This order, said Wisliceny, was sent by Himmler to Heydrich and to the Inspector of the Concentration Camps; it was classified top secret and dated April 1942. Eichmann went on to explain that ‘the planned biological destruction of the Jewish race in the Eastern territories was disguised by the wording “final solution”…’ and that he personally ‘was entrusted with the execution of this order’.
Long after the final decision had been taken, Himmler remained deeply oppressed. During a period of treatment by Kersten in Berlin, he admitted on 11 November after considerable pressure that the destruction of the Jews was being planned. When Kersten expressed his horror, Himmler became defensive — the Jews had to be finally eradicated, he said, since they had been and would always be the cause of intolerable strife in Europe. Just as the Americans had exterminated the Indians, so the Germans must wipe out the Jews. But in spite of his arguments, Himmler could not hide the disturbance of his conscience, and a few days later he admitted that ‘the extermination of people is unGermanic’.
Auschwitz, near Cracow in Poland, became the principal centre for Himmler’s extermination plan. It had once been the site of an Austrian military encampment built on marshy ground, where winter fog rose from the damp earth. Himmler transformed this military establishment into a concentration camp for the Poles, and it was officially opened on 14 June 1940, with Lieutenant Rudolf Hoess as its first Commandant. Joseph Kramer, who later had charge of Belsen, was his adjutant.
Hoess, who became one of Himmler’s most closely trusted agents, was to survive the collapse of Germany. Although held prisoner in May 1945, his true identity was not suspected until some months after his initial release. When he was once more taken into custody, he admitted his identity and signed a statement on 16 March in which he declared: ‘I personally arranged on orders received from Himmler in May 1941 the gassing of 2 million persons between June-July 1941 and the end of 1943, during which time I was Commandant of Auschwitz.’ He was very frank and co-operative, giving his lethal evidence at Nuremberg with all the impersonal self-confidence of a good and modest steward. Later he was handed over to the Polish authorities and while waiting his trial wrote in longhand his autobiography, perhaps the most incredible document to come from any Nazi agent. While, for example, Schellenberg relishes his intricate acts of espionage for Heydrich and Himmler, writing his story as if it were a thriller, Hoess is perpetually modest, melancholy and moralizing. The spirit of his Catholic upbringing taught him the supreme virtue of obedience.
Hoess represents himself as a simple, virtuous man who liked hard work and soldiering, and felt oppressed by the criminal underworld with which he was forced to associate.27 At Dachau he disliked the methods used by Eicke, and while confessing that his ‘sympathies lay too much with the prisoner’, he admits that he ‘had become too fond of the black uniform’ to admit his inadequacy and relinquish the work. ‘I wished to appear hard’, he writes, ‘lest I should appear weak.’ When he went to Sachsenhausen as an adjutant, he took charge of the execution of an S.S. officer who by an act of humanity had let a prisoner escape. ‘I was so agitated’, he recalls, ‘that I could hardly hold the pistol to his head when giving him the coup de grace.’ But executions became a matter of routine, and Hoess learned to hide his head in the sands of obedience. His exemplary conduct led to his promotion as Commandant of Auschwitz. Here, he says, ‘I lived only for my work… I was absorbed, I might say obsessed… Every fresh difficulty only increased my zeal.’ But this idealism was betrayed by the ‘general untrustworthiness that surrounded me’. His staff, he claimed, let him down, and he became powerless against the corruption and ill-will of his subordinates. He took discreetly to drink; his wife tried to help him by building up a social life in their home at the camp, but ‘all human emotions were forced into the background’.
In November 1940 Hoess reported his plans for Auschwitz to Himmler, who brushed aside his Commandant’s fears and grievances, and only became interested when the discussion turned on making Auschwitz into an agricultural research station, with laboratories, plant nurseries and facilities for stock breeding. As for the prisoners and their welfare, Hoess was left to ‘improvise’ as best he could. It was not until March the following year that Himmler paid a visit to the camp, accompanied by his officials and some ‘high executives of I.G. Farben Industrie’. Glücks, the Inspector of Concentration Camps, arrived in advance and ‘constantly warned me against reporting anything disagreeable to the Reichsführer S.S.’ When Hoess tried to impress on him the desperate overcrowding and lack of drainage or water supply, Himmler merely replied that the camp was to be enlarged to take 100,000 prisoners, so as to supply labour contingents to I.G. Farben Industrie. As to Hoess, he must continue to improvise.
This was the man to whom Himmler entrusted his special confidence in June 1941 when, as Hoess put it, he ‘gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place… By the will of the Reichsführer S.S., Auschwitz became the greatest human extermination centre of all time.’
According to Hoess’s detailed account of this meeting, Himmler explained to him that he had chosen Auschwitz ‘because of its good position as regards communications and because the area can be easily isolated and camouflaged’. He told him that Eichmann would come to Auschwitz and give him secret instructions about the equipment that would have to be installed. Hoess has left a full and frank account of the experiments for which he and Eichmann were responsible and which had led to the construction of the gas-chambers during the following winter. By the spring of 1942 the organized killings were to begin as a routine operation at Auschwitz; Russian prisoners-of-war were used during the test period. ‘The killing… did not cause me much concern at the time’, wrote Hoess. ‘I must even admit that this gassing set my mind at rest.’ Hoess did not relish the violence of the blood-bath caused by other forms of killing, and Himmler had warned him that trainloads of deported Jews would soon be on their way.
It has been suggested that Himmler deliberately chose a camp in Poland as the principal centre for genocide in order that German soil should not be contaminated by the destruction of so much impure flesh.28 Other subsidiary centres of mass extermination were also set up in Poland, such as Treblinka. Auschwitz, however, had the double task of providing forced labour for synthetic coal and rubber plants built in the district by I.G. Farben while at the same time preparing for human mass destruction. Hoess, far more anxious to fulfil his quota of death than to send slave labour to factories at some distance from the camp, went to visit the Commandant of Treblinka: ‘He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas and I did not think his methods were very efficient’, wrote Hoess after the war.
A vast mass of documents — statements by innumerable witnesses, the endless records of the interrogations and the examinations conducted before and during the war crime trials — have become the basis for many studies of the extermination and concentration camps during the peak period of the war. What emerges from these terrible, pitiful stories, which few read except for scholars and research workers, is the sheer muddle in which this carnage was conducted. The administrators such as Eichmann and Hoess were in the end utterly unable to control the grafters and the sadists on whom they had to depend to carry out the work of the camps, the selection and destruction of the victims and the mass cremation of the bodies. The S.S. élite, living in their barracks or married quarters nearby, either took no part in the proceedings or remained as aloof as possible from the hell they had created and which it was their duty to maintain. The bodily control of the captives passed increasingly into the hands of the Kapos, who were hardened criminals or renegade prisoners; their conduct was in the end far more savage than that of the S.S., whose morale grew slack in the increasing chaos as the tide of the war turned against the Nazis. On top of this morass of suffering sat Himmler at his desk, doing what he conceived to be his duty in circumstances of increasing strain and difficulty.