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| The monument at Bełżec. |
The Nazis always desired a Final Solution to the “Jewish
Question,” but stumbled into systematic mass murder. The Holocaust as we know
it began in the summer of 1941 with the mass shootings of the Jews of the
Soviet Union. At first, “only” military-aged Jewish men were shot, being conflated
with Bolsheviks and partisans, as was de
rigeur in Nazi ideology. Beginning in July/August 1941, women and children
were murdered as well. 90 Jewish children were murdered at Bila Tserkva in
August after their parents had been killed. 23,600 Jews were murdered at
Kamianets-Podolsky over two days that same month. 33,771 were shot in two days in September at Babi Yar, a ravine outside of Kiev, on the specious accusation of arson.
When
it became clear that the shootings were psychologically taxing on the killers, the Nazis began to
consider other methods of mass murder. They used vans in which the exhaust was
rerouted into the rear of the vehicle, killing Jews who had been forced aboard.
In a trial run, SS General Arthur Nebe forced inmates of an insane asylum near
Minsk into a room and gassed them, also with car exhaust. Nebe also tried
dynamiting another group, which left body parts all over the place, including
in the high branches of nearby trees.
Aktion Reinhard was
administered from Lublin, Poland, which was to be the crux of Nazi eastern
policy. The SS and Police Leader of Lublin was Odilo Globocnik, a toady of
Heinrich Himmler’s and a fanatical anti-Semite. Globocnik’s writ ran far beyond
the scope of the Lublin district – it was his intention, with Himmler’s
support, to remove Poles and Ukrainians (except for those to remain in a
servile capacity) and then to establish so-called “strongpoints” consisting of fortifications
manned by German “warrior-farmers” stretching all the way from the Baltic Sea to Transylvania. This was not just rhetoric – beginning in
August 1942, 110,000 Poles and Ukrainians were forcibly removed from their
homes in the Zamość region. They were replaced by some 9,000 ethnic Germans
from further east. It went horribly, led to an uprising on the part of the Poles, and may have contributed to Globocnik losing his job. But I digress.
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| Odilo Globocnik, the head of Aktion Reinhard |
The Jews, needless to say, had no role to play in the National Socialist utopia. The Nazis first intended to ship the Jews to Siberia
after defeating the Soviet Union, but then decided, at some unknown point, to
kill them in lands already under their control during the war. The Jews were
the Nazis’ world enemy and there was to be no compromise with them. They could
not remain, not even in a crushed, subservient capacity, as was to be the fate
of the Slavs.
Another piece of the National Socialist ideological puzzle
is necessary to contextualize Aktion
Reinhard. Nazi ideology posited that the disabled were “useless eaters” who
were a burden on society. A society could not thrive with such people “wasting”
food and housing and “polluting” the gene pool, especially not during wartime. Beginning
in 1940, German doctors began to kill the mentally and physically disabled in
gas chambers. They told the victims that they were only taking a shower. After
word got out and there was protest from the churches and many German citizens,
Hitler ordered it shut down (it was continued in a more clandestine way and
ultimately claimed 200,000 victims). Many of the
men who staffed the gas chambers and the crematoria of this “euthanasia” program
began to arrive in Lublin in the winter of 1941 after they had been decommissioned
– they constituted the German staff of the Aktion
Reinhard camps. They had been hardened by the sight and smells of mass
death.
In October, Globocnik met with Himmler and one of the two suggested the
idea of a complex with stationary gas chambers at Bełżec, located in the Lublin
district near the former demarcation line between Germany and the Soviet Union. It is unknown if the intent was to
murder “only” the Jews of the Lublin district or of the entire General Government,
which consisted of, in addition to Lublin, the Warsaw, Kraków, Radom, and Lwów
districts. Bełżec was situated very close to the Lwów district (eastern
Galicia) and the construction of its death facilities began on November 1,
1941.
The Jews of the General Government constituted the center of
gravity of European Jewry. Warsaw’s Jewish population was the largest urban agglomeration in
Europe, and second-most in the world after New York City. The Nazis could not,
ideologically, accept such a large Jewish population in their midst and close to their front lines.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews were concentrated in ghettos, where they died in
enormous numbers due to disease and starvation. The Nazis were faced with a
decision: where should they go?
Despite Nazi euphemisms, the Jews could not be
sent eastward across the Bug River into the occupied Soviet Union – the army would not
accept this for fear of partisans behind its lines. Because of the absurd Nazi
logic, this left but one choice: the Jews had to be killed. After the
experience of mass shootings had proven to be too stressful on the killers, as
discussed above, and other methods proved unsatisfactory, the Nazis settled on
the extermination camp with the gas chamber, which has become the very symbol
of the Holocaust. It would provide psychological relief to the killers and
distance them from the victims. Secondarily, it would be a more
efficient method that could be undertaken away from prying eyes (unlike the
semi-public shootings in the east, where German soldiers and local civilians
alike would gather to watch Jews being laid down in pits and shot).
Nonetheless, this second reason was not as important to Himmler as his men’s
nerves and consciences. Himmler had a warped sense of decency and wanted his
men to remain decent to their fellow Germans while being hard, ruthless, and
even inhuman to anyone unfortunate to be outside of that special circle. This
was especially the case for Jews and those he considered subhumans.
Deportations to Bełżec began in March 1942, targeting the
Jews of the Lublin Ghetto and the Lublin district more broadly. Construction on
Sobibór began around the same time as that of Bełżec – this camp also
served to kill the Jews of the Lublin district and began operations in May
1942. On July 19, 1942, Himmler ordered that the General Government be made
free of Jews by the end of the year. Three days later, the Nazis launched Großaktion Warschau – the decimation of
the Warsaw Ghetto, in which some
400,000 Jews led a miserable existence. Globocnik’s deputy and deportation
expert, Hermann Höfle, told the head of Warsaw’s Jewish council, Adam Czerniaków,
that 6,000 Jews were to be “resettled” each day. Czerniaków, realizing the
implication of the order, committed suicide. The Jews' destination was Treblinka,
the deadliest camp of Aktion Reinhard, which
lay some 60 miles northeast of Warsaw. Its purpose was the destruction of the Jews
of Warsaw, Radom, Częstochowa, Białystok, and other districts.
According to a telegram sent by Höfle, tallying the total of
the Jews deported to (and murdered in) the camps in the General Government as
of December 31, 1942, the figures were: Treblinka, 713,555; Bełżec, 434,508; Sobibór,
101,370; and Majdanek (a brutal concentration camp on the eastern outskirts of
Lublin outfitted with gas chambers), 24,733, coming to a grand total of
1,274,166. Globocnik had not been able to satisfy Himmler’s order to completely
destroy the Jews of the General Government by the end of 1942, but it was not
for want of trying and he came alarmingly close.
All the Aktion
Reinhard camps operated along similar, if not identical, lines. All were
rather primitive installations. There was no need for extensive housing, as in
Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, because all the arriving Jews were to be
gassed. When the Jews arrived, they alighted from the trains. If they were
Polish Jews, as the vast majority of them were, they were whipped, shot at, and
set upon by dogs. Western Jews, on the other hand, arrived in normal passenger
trains, not cattle cars, and were dealt with calmly and politely, as they had
no inkling of what lay in store for them.
The Jews were told they had arrived at a transit
camp and would need to be deloused before being sent further east. Their
belongings were taken from them and brought to “sorting squares” where valuables,
currency, and clothing were sent to the Reich. Many of the old, sick, and very
young died on the trains; others who could not make the trip to the gas chamber
were taken to a ditch and shot. A handful of carpenters, electricians,
cobblers, blacksmiths, etc, as well as strong young men (to work in the death
houses themselves), were held back. The rest were separated, men on one side
and women and children on the other.
Men were sent to their deaths first,
to minimize the risk of revolt. All the victims were chased down what was variously known as “The Tube” or “The Road to Heaven” – the path to the gas
chambers. Women had their hair shorn for use in mattresses back in Germany (in
Auschwitz-Birkenau, the hair was cut after
the women were gassed, but not in the Aktion
Reinhard camps). The gas chamber building at Treblinka was cynically
designed with a Star of David over its entrance. The Jews were forced into the
chambers by Ukrainians and Germans wielding whips, iron pipes, guns, and even swords. Gas
poured into the rooms from a captured Russian submarine engine (carbon monoxide
was used in these camps, not Zyklon B). After the gassing, the victims’ bodies
were dragged out by unfortunate Jewish prisoners and buried – later, at Himmler’s
insistence, these were exhumed and burned. Later transports were burned
straightaway.
The camps each had 90-120 Ukrainian guards (former Soviet POWs
who agreed to volunteer as a way out of their terrible predicament – for context,
3.3 million out of 5.7 million Soviet POWs died in German captivity) and a
German staff of only 20-30 SS men. With their newfound wealth (taken from the
dead), corruption was rife among the Germans and the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians
spent money on vodka and sex in the surrounding villages (they could
communicate using pidgin Polish); whores from as far away as Warsaw would come
to service their needs. Local farmers would pimp out daughters as young as 12.
These grotesque scenes of death, looting, and orgies are impossible
to imagine and painful to describe. The first commandant of Treblinka, Dr.
Irmfried Eberl, was removed for “inefficiency." Corpses lined the road to
Treblinka and thousands lay in the camp itself, putrefying in the summer heat – the transports were coming
faster than he could dispose of them. Christian Wirth, the first commandant of Bełżec and later inspector of all three camps, was known as the “Savage
Christian” – standing atop a hill and peering down at the rotting corpses of
thousands of Jews, he asked Franz Stangl, who commanded Sobibór and later
Treblinka, what should be done with this “garbage.” Wirth was a vulgar man who
terrified his own men – he was known to whip even them in the event the gas
chambers broke down, which was a frequent occurrence. The deputy commandant of
Treblinka, Kurt Franz, who was known as Lalke
(“the doll” in Yiddish) because of his handsome looks, would sic his giant dog
Barry on prisoners with the command, “Man, get that dog!” Franz would also box
prisoners and, halfway through a bout, shoot them in the face with a gun hidden
inside his boxing glove. Gustav Wagner, a notorious officer at Sobibór, would rip infants
from their mothers’ arms and tear them to pieces with his bare hands. Ukrainian
guards would pull aside attractive girls and women and rape them beside the gas
chambers, sometimes to death.
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| Christian Wirth, the inspector of the Aktion Reinhard camps, known as "The Savage Christian" |
Unlike at camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, Jews
went to the camps of Aktion Reinhard (and
Chełmno) strictly to die. This is why so much less is known about these camps.
Auschwitz is (in)famous and weighs heavily on the Western consciousness because
it was mostly Western and Central European Jews who were killed there and there
were vastly more survivors (for context, while tens of thousands survived Auschwitz, only 70 people survived Treblinka and a mere two survived Bełżec). Furthermore, the
Nazis had time to destroy the facilities at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, because
the camps were relatively small in size, consisted of few structures, and the
Russians were still far enough away when Aktion
Reinhard was wrapped up in late 1943 after revolts in Treblinka and Sobibór
in August and October of that year, respectively.
Nothing today remains of them. After the camps were demolished, the bricks of the gas chambers were used to build houses for Ukrainian guards, who were to stay there to ward off Poles digging for the murdered Jews’ treasure and to brush off any awkward questions about what had happened at these places (“Oh, there was no German death camp here – I lived here on my farm the whole time!”)
Nothing today remains of them. After the camps were demolished, the bricks of the gas chambers were used to build houses for Ukrainian guards, who were to stay there to ward off Poles digging for the murdered Jews’ treasure and to brush off any awkward questions about what had happened at these places (“Oh, there was no German death camp here – I lived here on my farm the whole time!”)
In the final analysis, the camps of Aktion Reinhard took the lives of at least 1.5 million Jews – they are
the graveyards of Polish Jewry, which existed for a millennium and was the
physical, though not spiritual, center of world Judaism (at the beginning of
the 18th century, three-quarters of the world’s Jews lived in Poland).
There were world-renowned (among Jews, anyway) yeshivot in Lublin and Wilno (now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania).
Jewish art, journalism, and literature flourished, most particularly in Warsaw,
which saw dozens of Jewish periodicals in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish as well as a thriving Yiddish theater.
Now one
walks the ancient streets of Kazimierz, once the Jewish neighborhood of Kraków,
and sees preserved Jewish shopfronts, kosher-style restaurants serving gefilte
fish and featuring klezmer bands, synagogues, a cemetery, and souvenir shops
selling figurines of Hasidic Jews (whose very dress was influenced by that of
the Polish aristocracy in the 17th century). But there are only a
pitiful handful of Jews. Instead, in Zgody Square in Podgórze, where Jews were
once assembled to be shipped to their deaths, there stand 40 silent chairs,
each one representing 1,000 Cracovian Jews murdered during the Holocaust. They
have no grave: their ashes lie 150 miles to the east, dumped unceremoniously underneath the
earth of Bełżec.
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| The memorial at Zgody Square, Kraków. Photo taken by the author, October 2014 |
