The main resistance to Himmler’s obsessions occurred in the south, for the Italians were never won over to anti-Semitism; in any case there were barely 50,000 Jews living in Italy. The Italians had refused to co-operate in the South of France, and Eichmann was forced to complain once more of their ‘sabotage’ in Greece and Yugoslavia. Although Mussolini had created his own anti-Jewish laws in 1938 under the influence of Hitler, he did not want to become implicated in genocide. Himmler, as we have seen, was regarded by Hitler as a suitable envoy to negotiate with Mussolini, and he paid several state visits to the Duce, the last being in October 1942, of which no record survives that includes discussion of Jewish deportation. 14 Only when the Germans occupied Italy in September 1943 did Himmler gain direct access to those Jews who, having taken refuge in Rome, failed to escape the successive round-ups that followed in the capital and the north. In Yugoslavia and Greece, the proportion of Jewish losses by deportation were, in sharp contrast to Italy, extremely heavy.
‘In the spring of 1942 the first transports of Jews, all earmarked for extermination, arrived from Upper Silesia’, wrote Hoess.15 They were taken across the meadows to Hoess’s new gas-chambers, told to undress because they were to be disinfected, then sealed in and killed:
‘There was no doubt in the mind of any of us that Hitler’s order had to be obeyed regardless, and that it was the duty of the S.S. to carry it out. Nevertheless we were all tormented by secret doubts… I had to exercise intense self-control in order to prevent my innermost doubts and feelings of oppression from becoming apparent… I had to watch coldly while the mothers with laughing or crying children went into the gas-chambers… My pity was so great that I longed to vanish from the scene: yet I might not show the slightest trace of emotion.’
Hoess sat drinking deeply with Eichmann, trying to discover whether similar anxieties were to be found in him, but:
‘he showed that he was completely obsessed with the idea of destroying every single Jew on whom he could lay his hands … If I was deeply affected by some incident, I found it impossible to go back to my home and my family. I would mount my horse and ride until I had chased the terrible picture away. Often at night I would walk through the stables and seek relief among my beloved animals.’
What is more revealing than these expressions of self-pity is the inability of Hoess to conceive the magnitude of the crime to which he was committed. His emotionalism, so evident throughout his writing, constantly falls ludicrously short of the nature of the tragedy which he is trying to describe, if not excuse. ‘I truly had no reason to complain that I was bored’, he says. ‘My wife’s garden was a paradise of flowers… The prisoners never missed an opportunity to do some little act of kindness for my wife or children, thus attracting their attention. No former prisoner can ever say that he was in any way or at any time badly treated in our house.’ When offered the chance of moving to Sachsenhausen he says, ‘At first I felt unhappy at the prospect of uprooting myself,… but then I was glad to be free from it all.’ As his excuse for what he did he quotes the British saying, ‘My country, right or wrong’, but he lays the blame squarely on the desk of Heinrich Himmler, whom he calls ‘the crudest representative of the leadership principle’. ‘I was never cruel’, he declares, though he admits that his subordinates frequently were so; but he was, he claims, unable to stop them. The nature of these cruelties, practised by the sadists of the S.S. and the Kapos who enjoyed their absolute authority over the prisoners, has been described in detail by Kogon and many others who survived imprisonment in the camps.
It is perhaps not surprising that after his initial visit in March 1941, Himmler saw the camp at Auschwitz only once more. This was in the summer of 1942, when he came to inspect constructional developments. According to Hoess, his interest lay solely in the agricultural and industrial plant. Nevertheless, he was shown something of the fearful living conditions of the prisoners and their subjection to disease and overcrowding. He was furious: ‘I want to hear no more about difficulties’, he said to Hoess. ‘An S.S. officer does not recognize difficulties; when they arise, his task is to remove them at once by his own efforts! How this is to be done is your worry and not mine!’ He contrasted the progress made by I.G. Farben in their structures; from the point of view of Hoess, Farben had the use of all the skilled labour and had priority over him for building materials.
Then Himmler turned to other matters:
‘He watched the whole process of destruction of a transport of Jews which had just arrived. He also spent a short time watching the selection of the able-bodied Jews, without making any objection. He made no remark about the process of extermination, but remained quite silent. While it was going on he unobtrusively observed the officers and junior officers engaged in the proceedings, including myself. He then went in to look at the synthetic rubber factory.’
Hoess used every opportunity to voice his complaints, although he knew that ‘Himmler always found it more interesting and more pleasant to hear positives than negatives.’ At dinner, when Hoess told him many of his officers were utterly inadequate, Himmler merely replied that he must use more dogs. At a late-night party in the house of the local Gauleiter, with whom Himmler was staying, he became more amiable and talkative, ‘especially towards the ladies’. He even drank a few glasses of red wine. The following day he watched a female prisoner whipped in the women’s camp; he had in fact only the previous April personally ordered ‘intensified’ beatings of undisciplined prisoners. The beatings were administered on the naked buttocks of male and female alike, their bodies strapped down on wooden racks. Then, says Hoess, he ‘talked with some female Jehovah’s Witnesses and discussed with them their fanatical beliefs’.16 At a final conference with Hoess he told him he could do nothing to alleviate his difficulties; he would have to manage as best he could. Auschwitz must expand, work must be increased, prisoners who could not labour must be killed. Eichmann’s programme was to be intensified. He then promoted Hoess an S.S. Lieutenant-Colonel and flew back to Berlin. He would not see Auschwitz again.
Though Auschwitz was Himmler’s principal death camp, there were others in Poland and Russia at which the organized gassing and shooting of Jews, Slavs and gypsies took place during the years 1942—4.
In Auschwitz and its satellite, Auschwitz II at Birkenau, the massacres began in March 1942 and did not end until October 1944; the gas-chambers and crematoria, meticulously destroyed by Himmler in November 1944 in the face of the Russian advance, were buildings constructed in an area separated from the camp itself. The human destruction was held back by the limited capacity of these buildings and their equipment; the limit at Auschwitz, even after the construction of four new combined gas-chamber-crematoria in 1943 by Heinz Kammler, who was later to design the sites for the V-rockets, seems, according to Reitlinger, not to have exceeded some 6,000 prisoners a day. Another growing limitation was transport; the trains, their airless vans packed tight with prisoners, were shunted into sidings to avoid delay to rolling-stock with a higher war priority. Himmler and Eichmann might rage at the delays that impeded the purification of Europe, but Auschwitz before its closure consumed some two million people. Himmler’s mechanized massacres far exceeded those of his hero Genghis Khan.
Himmler’s off-hand treatment of Hoess is evidence that by 1942 his positive interests lay elsewhere. This was the first year of reverses for Germany, both in North Africa and on the Russian front, while at home the intensity of the Allied bombing grew even greater.