Oświęcim fell within the area designated as the ‘New Reich’ but its industrial landscape meant few ‘ethnic Germans’ would be resettled there. Instead the town was renamed Auschwitz, and its native population moved out to make way for a new concentration camp, initially planned on the site of an old barracks and horse-breaking yard. The Nazis had identified that building a concentration camp in the area would be important; they needed to incarcerate troublesome Polish prisoners and utilise a large slave-labour force, as well as create a symbolic location from which to terrify the general population. Yet, when Auschwitz’s first and most important commandant stepped off the train on 30 April 1940; he surely had no idea that within the course of five years he would be presiding over the site of the biggest single mass murder in world history. Instead, the dream of SS Haupturmführer Rudolf Höss was to create a model concentration camp, based on the lessons he had learned after six years’ service in the SS, first at Dachau and then Sachsenhausen.
Höss, a forty-year-old ex-farmer from the Black Forest who had served as one of the youngest non-commissioned officers in the First World War, had been involved in violent right-wing politics since the early 1920s, and had joined the Nazi Party in 1922. Like many of his comrades, he later claimed his problem was not with Jews as individuals, but with the ‘international world Jewish conspiracy’ that he believed had brought Germany to its knees after the Treaty of Versailles (this rationale would crop up again when he later justified murdering Jewish children). Höss was a careerist Nazi who ‘looked like a grocery clerk’, according to the American lawyer Whitney Harris, who interrogated him at Nuremberg. Höss’s first post initially appeared unremarkable – as camp commandant of Auschwitz, he would preside over a small camp in an eastern European backwater.
The first prisoners to arrive at Auschwitz were thirty German criminals who had been transferred from Sachsenhausen. These men, who arrived at the start of June 1940, would become the Kapos – they would preside over other prisoners, supervising the forced labour. Soon after, the first group of Polish prisoners arrived on 14 June. Previously held at Tarnów Prison, these were former university students, who were now charged with building the camp itself. As the Nazis had not secured any construction materials, the prisoners’ first task was to try and steal some. ‘I worked at demolishing houses that used to belong to Polish families,’ Wilhelm Brasse explained.[63] ‘There was an order to take building materials such as bricks, planks and other kinds of wood.’ This method of stealing what was needed, even from other work gangs in the camp, also applied to Rudolf Höss himself, who drove as far as 60 or 70 miles to get kettles for the kitchen or straw sacks for bedding. ‘Whenever I found depots containing materials that I needed urgently, I would simply cart whatever I needed away without worrying about the formalities… I didn’t even know where I could buy 100 metres of barbed wire. So I just had to pilfer the badly needed barbed wire.’[64]
This seemingly bizarre method of makeshift camp construction offers a much larger insight into Nazi policy – and its failings. Although the Nazis liked to present themselves as supremely organised and efficient, their policies were often dreamt up on the spur of the moment and were ill-thought through. For example, by the autumn of 1940, Oswald Pohl, head of the SS main administration office in Berlin, had visited the camp and instructed Höss to increase its capacity so that prisoners could be forced to labour in industries. This began with a plan to mine sand and gravel, while Himmler envisioned the camp as an agricultural utopia where ‘every necessary agricultural experiment was to be attempted,’ according to Rudolf Höss – this would include cattle breeding and massive plant cultivation experiments. Yet both of these policies proved to be pipe dreams. The prisoners of Auschwitz were engaged in slave-labour projects, both for the SS and private industry – but later studies demonstrated that even the IG Farben plant was massively inefficient, as its workers were weak and starving. Himmler’s passion for farming, which he shared with Höss, was impracticable, as the marshy flat lands and flooding rivers near Auschwitz were completely unsuited to agriculture. But according to Laurence Rees, ‘Until the day the camp closed Auschwitz prisoners would labour in pursuit of Himmler’s vision, digging ditches, draining ponds, shoring up riverbanks – all because it was much more exciting for the Reichsführer SS to dream a dream than to discuss practicalities.’[65]
In 1941, the SS decided to increase the capacity of Auschwitz from 10,000 to 30,000 in order to accommodate the needs of the IG Farben plant. The number then grew to over 100,000 after a huge new camp was built at Birkenau, only two miles away from the Auschwitz main camp. This vast new camp was designed to accommodate the victims of the next stage of Nazi aggression.
The launch of Operation Barbarossa and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 would transform the role of the camp and its prisoners. Hitler’s war against Stalin would lead to a vast influx of Soviet prisoners into concentration camps throughout the old Reich in Germany and the ‘New Reich’ in occupied lands. According to a letter he wrote to Italian dictator Mussolini, such a dramatic move left Hitler feeling ‘spiritually freed’ and he could now fulfil his most radical dreams. The fast progression of the German invasion surprised even senior Nazis who believed that the war against the USSR could now be won within weeks, a victory so vast that they believed almost anything was possible and within their grasp – and by that they meant the annihilation of the Jewish race.
Over summer and autumn several events happened almost simultaneously. In July 1941, the first 500 prisoners from Auschwitz were gassed – but these initial victims were not Jews and they were murdered not at the camp itself, but were transported instead to a former mental hospital near Danzig, several hundred miles away. These prisoners, deemed too sick to work, were the victims of the Nazi adult euthanasia programme which began in September 1939 and first targeted mentally ill and physically disabled Germans, before being extended to concentration camps two years later. (A similar law applied to disabled German children, who were perceived to be a drain on society.) It was not until August or early September, when Höss was away on a break that his deputy Fritzsch began experimenting with gassing prisoners using Zyklon B, a chemical made up of crystallised cyanide that was normally used to stop insect infestations. These first gassings occurred in Block 11, the barracks where prisoners were sent to be tortured. When Höss returned to the camp he watched the process, and deemed it highly satisfactory: ‘Protected by a gas mask, I watched the killing myself. In the crowded cells death came almost instantaneously the moment the Zyklon B was thrown in. A short, smothered cry and it was almost all over.’[66]
In reality, death by gassing was neither painless nor instantaneous – but as Höss had realised, it was a solution to the mass murder the Nazis were embarking on. Einsatzgruppen death squads had been sweeping through Soviet territory killing at first all Jewish men, and then all Jewish women and children. Mass killing by firing squads raised some logistical problems, however, not to mention the fact that actually having to look their helpless victims in the eyes strained the nerves of many soldiers. The development of gassing as a means of mass murder, and the vast expansion of Auschwitz-Birkenau to accommodate large numbers of Jewish prisoners were both procedures Topf and Sons would become intimately involved in.