Until now, had he told himself that the smoke from the crematorium in the main camp was generated by the dead who had fallen by the wayside at Buna, or collapsed on the march back to the camp from a day’s work in the gravel pit, or withered through hunger, or succumbed to a Kapo ’s blow, or failed Fries’s typhus test, or simply expired in the darkness of the barracks? Had he failed to realise that more bodies were burning than even that grim tally could account for? Had Walter seen the two plus two that was in front of him, but failed to make four, either because he was diverted by pain and hunger and the need to stay alive, or because some truths are too hard to digest?
It cannot have been easy to believe in such a thing as a death factory, a round-the-clock facility designed and operated for the chief purpose of murdering human beings. After all, no place like it had ever existed before. It was outside human experience and, perhaps, outside human imagination.
Walter was eighteen – his mind sharp and quick to adjust. But now he faced things almost impossible to fathom.
7
The Final Solution
T HIS WAS WHAT Walter did not know and could not imagine.
Auschwitz was not built to be a byword for murder and death. In the months before Walter Rosenberg arrived on that summer’s evening in 1942, its primary purpose was something else, the vaguest outline of which was a project Walter had intuited before he even got there, back when he was in a mere outer circle of hell in Majdanek.
When the Germans invaded Poland in late 1939, the site just outside the town of O? wi? cim in Upper Silesia was an empty, derelict barracks originally built for the Polish army: hence those solid brick buildings that had so impressed Walter on arrival. It was an enterprising SS police leader who spotted its suitability as a place to hold and terrify troublesome members of the newly occupied Polish nation. Admittedly, the twenty two-storey buildings, wooden stables and one-time tobacco storehouse were run down, the land around was boggy and both the sewerage and water supply were not up to much. But those faults could not outweigh its singular advantage: its proximity to the railway network. A junction to the main line connecting Kraków to Katowice was nearby. For its intended function, it was perfect. Thanks to the slave labour of 300 Jews from O? wi? cim, it did not take too long to knock it into shape.
Early in 1940, Auschwitz, as its new German masters had named it, opened its doors to hordes of Polish political prisoners, and the camp commandant, Rudolf H?ss, set to work building new structures, some of them on the erstwhile army parade ground, and repurposing old ones. He wasted no time in converting a former ammunition store into a facility that rapidly became essential: a mortuary. Prisoners had a tendency to die in the camp so the mortuary soon had to be upgraded, equipped with furnaces that allowed inmates’ corpses to be burned on-site, thereby saving H?ss the laborious and costly task of ferrying them to a local crematorium.
The Germans had ruled Poland for a year when the SS concluded that Auschwitz’s potential was being squandered. The place was wasted on mere incarceration of awkward Polish dissenters. There was money to be made.
Tellingly, concentration camps came under the SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, or SS-WVHA, the Main Economic and Administrative Office of the SS. ‘Economic’ was the operative word. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, was ambitious to match the Third Reich’s military might with economic might, and sought to construct nothing less than an industrial empire, anchored in south-east Poland. It would be predicated on a key economic advantage, one enjoyed by the great empires of the past: slave labour. Tens of thousands of imprisoned workers could build the factories and plants that would turn this newly German terrain into an industrial powerhouse and it would cost the Reich next to nothing. Walter had had an inkling of this grand scheme in Majdanek when he saw the Kapos march teams of inmates off to work in assorted factories and workshops around Lublin. But it was Auschwitz, with its excellent transport links and proximity to Silesia’s coal mines, that, by October 1940, Himmler had decided should be the engine of the effort, a throbbing generator of wealth for the new Nazi empire, fuelled by the involuntary labour of the people it now ruled. Their work was all. Hence the slogan, borrowed from the concentration camp at Dachau: Arbeit Macht Frei .
Himmler ordered a massive expansion of the camp, so that it soon took in the neighbouring village of Brzezinka, now endowed by the Germans with a charming name whose literal translation was ‘birch-tree alley’： Birkenau. In January 1942, Himmler ordered that 100,000 Jewish men and 50,000 Jewish women be sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau to work.
But within a few months Auschwitz was to acquire a new role. Walter’s arrival coincided with the haphazard integration of the camp in July 1942 into what the Nazis were now calling the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. The goal had been formally adopted, the decree sealed, six months earlier in the tree-lined Berlin suburb of Wannsee, where the heads of the multiple German government agencies tasked with handling the Jews gathered at lunchtime on 20 January 1942 in a splendid house by the lake, with Reinhard Heydrich in the chair, and set about organising the ultimate stage of their war against this one, small people: elimination.
By the time Walter was shipped off, the effort had already been under way for nearly a year following Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. It happened in the forests of Lithuania and the woods of Poland, in the fields of Belarus or in a ravine by the name of Babyn Yar outside Kyiv, where mobile killing units, Einsatzgruppen , would gather Jewish civilians in their hundreds and shoot them from inches away, usually in the backs of their heads or necks, their bodies falling into trenches and pits. By the end of 1941, some 600,000 Jews across the freshly conquered east had been murdered that way.
Those mass shootings never let up. In fact they intensified throughout the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union, as the SS cleared out ghettos, massacring their inhabitants. But after Wannsee the plan was to supplement those efforts with a smoother, more streamlined approach, one that would transport Jewish children, along with their mothers, fathers and grandparents, to dedicated killing centres in occupied Poland. There, Jews would either be murdered straightaway or they would face ‘annihilation through labour’： put more simply, they would be worked to death.
The first such place was Che?mno, in the west of the country, where they began murdering Jews on 8 December 1941, one day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that would at last draw the United States into the war. They did it by herding their victims into vans, locking the doors of the vehicle, then feeding the exhaust pipe back in, poisoning all those who were inside. It took just four months to kill more than 50,000 people that way, most of them Jews from the ghetto the Nazis had created in ?ód? .
But the Nazis did not want to rely on gas chambers on wheels. They wanted fixed, purpose-built camps. As 1941 turned into 1942, they built Belzec, then Sobibor and finally Treblinka, refining the method of murder by gas. Majdanek joined the endeavour around the time Walter passed through there. As for Belzec, that was where the elderly and the women who had been crammed into that train from Nováky, including the young bride who stretched out her hand towards her groom, were taken and killed.
Auschwitz was not like those first three camps, built for the sole purpose of murdering Jews. From the start it had always had several missions, only adding the destruction of Jewish life to its portfolio relatively late. It acquired that function gradually , incrementally, even erratically. The process was a story familiar to any industrialist: steady expansion, as capacity grew and grew to cope with demand.