ABSTRACT
On 7 December 1941, 700 Jews were rounded-up in the Lodz ghetto, Poland, and transported 40 miles to the first purpose-built death camp at Chelmno. All had been promised better conditions at an agricultural work camp to the east, and many volunteered to go in order to escape the chronic overcrowding and hunger in the ghetto. On the morning of the 8 December they were all directed to take a shower. Naked and in groups of sixty at a time they were herded and beaten down a corridor and directed up a short ramp into the back of a plain-grey enclosed truck. The doors were bolted and the driver, dressed in an SS Totenkopf or Death’s Head uniform, drove the truck a short distance into the surrounding forest. The truck parked at the edge of a pre-prepared burial pit and as the driver stepped down from the cab he flicked a switch to divert the exhaust gases into the back of the hermetically sealed truck. Frantic banging on the sides of the truck ensued as the exhaust gases were pumped into the truck down two perforated tubes laid in parallel along the floor. The tubes were protected by a raised wooden grating and concealed from view by a covering of loose straw mats. After approximately fifteen minutes all had been asphyxiated, and a waiting detachment of Jewish slave labourers were beaten into action with whips and clubs and ordered to drag the bodies from the truck. Gold teeth were pulled out with pliers and orifices were searched for hidden valuables, especially diamonds, before the bodies were flung into the burial pit. All 700 were gassed. Over the next four days a further 1,000 Jews per day were transported from the Lodz ghetto and murdered in the same way. This was the first act of the ‘mechanised’ Holocaust, as opposed to the random and chaotic shootings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen across the Baltic States and the occupied Soviet Union. The term ‘Holocaust’, from the Greek Holos (whole) and caustos (burn), is used in the western world to denote the period of the death camps between 1942 and 1944 when the majority of Europe’s Jews were systematically rounded-up and gassed. In Hebrew the preferred term is ‘Shoah’, meaning a devastating storm. Chelmno was the first death camp to enter service and it provided an easily disguised and faster means of mass murder than the continuing Einsatzgruppen actions of mass shootings in the Soviet Union, following the decision for the Final Solution (see Chapter 17). Himmler turned to Christian Wirth for advice and guidance on how to replicate Chelmno on a larger scale. Wirth was one of the key ‘experts’ associated with the Sonderbehandlung or special treatment programme for those deemed unfit for work in the concentration camps. The prisoners were gassed by carbon
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the construction of Vernichtungslager, or annihilation camps, with large, static gas chambers capable of gassing 1,000 people at a time and to dispose of the bodies in crematoria. Himmler approved an immediate expansion of the Vernichtungslager with a capacity not only to empty the ghettos of Poland of ‘unproductive’ or sick Jews but to gas the entire Jewish population of occupied Europe. With the death camps under construction, Himmler delegated the practical arrangements for the transport of the Jews of Europe to their deaths to Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office. Heydrich chaired a meeting of the fifteen key administrators of occupied Europe in Berlin on 20 January 1942. The conference was held in a luxury villa on the shores of the Wannsee, which was Heydrich’s intended home after the war. The meeting had been originally scheduled for 9 December 1941, but was postponed following the unexpected Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December. The meeting only lasted ninety minutes, and the minutes record that Heydrich listed the estimated number of Jews in each European country and confirmed that all were to be subject to the Final Solution. The stated total was 11 million, ranging from 5 million Jews in the Soviet Union to only 200 in tiny Albania. The list of Jews included 8,000 living in neutral Sweden and 330,000 living in undefeated Great Britain. The detailed arrangements for the transports were left to Adolf Eichmann, who had been promoted to SS Lieutenant-Colonel in November 1941. In the months and years ahead he was to become the chief administrator of the Final Solution. Heydrich specified a death sentence for all European Jews:
The Jews are to be utilised for work in the East in an expedient manner in the course of Final Solution. In large (labour) columns, with the sexes separated, Jews capable of work will be moved into those areas as they build roads, during which a large proportion will no doubt drop out through natural reduction. The remnant that eventually remains will require suitable treatment . . . the evacuated Jews will first be taken, group by group to so-called transit ghettos to be transported further east from there.2
