milch of the Luftwaffe conveyed Goering's "thanks" to Himmler for Dr. Rascher's pioneer experiments. A little later, on October 10, 1942, Lieutenant General Dr. Hippke, Medical Inspector of the Air Force, tendered to Himmler "in the name of German aviation medicine and research" his "obedient gratitude" for "the Dachau' experiments." However, he thought, there was one omission in them. They had not taken into account the extreme cold which an aviator faces at high altitudes. To rectify this omission the Luftwaffe, he informed Himmler, was building a decompression chamber "equipped with full refrigeration and with a nominal altitude of 100,000 feet. Freezing experiments," he added, "along different lines are still under way at Dachau." [83]

 

Indeed they were. And again Dr. Rascher was in the vanguard. But some of his doctor colleagues were having qualms. Was it Christian to do what Dr. Rascher was doing? Apparently a few German Luftwaffe medics were beginning to have their doubts. When Himmler heard of this he was infuriated and promptly wrote Field Marshal Milch protesting about the difficulties caused by "Christian medical circles" in the Air Force. He begged the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff to release Rascher from the Air Force medical corps so that he could be transferred to the S.S. He suggested that they find a "non-Christian physician, who should be honorable as a scientist," to pass on Dr. Rascher's valuable works. In the meantime Himmler emphasized that he

 

[quote]personally assumed the responsibility for supplying asocial individuals and criminals who deserve only to die from concentration camps for these experiments.[/quote]

 

Dr. Rascher's "freezing experiments" were of two kinds: first, to see how much cold a human being could endure before he died; and second, to find the best means of rewarming a person who still lived after being exposed to extreme cold. Two methods were selected to freeze a man: dumping him into a tank of ice water or leaving him out in the snow, completely naked, overnight during winter. Rascher's reports to Himmler on his "freezing" and "warming" experiments are voluminous; an example or two will give the tenor. One of the earliest ones was made on September 10, 1942.

 

[quote]The TPs were immersed in water in full flying uniform ... with hood. A life jacket prevented sinking. The experiments were conducted at water ,temperatures between 36.5 and 53.5 degrees Fahrenheit. In the first test series the back of the head and the brain stem were above water. In another series the back of the neck and cerebellum were submerged. Temperatures as low as 79.5 in the stomach and 79.7 in the rectum were recorded electrically. Fatalities occurred only when the medulla and the cerebellum were chilled.

 

In autopsies of such fatalities large quantities of free blood, up to a pint, were always found inside the cranial cavity. The heart regularly showed extreme distention of the right chamber. The TPs in such tests inevitably died when body temperature had declined to 82.5, despite all rescue attempts. These autopsy findings plainly prove the importance of a heated head and neck protector for the foam suit now in the process of development. [84][/quote]

 

A table which Dr. Rascher appended covers six "Fatal Cases" and shows the water temperatures, body temperature on removal from water, body temperature at death, the length of stay in the water and the time it took the patient to die. The toughest man endured in the ice water for one hundred minutes, the weakest for fifty-three minutes.

 

Walter Neff, a camp inmate who served as Dr. Rascher's medical orderly, furnished the "Doctors' Trial" with a layman's description of one water-freezing test.

 

[quote]It was the worst experiment ever made. Two Russian officers were brought from the prison barracks. Rascher had them stripped and they had to go into the vat naked. Hour after hour went by, and whereas usually unconsciousness from the cold set in after sixty minutes at the latest, the two men in this case still responded fully after two and a half hours. All appeals to Rascher to put them to sleep by injection were fruitless. About the third hour one of the Russians said to the other, 'Comrade, please tell the officer to shoot us.' The other replied that he expected no mercy from this Fascist dog. The two shook hands with a 'Farewell, Comrade' ... These words were translated to Rascher by a young Pole, though in a somewhat different form. Rascher went to his office. The young Pole at once tried to chloroform the two victims, but Rascher came back at once, threatening us with his gun ... The test lasted at least five hours before death supervened. [85][/quote]

 

The nominal "chief" of the initial cold-water experiments was a certain Dr. Holzloehner, Professor of Medicine at the University of Kiel, assisted by a Dr. Finke, and after working with Rascher for a couple of months they believed that they had exhausted the experimental possibilities. The three physicians thereupon drew up a thirty-two-page top-secret report to the Air Force entitled "Freezing Experiments with Human Beings" and called a meeting of German scientists at Nuremberg for October 26-27, 1942, to hear and discuss their findings. The subject of the meeting was "Medical Questions in Marine and Winter Emergencies." According to the testimony at the "Doctors' Trial," ninety-five German scientists, including some of the most eminent men in the field, participated, and though the three doctors left no doubt that a good many human beings had been done to death in the experiments there were no questions put as to this and no protests therefore made.

 

Professor Holzloehner [xli] and Dr. Finke bowed out of the experiments at this time but the persevering Dr. Rascher carried on alone from October 1942 until May of the following year. He wanted, among other things, to pursue experiments in what he called "dry freezing." Auschwitz, he wrote to Himmler,

 

[quote]is much better suited for such tests than Dachau because it is colder there and because the size of the grounds causes less of a stir in the camp. (The test persons yell when they freeze.)[/quote]

 

For some reason the change of locality could not be arranged, so Dr. Rascher went ahead with his studies at Dachau, praying for some real winter weather.

 

[quote]Thank God, we have had another intense cold snap at Dachau [he wrote Himmler in the early spring of 1943]. Some people remained out in the open for 14 hours at 21 degrees, attaining an interior temperature of 77 degrees, with peripheral frostbite ... [86][/quote]

 

At the "Doctors' Trial" the witness Neff again provided a layman's description of the "dry-freezing" experiments of his chief.

 

[quote]A prisoner was placed naked on a stretcher outside the barracks in the evening. He was covered with a sheet, and every hour a bucket of cold water was poured over him. The test person lay out in the open like this into the morning. Their temperatures were taken.

 

Later Dr. Rascher said it was a mistake to cover the subject with a sheet and to drench him with water ... In the future the test persons must not be covered. The next experiment was a test on ten prisoners who were exposed in turn, likewise naked.[/quote]

 

As the prisoners slowly froze, Dr. Rascher or his assistant would record temperatures, heart action, respiration and so on. The cries of the suffering often rent the night.

 

[quote]Initially [Neff explained to the court] Rascher forbade these tests to be made in a state of anesthesia. But the test persons made such a racket that it was impossible for Rascher to continue these tests without anesthetic. [87][/quote]

 

The TPs (test persons) were left to die, as Himmler said they deserved to, in the ice-water tanks or lying naked on the ground outside the barracks at Dachau on a winter evening. If they survived they were shortly exterminated. But the brave German flyers and sailors, for whose benefit the experiments were ostensibly carried out, and who might find themselves ditched in the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean or marooned in some frozen waste above the Arctic Circle in Norway, Finland or northern Russia, had to be saved if possible. The inimitable Dr. Rascher therefore took to performing on his human guinea pigs at Dachau what he termed "warming experiments." What was the best method, he wanted to know, for warming a frozen man and thus possibly saving his life?

 

Heinrich Himmler, never backward in offering "practical" solutions to his corps of busy scientists, suggested to Rascher that warming by "animal heat" be tried, but at first the doctor did not think much of the idea "Warming by animal heat -- the bodies of animals or women -- is much too slow," he wrote the S.S. chief. But Himmler kept after him.

 

[quote]I am very curious [he wrote Rascher] about the experiments with animal heat. Personally I believe these experiments may bring the best and the most sustained results.[/quote]

 

Though skeptical, Dr. Rascher was not the man to ignore a suggestion from the leader of the S.S. He promptly embarked on a series of the most grotesque "experiments" of all, recording them for posterity in every morbid detail. Four inmates from the women's concentration camps at Ravensbrueck were sent to him at Dachau. However there was something about one of them -- they were classified as prostitutes -- that disturbed the doctor and he so reported to his superiors.

 

[quote]One of the women assigned showed impeccably Nordic racial characteristics . . I asked the girl why she had volunteered for brothel service and she replied, 'To get out of the concentration camp." When I objected that it was shameful to volunteer as a brothel girl, I was advised, "Better half a year in a brothel than half a year in the concentration camp ... "

 

My racial conscience is outraged by the prospect of exposing to racially inferior concentration camp elements a girl who is outwardly pure Nordic ... For this reason I decline to use this girl for my experimental purposes. [88][/quote]

 

 

But he used others, whose hair was less fair and the eyes less blue. His findings were duly reported to Himmler in a report marked "Secret" on February 12, 1942. [89]

 

[quote]The test persons were chilled in the familiar way -- dressed or undressed -- in cold water at various temperatures ... Removal from the water took place at a rectal temperature of 86 degrees.

 

In eight cases the test persons were placed between two naked women on a wide bed. The women were instructed to snuggle up to the chilled person as closely as possible. The three persons were then covered with blankets ...

 

Once the test persons regained consciousness, they never lost it again, quickly grasping their situation and nestling close to the naked bodies of the women. The rise of body temperature then proceeded at approximately the same speed as with test persons warmed by being swathed in blankets ... An exception was formed by four test persons who practiced sexual intercourse between 86 and 89.5 degrees. In these persons, after coitus, a very swift temperature rise ensued, comparable to that achieved by means of a hot-water bath.[/quote]

 

Dr. Rascher found, somewhat to his surprise, that one woman warmed a frozen man faster than two women.

 

[quote]I attribute this to the fact that in warming by means of one woman personal inhibitions are avoided and the woman clings more closely to the chilled person. Here too, return of full consciousness was notably rapid. In the case of only one person did consciousness fail to return and only a slight degree of warming was recorded. This test person died with symptoms of a brain hemorrhage, later confirmed by autopsy.[/quote]

 

Summing up, this murderous hack concluded that warming up a "chilled" man with women "proceeds very slowly" and that hot baths were more efficacious.

 

[quote]Only test persons [he concluded] whose physical state permitted sexual intercourse warmed up surprisingly fast and also showed a surprisingly rapid return of full bodily well-being.[/quote]

 

According to the testimony at the "Doctors' Trial" some four hundred "freezing" experiments were performed on three hundred persons of whom between eighty and ninety died directly as a result thereof, and the rest, except for a few, were bumped off subsequently, some of them having been driven insane. Dr. Rascher himself, incidentally, was not around to testify at this trial. He continued his bloody labors on various new projects, too numerous to mention, until May 1944, when he and his wife were arrested by the S.S. -- not for his murderous "experiments," it seems, but on the charge that he and his wife had practiced deceit about how their children came into the world. Such treachery Himmler, with his worship of German mothers, could not brook -- he had sincerely believed that Frau Rascher had begun to bear her three children at the age of forty-eight and he was outraged when he learned that she had kidnaped them. So Dr. Rascher was incarcerated in the political bunker at his familiar Dachau camp and his wife was carted off to Ravensbrueck, from which the doctor had procured his prostitutes for the "warming" tests. Neither survived, and it is believed that Himmler himself, in one of the last acts of his life, ordered their execution. They might have made awkward witnesses.

 

A number of such awkward witnesses did survive to stand trial. Seven of them were condemned to death and hanged, defending their lethal experiments to the last as patriotic acts which served the Fatherland. Dr. Herta Oberheuser, the only woman defendant at the "Doctors' Trial," was given twenty years. She had admitted giving lethal injections to "five or six" Polish women among the hundreds who suffered the tortures of the damned in a variety of "experiments" at Ravensbrueck. A number of doctors, such as the notorious Pokorny, who had wanted to sterilize millions of the enemy, were acquitted. A few were contrite. At a second trial of medical underlings Dr. Edwin Katzenellenbogen, a former member of the faculty of the Harvard Medical School, asked the court for the death sentence. "You have placed the mark of Cain on my forehead," he exclaimed. "Any physician who committed the crimes I am charged with deserves to be killed." He was given life imprisonment. [90]

 

[b]THE DEATH OF HEYDRICH AND THE END OF LIDICE[/b]

 

Midway through the war there was one act of retribution against the gangster masters of the New Order for their slaughtering of the conquered people. Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security Police and the S.D., deputy chief of the Gestapo, this long-nosed, icy-eyed thirty-eight-year-old policeman of diabolical cast, the genius of the "final solution," Hangman Heydrich, as he became known in the occupied lands, met a violent end.

 

Restless for further power and secretly intriguing to oust his chief, Himmler, he had got himself appointed, in addition to his other offices, Acting Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Poor old Neurath, the Protector, was packed off on indefinite sick leave by Hitler in September 1941, and Heydrich replaced him in the ancient seat of the Bohemian kings at Hradschin Castle in Prague. But not for long.

 

On the morning of May 29, 1942, as he was driving in his open Mercedes sports car from his country villa to the Castle in Prague a bomb of British make was tossed at him, blowing the car to pieces and shattering his spine. It had been hurled by two Czechs, Jan Kubis and Josef Gabeik, of the free Czechoslovak army in England, who had been parachuted from an R.A.F. plane. Well equipped for their assignment, they got away under a smoke screen and were given refuge by the priests of the Karl Borromaeus Church in Prague.

 

Heydrich expired of his wounds on June 4 and a veritable hecatomb followed as the Germans took savage revenge, after the manner of the old Teutonic rites, for the death of their hero. According to one Gestapo report, 1,331 Czechs, including 201 women, were immediately executed. [91] The actual assassins, along with 120 members of the Czech resistance who were hiding in the Karl Borromaeus Church, were besieged there by the S.S. and killed to the last man. [lvii] It was the Jews, however, who suffered the most for this act of defiance against the master race. Three thousand of them were removed from the "privileged" ghetto of Theresienstadt and shipped to the East for extermination. On the day of the bombing Goebbels had 500 of the few remaining Jews at large in Berlin arrested and on the day of Heydrich's death 152 of them were executed as a "reprisal."

 

But of all the consequences of Heydrich's death the fate of the little village of Lidice near the mining town of Kladno not far from Prague will perhaps be longest remembered by the civilized world. For no other reason except to serve as an example to a conquered people who dared to take the life of one of their inquisitors a terrible savagery was carried out in this peaceful little rural place.

 

On the morning of June 9, 1942, ten truckloads of German Security Police under the command of Captain Max Rostock [lviii] arrived at Lidice and surrounded the village. No one was allowed to leave though anyone who lived there and happened to be away could return. A boy of twelve, panicking, tried to steal away. He was shot down and killed. A peasant woman ran toward the outlying fields. She was shot in the back and killed. The entire male population of the village was locked up in the barns, stables and cellar of a farmer named Horak, who was also the mayor.

 

The next day, from dawn until 4 P.M., they were taken into the garden behind the barn, in batches of ten, and shot by firing squads of the Security Police. A total of 172 men and boys, over sixteen, were executed there. An additional nineteen male residents, who were working in the Kladno mines during the massacre, were later picked up and dispatched in Prague.

 

Seven women who were rounded up at Lidice were taken to Prague and shot. All the rest of the women of the village, who numbered 195, were transported to the Ravensbrueck concentration camp in Germany, where seven were gassed, three "disappeared" and forty-two died of ill treatment. Four of the Lidice women who were about to give birth were first taken to a maternity hospital in Prague where their newly born infants were murdered and they themselves then shipped to Ravensbrueck.

 

There remained for the Germans the disposal of the children of Lidice, whose fathers were now dead, whose mothers were imprisoned. It must be said that the Germans did not shoot them too, not even the male children. They were carted off to a concentration camp at Gneisenau. There were ninety in all and from these seven, who were less than a year old, were selected by the Nazis, after a suitable examination by Himmler's "racial experts," to be sent to Germany to be brought up as Germans under German names. Later, the others were similarly disposed of.

 

"Every trace of them has been lost," the Czechoslovak government, which filed an official report on Lidice for the Nuremberg tribunal, concluded.

 

Happily, some of them, at least, were later found. I remember in the autumn of 1945 reading the pitiful appeals in the then Allied-controlled German newspapers from the surviving mothers of Lidice asking the German people to help them locate their children and send them "home." [xliv]

 

Actually Lidice itself had been wiped off the face of the earth. As soon as the men had been massacred and the women and children carted off, the Security Police had burned down the village, dynamited the ruins and leveled it off.

 

Lidice, though it became the most widely known example of Nazi savagery of this kind, was not the only village in the German-occupied lands to suffer such a barbaric end. There was one other in Czechoslovakia, Lezhaky, and several more in Poland, Russia, Greece and Yugoslavia. Even in the West, where the New Order was relatively less murderous, the example of Lidice was repeated by the Germans though in most cases, such as that of Televaag in Norway, the men, women and children were merely deported to separate concentration camps after every building in the village had been razed to the ground.

 

But on June 10, 1944, two years to a day after the massacre of Lidice, a terrible toll of life was taken at the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges. A detachment of the S.S. division pas Reich, which had already earned a reputation for terror -- if not for fighting -- in Russia, surrounded the French town and ordered the inhabitants to gather in the central square. There the people were told by the commandant that explosives were reported to have been hidden in the village and that a search and the checking of identity cards would be made. Whereupon the entire population of 652 persons was locked up. The men were herded into barns, the women and children into the church. The entire village was then set on fire. The German soldiers next set upon the inhabitants. The men in the barns who were not burned to death were machine-gunned and killed. The women and children in the church were also peppered with machine-gun fire and those who were not killed were burned to death when the German soldiers set fire to the church. Three days later the Bishop of Limoges found the charred bodies of fifteen children in a heap behind the burned-out altar.

 

Nine years later, in 1953, a French military court established that 642 inhabitants -- 245 women, 207 children and 190 men -- had perished in the massacre at Oradour. Ten survived. Though badly burned they had simulated death and thus escaped it. [xlv]

 

Oradour, like Lidice, was never rebuilt. Its ruins remain a monument to Hitler's New Order in Europe. The gutted church stands out against the peaceful countryside as a reminder of the beautiful June day, just before the harvest, when the village and its inhabitants suddenly ceased to exist. Where once a window stood is a little sign: "Madame Rouffance, the only survivor from the church, escaped through this window." In front there is a small figure of Christ affixed to a rusty iron cross.

 

Such, as has been sketched in this chapter, were the beginnings of Hitler's New Order; such was the debut of the Nazi Gangster Empire in Europe. Fortunately for mankind it was destroyed in its infancy -- not by any revolt of the German people against such a reversion to barbarism but by the defeat of German arms and the consequent fall of the Third Reich, the story of which now remains to be told.

 

_______________

 

[b]Notes:[/b]

 

i. As early as September 18, 1941, Hitler had specifically ordered that Leningrad  was to be "wiped off the face of the earth." After being surrounded it was to be  "razed to the ground" by bombardment and bombing and its population (three  millions) was to be destroyed with it. See above, pp. 853-54.

 

ii. Neither the extermination of masses of Soviet prisoners of war nor the exploitation  of Russian slave labor was a secret to the Kremlin. As early as November 1941,  Molotov had made a formal diplomatic protest against the "extermination" of  Russian POWs, and in April of the following year he made another protest against  the German slave labor program.

 

iii. See above, pp. 830-34.

 

 

iv. A year before, it will be remembered, Goering had told Ciano that "this year between twenty and thirty million persons will die of hunger in Russia" and that "perhaps it is well that it should be so." Already, he said, Russian prisoners of war had begun "to eat each other." See above, p. 854n.

 

v. In a directive of Goering's Economic Staff, East, on May 23, 1941, the destruction of the Russian industrial areas was ordered. The workers and their families in these regions were to be left to starve. "Any attempt to save the population there," the directive stated, "from death by starvation by importing [food] surpluses from the black-soil zone [of Russia]" was prohibited. See above, p. 833.

 

 

vi. At the official rate of exchange (2.5 Reichsmarks to the dollar) this would amount  --   to 40 billion dollars. But I have used the unofficial rate of four Reichsmarks to the  dollar. In terms of purchasing power it is more accurate.

 

vii. According to Alexander Dallin in his exhaustive study of German rule in Russia,  Germany could have obtained more from Russia in normal trade. (See Dallin.  German Rule in Russia.)

 

viii. Albert Speer, Minister for Armament and War Production, admitted at Nuremberg that 40 per cent of all prisoners of war were employed in 1944 in the production of weapons and munitions and in subsidiary industries. [20]

 

ix. A captured record shows Field Marshal Milch of the Air Force in 1943 demanding 50.000 more Russian war prisoners to be added to the 30,000 already manning antiaircraft artillery. "It is amusing." Milch laughed. "that Russians must work the guns." [21]

 

 

x. The entire slave labor program was put in charge of Fritz Sauckel, who was given  the title of Plenipotentiary General for the Allocation of Labor. A second-string  Nazi, he had been Gauleiter and Governor of Thuringia. A pig-eyed little man, rude  and tough, he was, as Goebbels mentioned in his diary, "one of the dullest of the  dull." In the dock at Nuremberg, he struck this writer as being a complete nonentity,  the sort of German who in other times might have been a butcher in a small-town  meat market. One of his first directives laid it down that the foreign workers were  "to be treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the  lowest conceivable degree of expenditure." [24] He admitted at Nuremberg that of all  the millions of foreign workers "not even 200,000 came voluntarily." However at  the trial he denied all responsibility for their ill-treatment. He was found guilty,  sentenced to death, and hanged in the Nuremberg jail on the night of October 15-16,  1946.

 

xi. Besides obtaining thousands of slave laborers, both civilians and prisoners of war for its factories in Germany, the Krupp firm also built a large fuse factory at the extermination camp at Auschwitz, where Jews were worked to exhaustion and then gassed to death.

 

Baron Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the chairman of the board, was  indicted as a major war criminal at Nuremberg (along with Goering, et al.) but because of his "physical and mental condition" (he had had a stroke and had faded into senility), he was not tried. He died on January 16, 1950. An effort was made by the prosecution to try in his stead his son, Alfried, who had acquired sole ownership of the company in 1943, but the tribunal denied this.

 

Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was subsequently tried before a Nuremberg military tribunal (a purely American court) along with nine directors of the firm in the United States v. Alfried Krupp et al. case. On July 31, 1948, he was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment and confiscation of all his property. He was released from Landsberg prison (where Hitler had served his sentence in 1924) on February 4, 1951, in a general amnesty issued by John J. McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner. Not only was the confiscation of his corporate property annulled but his personal fortune of some $10,000,000 was returned to him. The Allied governments had ordered the breakup of the vast Krupp empire but Alfried Krupp, who took over the active management of the firm after his release from prison, evaded the order and at the time of writing (1959) announced, with the approval of the Bonn government, that not only would the company not be broken up but that it was acquiring new industries.

 

xii. Himmler's directive of February 20, 1942, was directed especially against Russian slave workers. It ordered "special treatment" also for "severe violations against discipline, including work refusal or loafing at work." In such cases

 

[quote]special treatment is requested. Special treatment is hanging. It should not take place in the immediate vicinity of the camp. A certain number [however] should attend the special treatment. [27][/quote]

 

The term "special treatment" was a common one in Himmler's files and in Nazi parlance during the war. It meant just what HimmIer in this directive said it meant.

 

xiii. Mueller was never apprehended after the war. He was last seen in Hitler's bunker  in Berlin on April 29, 1945. Some of his surviving colleagues believe he is now in  the service of the Soviet secret police, of which he was a great admirer.

 

xiv. On July 20, 1942, Keitel had drafted the order.

 

1. Soviet prisoners of war are to be branded with a special and durable mark.

 

2. The brand is to consist of an acute angle of about 45 degrees with a one-centimetre length of side, pointing downward on the left buttock, at about a hand's width from the rectum. [36]

 

 

 

xv. General Dostler was condemned to death by the U.S. military tribunal in Rome on October 12, 1945.

 

xvi. Kaltenbrunner was hanged at Nuremberg jail on the night of October 15-16, 1946.

 

 

xvii. I.e., they were told they were being resettled elsewhere.

 

* There was a special reason for this. See below, p. 942n.

 

xviii. Ohlendorf was tried at Nuremberg by a U.S. military tribunal along with twenty-one others in the "Einsatzgruppen Case." Fourteen of them were condemned to death. Only four, Ohlendorf and three other group commanders, were executed -- on June 8, 1951, at Landsberg prison, some three and a half years after being sentenced. The death penalties for the others were commuted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ix. On August 31, Himmler had ordered an Einsatz detachment to execute a hundred  inmates of the Minsk prison, so that he could see how it was done. According to  Bach-Zalewski, a high officer in the S.S. who was present, Himmler almost swooned when he saw the effect of the first volley from the firing squad. A few minutes later, when the shots failed to kill two Jewish women outright, the S.S. Fuehrer became hysterical. One result of this experience was an order from Himmler that henceforth the women and children should not be shot but dispatched in the gas vans. [50] (See above, p. 960.)

 

xx. The number of Soviet Communist party functionaries slain by the Einsatzgruppen has never even been estimated, as far as I know. Most S.D. reports lumped them together with the Jews. In one report of Group A, dated October 15, 1941, some 3,387 "Communists" are listed among the 121,817 executed, the rest being Jews. But the same report often lists the two together.

 

xxi. Pohl was condemned to death in the so-called "Concentration Camp Case" by a U.S. military tribunal on November 3, 1947, and hanged in Landsberg prison on June 8, 1951, along with Ohlendorf and others.

 

xxii. The emphasis is this writer's. A faulty translation of the last line, rendering the German word Endloesung as "desired solution" instead of "final solution" in the English copy of the document, led Justice Jackson, who did not know German, to allow Goering under cross-examination to get away with his contention that he never used the sinister term. (See n. 54.) "The first time I learned of these terrible exterminations," Goering exclaimed at one point, "was right here in Nuremberg."

 

xxiii. See above, p. 661.

 

 

xxiv. Lammers was sentenced in April 1949 to twenty years' imprisonment by a U.S.  military tribunal at Nuremberg, chiefly because of his responsibility in the anti-Jewish decrees. But as in the case of most of the other convicted Nazis whose  sentences were greatly reduced by the American authorities, his term was commuted  in 1951 to ten years and he was released from Landsberg prison at the end of that  year, after serving a total of six years from the date of his first imprisonment. It  might be noted here that most Germans, at least so far as their sentiment was  represented in the West German parliament, did not approve of even the relatively  mild sentences meted out to Hitler's accomplices. A number of them handed over  by the Allies to German custody were not even prosecuted -- even when they were  accused of mass murder -- and some of them quickly found employment in the Bonn  government.

 

xxv. Kogon estimates the number at 7,125,000 out of a total of 7,820,000 inmates, but the figure undoubtedly is too high. (Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell, p. 227.)

 

xxvi. The camp commander, Franz Ziereis, put the total number at 65,000. [56]

 

xxvii. Born in 1900, the son of a small shopkeeper in Baden-Baden, Hoess was pressured by his pious Catholic father to become a priest. Instead he joined the Nazi Party in 1922. The next year he was implicated in the murder of a school teacher who allegedly had denounced Leo Schlageter, a German saboteur in the Ruhr who was executed by the French and became a Nazi martyr. Hoess received a life sentence.

 

He was released in a general amnesty in 1928, joined the S.S. two years later and in 1934 became a member of the Death's Head group of the S.S., whose principal job was the guarding of the concentration camps. His first job in this unit was at Dachau. Thus he spent almost his entire adult life first as a prisoner and then as a jailer. He freely -- and even exaggeratedly -- testified to his killings both on the stand at Nuremberg and in affidavits for the prosecution. Turned over later to the Poles, he was sentenced to death and in March 1947 hanged at Auschwitz, the scene of his greatest crimes.

 

xxviii. A task which because of the large numbers involved and because of, at the end, armed resistance, could not be completed (as we shall see) until 1943.

 

 

xxix. Usually "heart disease" was written down. Kogon, himself in Buchenwald for  eight years, gives samples: " ... Patient died after prolonged suffering on __  at __ o'clock. Cause of death: cardiac weakness complicated by pneumonia."  (Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell, p. 218.) Such formalities were dispensed  with at Auschwitz when the massive gassings began. Often the day's dead were not  even counted.

 

xxx. They were inevitably and regularly dispatched in the gas chambers and replaced  by new teams who continued to meet the same fate. The S.S. wanted no survivors  to tell tales.

 

xxxi. There was testimony at the Nuremberg trials that the ashes were sometimes sold as  fertilizer. One Danzig firm, according to a document offered by the Russian prosecution,  constructed an electrically heated tank for making soap out of human fat.  Its "recipe" called for "12 pounds of human fat, 10 quarts of water, and 8 ounces  to a pound of caustic soda ... all boiled for two or three hours and then cooled." [59]

 

xxxii. Sometimes they were pulled out before the victims were slain. A secret report of  the German warden of the prison at Minsk disclosed that after he had commandeered  the services of a Jewish dentist all the Jews "had their gold bridgework, crowns and  fillings pulled or broken out. This happens always one to two hours before the  special action." The warden noted that of 516 German and Russian Jews executed  at his prison during a six-week period in the spring of 1943, some 336 had the gold  yanked from their teeth. [65]

 

xxxiii. Dr. Funk was sentenced to life imprisonment at Nuremberg.

 

xxxiv. John Hersey's novel The Wall, based on the Jewish records, is an epic story of the uprising.

 

xxxv. But not Stroop. He was caught after the war, sentenced to death by an American court at Dachau on March 22, 1947, for the shooting of hostages in Greece, and then extradited to Poland, where he was tried for the slaughter of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. He was again sentenced to death and hanged at the scene of the crime on September 8, 1951.

 

xxxvi. Eichmann, according to one of his henchmen, said just before the German collapse  that "he would leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five  million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary  satisfaction." [70] Probably he never leaped into the grave, laughing or otherwise. He  escaped from an American internment camp in 1945. (NOTE: As this book went on  press, the government of Israel announced that it had apprehended Eichmann.)

 

xxxvii. Not even Germany's most famous surgeon, Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, though he  eventually became an anti-Nazi and conspired with the resistance. Sauerbruch sat  through a lecture at the Berlin Military Medical Academy in May of 1943 given by  two of the most notorious of the doctor-killers, Karl Gebhardt and Fritz Fischer,  on the subject of gas gangrene experiments on prisoners. Sauerbruch's only argument  on this occasion was that surgery was better than sulfanilamide! Professor  Gebhardt was sentenced to death at the so-called "Doctors' Trial" and hanged on  June 2, 1948. Dr. Fischer was given life imprisonment.

 

xxxviii. And in which he was condemned to death, and hanged.

 

xxxix. Germany had annexed Alsace after the fall of France in 1940 and the Germans had taken over the University of Strasbourg.

 

xl. Professor Dr. Hirt disappeared. As he left Strasbourg he was heard boasting that no one would ever take him alive. Apparently no one has -- alive or dead.

 

 

xli. Frau Koch, whose power of life and death over the inmates of Buchenwald was  complete, and whose very whim could bring terrible punishment to a prisoner, was  sentenced to life imprisonment at the "Buchenwald Trial," but her sentence was  commuted to four years, and she was soon released. On January 15, 1951, a  German court sentenced her to life imprisonment for murder. Her husband was  sentenced to death by an S.S. court during the war for "excesses" but was given the  option of serving on the Russian front. Before he could do this, however, Prince  Waldeck, the leader of the S.S. in the district, had him executed. Princess Mafalda,  daughter of the King and Queen of Italy and wife of Prince Philip of Hesse, was  among those who died at Buchenwald.

 

xlii. Professor Holzloehner may have had a guilty conscience. Picked up by the British  he committed suicide after his first interrogation.

 

xliii. According to Schellenberg, who was there, the Gestapo never learned that the  actual assassins were among the dead in the church. (Schellenberg, The Labyrinth,  p. 292.)

 

xliv. Hanged in Prague in August 1951.

 

xlv. UNRRA reported on April 2, 1947, that seventeen of them had been found in Bavaria and sent back to their mothers in Czechoslovakia.

 

 

xlvi. Twenty members of the S.S. detachment were sentenced to death by this court but  only two were executed, the remaining eighteen having their sentences commuted to  prison terms of from five to twelve years. The commander of the Das Reich  Division, S.S. Lieutenant General Heinz Lammerding was condemned to death in  absentia. So far as I know he was never found. The actual commander of the  detachment at Oradour, Major Otto Dickmann, was killed in action in Normandy a  few days later.

 

Go to Next Page