It was a footling gesture. The desperate German commanders, whose troops now pathetically included boys from the Hitler Youth and old men, raced to reinforce towns, bridges, and ports and form defensive lines in the Allies’ path, yet Germany’s leadership was breaking down at the top. In early September, Hitler had repeatedly spoken of discomfort in his right eye, the legacy of von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt at Wolf’s Lair. During the following weeks he had fluctuating blood pressure, tremors in his hands and legs, swollen ankles, dizziness, and then violent stomach spasms that left him bedridden. He developed jaundice, and by mid-October he was described by those around him as lifeless; he also had lost sixteen pounds. His heart was weakening and his tremors almost certainly indicated Parkinson’s disease. Even his vocal cords were affected. His mood swings, phobias, and hysteria intensified. But as historian Ian Kershaw notes, Hitler “was not clinically insane.” So was there pathology? There was—and not in Hitler alone; it was present in the broader leadership, “backed by much of a gullible population,” which had undertaken to conquer and cleanse all of Europe. But now the Allied armies were inexorably driving toward the German borders.
And outside of his crumbling empire of war, his cherished other empire—his empire of death, the vast network of labor and death camps—was about to come under an assault. Finally.
AUSCHWITZ HAD NOT REALIZED its full potential until 1943, when the Belzec camp near the city of Lvov had been abandoned, and attempted uprisings had derailed the killing operations in Sobibór and Treblinka. After that Majdanek had been closed. Auschwitz-Birkenau then became the center of death in the eastern region. There were four new crematoriums, numbered II, III, IV, and V. Numbers IV and V, tucked away behind the camp’s tall trees, became known as the “forest crematoriums.” Their designers constantly sought modifications to make them more deadly, for example, by proposing heating systems that would warm the Zyklon B and thus speed the killing process. At peak capacity, the crematoriums could dispose of up to 4,756 corpses daily. Numbers II and III were the largest, each capable of reducing 1,440 bodies at a time to a gray blend of bone and ash. But even this capacity could not match the killing. Where the planners had expected two bodies, five would appear, lifted on hoists or carted in tubs, arms and legs sticking out at odd angles, hair shorn, teeth wrenched out for the gold fillings, fingers sliced to remove the rings. By the time the corpses reached the incinerators they were only remnants of humans.
As bodies were shoved in the ovens the chimneys repeatedly failed because of the massive overheating, so that the Sonderkommando were forced to burn the remains in vast open trenches. There, it took hours for the flames to eat their way through the corpses.
Life expectancy in the Sonderkommando was short; about eight months at most. Some of its members lived little more than a few weeks. When their usefulness was done, they were shot or gassed. Many took their own lives early on. The SS required hardy men for the Sonderkommando, and many of the members they recruited had once been part of the French Resistance and the Polish Communist underground. As early as the summer of 1943, the Sonderkommando members began forming secret units of their own. Nearly a year later, their plan was daring, even foolhardy, but certainly courageous: capture weapons, destroy the crematoriums, and organize a breakout; their strategy was written in a small notebook and buried underground in a jar.
They plotted—three girls smuggled explosives into Birkenau in a food tray with a false bottom—but it was the SS that ultimately chose the moment of confrontation. Discovering two hundred of the Sonderkommando after an attempted escape, the SS murdered them with cyanide in a storage room. Then others in the Sonderkommando were told to personally select three hundred more of their men for “evacuation”; October 7, 1944, was the day announced for transport to another camp, ostensibly to work there. But the men who loaded the ovens knew better. They knew this would be a day for death. And they knew they needed to act quickly.
It was either them or the SS.
At 1:30 in the afternoon, as a group of SS men were walking toward Crematorium IV, the Sonderkommando, shouting “Hurrah!” and armed with stones, axes, and iron bars, set upon them and threw one of the SS into the flames. While the SS men sought cover behind a barbed-wire fence, the insurgents torched hundreds of straw mattresses near Crematorium IV, setting it ablaze. Then, with smuggled hand grenades, they blew up the building and its ovens. Nazi reinforcements quickly arrived on motorcycles, and the SS set up machine guns, firing into the crowd and driving fleeing prisoners into Crematorium IV. Near Crematorium II, some six hundred of the Sonderkommando cut the barbed wire and fled into the forest, through the fish hatcheries and the farmsteads along the Sola river. The alarm screeched and the SS surrounded the area. Nevertheless, some escapees made it. But when the SS found one group hiding in a barn, they locked it and set it on fire, roasting everyone inside alive—and shooting any who somehow ran out. The Jewish women who had smuggled the explosives from their work camp under their clothes and given them to the Sonderkommando were tortured—they never broke—and eventually hanged. At their execution, they betrayed no fear.
At least 425 of the Sonderkommando died in the insurrection. But the insurgents drew blood as well, killing three SS corporals and injuring twelve more.
And Crematorium IV was now gone. Remarkably, what the Allies had failed to do, the inmates themselves succeeded in accomplishing—in part. However, the remaining three crematoriums continued, sending ash and smoke into the sky. Two days after the revolt, four thousand Jewish women were gassed and burned, two thousand from an incoming transport along with another two thousand “specially” selected from those already confined at Birkenau. By the month’s end, in just thirty-one days, more than thirty-three thousand Jews had been gassed, a pace not seen since the Hungarian transports.
IT DID NOT MATTER that the Führer was frequently bedridden; it did not matter that the U.S. Twelfth Army Group was pushing through the Ardennes forest in France, advancing on the Rhine; it did not matter that the Soviets were within reach of Warsaw; it did not matter that Franklin Roosevelt was riding through the streets of New York in an open car in the driving rain. Absent Allied actions, the way of Auschwitz remained unchanged, except that it began to slow down. And in Hungary, 200,000 Jews at most remained alive.
AS IN CONNECTING THE dots of a puzzle, the outlines and contours of Auschwitz were becoming visible as never before in the fall of 1944—not just to Washington, London, the Vatican, and New York, but to all the world. There had been the reports from Eduard Schulte the Polish government-in-exile as early as July 1942; then the Riegner Telegram; then the BBC reports in the fall of 1943; then Jan Karski’s meeting with Roosevelt; then the Vrba-Wetzler report in the late spring and early summer of 1944, corroborated by two later escapees, Czeslaw Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin; then the articles, the radio reports, and the aerial photographs from the Allies’ reconnaissance flights. The photographs taken in late June, while McCloy was refusing to bomb Auschwitz, were so detailed that it was possible to see the ramp lined with people walking toward the gas chambers and crematoriums.
By late July, the evidence was even more overwhelming. By then, the Soviets had liberated Majdanek, near Lublin, Poland, the origin of many of the transports to Auschwitz. There, they found gas chambers, innocuously labeled “Bath” and “Disinfection”; they found the crematoriums and the hastily covered-over mass graves. They found bodies along the road leading to and away from the camp. “They were not the bodies of soldiers felled in the heat of battle,” recalled a Polish Jew who fought with the Soviet army. “They were the striped-cloth bodies of prisoners, of Jews, gunned down as they ran from the camp in the final hours before it fell. They were thin and hairless, and their clothes little more than rags. Some had died with their eyes open. Others had begun crawling after they were shot.”
Inside the camp, inside the low single-story buildings beyond the double rows of electrified barbed wire, the Soviet army found piles of
shoes, more than could be counted, “shoes piled like pieces of coal” or “rising in a high mound, like grain.” Some shoes had worn-out soles and no laces; some had tumbled down off the high pile and had landed back on the floor. In one room, all the shoes were small, small enough to fit easily in a man’s palm. They were baby and toddler shoes; many pairs were evidently the children’s first shoes. Along with the shoes, there were piles of human teeth, piles of hair, and piles of eyeglasses with cracked lenses and bent or broken frames. Everywhere, there were piles of things. The Jewish soldier recalled, “When I closed my eyes, I saw those piles of small shoes,” adding, “They took the children from their mothers, and they killed them. And they kept the shoes. Even when I slept, I saw the shoes. It was unrelenting.” For his part, one Time magazine reporter wrote, suddenly everything became “real.”
The secrets of Majdanek were gradually unearthed. On November 3, 1943, the Germans had held what they euphemistically called a “Harvest Festival”: eighteen thousand people were machine-gunned in a single day in the woods (Vrba was there), while music blared to drown out the killing. But still, for all its horror, Majdanek was not Auschwitz.
Among camps, Auschwitz, where the dead were left with the wind and the silence, stood alone.
By September, members of the Sonderkommando had taken photographs inside Auschwitz. Through doorways, they captured fellow Sonderkommando prisoners standing alongside burning corpses in the open air. Another photo showed women removing their clothes outside before being herded into the gas chamber. The film was smuggled to the Polish Resistance movement in Kraków. The proof lay everywhere. But proof did not yet make policy. And regarding policy, almost nothing was clear.
ON OCTOBER 10, THE United States and Great Britain had broadcast a joint warning to the Germans, telling them that if mass executions were carried out at the concentration camps of Oswiecim and Brzezinka (Birkenau), all those “from the highest to the lowest” who were in any way involved would be held responsible, and no effort would be spared to bring the guilty to justice. The German telegraph service immediately responded that the reports were “false from beginning to end.” The British thought it “a satisfactory reaction,” believing the declaration had made a difference. But in fact it had done little to stem the slaughter. Only the westward advance of the Soviet army at Auschwitz began to quell the fires.
Since the summer of 1944, trains and trucks had been carrying prisoners, piles of personal effects, building materials, and equipment from Poland into Germany and Austria. In effect, even as the Germans desperately sought to cover up their crimes, the process of death, albeit on a lesser scale, was simply being transferred closer to home, to Buchenwald, Flossenburg, Ravensbrück, Dachau, Mauthausen, Gross-Rosen, Bergen-Belsen, Natzweiler, Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme. On November 26, a panicked Himmler, knowing of the rapid advances of the Allied armies, ordered the crematoriums at Auschwitz to be destroyed. Meanwhile, the motor of Crematorium II was to be crated up and transported to Mauthausen, as was its ventilation system. Its gas infrastructure was designated for Gross-Rosen. By November 29, aerial reconnaissance photos taken from a high altitude by U.S. planes showed Crematorium II being taken apart and also revealed that the Birkenau rail line was empty. No train was waiting to unload a human cargo.
Then came the methodical disposal of the evidence. As the prisoners continued to provide forced labor, the trenches where the corpses had been burned had to be filled in and leveled. On December 5, while snow was falling, fifty female Jewish prisoners were selected. Their orders: dig out every corpse that had been tossed into mass graves around Crematorium IV, the one that had been destroyed during the Sonderkommando revolt. Once the bodies were exhumed, they would be burned in open pits, despite the frigid temperatures and blanketing snowfall. Next, the cuts in the earth and the hollow places that had been repositories for human remains and broken-up skeletons had to be emptied, covered in turn, and masked with fresh plantings.
Crematorium I, its ovens taken apart, became an air-raid bunker. Its chimney, and the ceiling holes from which the gas settled, simply disappeared. The passageway between the gas chamber and the ovens was sealed and shut. As Benjamin Akzin had predicted, this process of destruction continued. By December 21, many of the guard towers and electrified fences around Birkenau had been taken down, as well as the fences around the crematoriums. Even the roof of one of the undressing rooms had been removed. But in a cruel twist of fate, what the gas chambers had not done, the cold and the deplorable conditions now slowly did: over two thousand women died during December in Auschwitz.
THIS METHODICAL DISMANTLING WAS begun just as the Nazi war machine was making a daring attack on Allied forces in the west. It came in the Ardennes and was to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. Again, this was a puzzle with the dots waiting to be connected. When refugees told the Allied forces that the Germans were massing tanks and armored vehicles, no one pursued the reports, which seem to have been discounted. Similarly, when German U-boats based in the Atlantic and Baltic sent large numbers of weather reports the intercepts were ignored, as were transmissions of the Germans’ requests for aerial photos of the region around the Meuse. The prevailing view at the Allies’ headquarters was that the Germans were using the Ardennes as a resting place, that they were going to pull back to the eastern front, and that they lacked enough fuel to mount any attack, let alone a winter assault. Great Britain’s General Montgomery (not unlike Rommel, who went home with shoes for his wife on D-Day) planned a Christmas visit to England and had dispensed with his nightly situation conferences “until the war becomes more exciting.”
The attack on the western front was Hitler’s last ditch, desperate effort. It began at 6 a.m. on December 16 with an hour-long artillery barrage against the least defended section of the Allies’ line, a section held by some of the greenest troops of the war. When the Waffen SS and the elite panzer armies appeared out of the frigid mist, “the result,” according to one military historian, “was complete . . . panic, and shock.” The Germans had taken advantage of a heavy forest and an impenetrable fog, and the attack was a total surprise. Within days, the key crossroad at the town of Bastogne was at risk. As if it were 1939, the Germans demanded that the 101st Airborne surrender; Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe tersely replied: “Nuts!” He would not. Meanwhile, Eisenhower acted quickly. Like Robert E. Lee during the American Civil War, he split his forces, giving the divisions north of the German breakthrough over to General Montgomery. All those to the south would be under the command of an American, General Omar Bradley.
Both sides had to contend with the weather, especially the Americans, who had inadequate winter clothing. Roads turned to mud and the snowfall was so thick that tank drivers plunged ahead almost completely blind in the frosty white cloud. Bastogne, resupplied by air, did not fall to the Germans, and Eisenhower began a counterattack from the south, creating a pincer movement around the German forces. Then, on Christmas Eve, came a magnificent sight: the cloud cover broke and ten thousand planes rained hell on the Germans. This was the largest battle the U.S. Army had ever fought and by January 3, the Germans were driven back; Hitler’s roll of the dice had foundered. The Germans were able to withdraw, but over thirty thousand of their men were dead, another forty thousand were wounded, and over six hundred of their armored vehicles had been destroyed or abandoned for lack of fuel. In response to pleas from Churchill, Stalin renewed his own forces’ attack across the Vistula River in the east. The Allies had yet to cross the Rhine in the west or enter Germany from the east, but they would.
And every mile that the Soviets gained brought them a mile closer to Auschwitz.
BY MID-JANUARY, WHEN SOVIET artillery fire could be heard echoing in the distance, there was nothing left to do but evacuate the death camp. Only the feeblest, those too weak or ill to move, and those too depleted to work were left behind: some 2,000 at Auschwitz and more than 6,000 at Birkenau. The rest—some 58,000 men, women, and children—set off on foot
in enormous columns, with as many as 2,500 prisoners in a single group; the columns of Jews were so long that the war-weary SS could no longer keep track of them. Anyone who collapsed, fell to the ground, and could not immediately rise to his or her feet was simply shot. These inmates marched for days, not just from the main camps but also from the smaller slave labor camps in that section of Poland. As the columns poured into the larger cities, they were put into trains or open trucks and sent to the network of remaining German camps.
Elie Wiesel was one of the marchers. He was lucky: he was to be put on board a train where at least there was a roof to keep out the cold, or so he believed. He recalled how on the platform the prisoners tried to quench their thirst by eating the snow “off our neighbors’ backs.” They spent hours standing in the snow, staring down the tracks, waiting for the train to appear. “An infinitely long train, composed of roofless cattle cars. The SS shoved us inside, a hundred per car: we were so skinny!” When dawn came, the bodies inside were “crouching, piled one on top of the other, like a cemetery covered with snow.” By now, there was “barely a difference” between the living and the dead. About fifteen thousand died along the way. Bodies that had been tossed out of the cars lined the train tracks. Inside one car, Wiesel watched as a son, his mind clouded by hunger and exhaustion, snapped and rained blows on his own father and snatched his morsel of bread. Then, as the son stuffed the bread into his own mouth, he was set on and killed.