Inferno - Max Hastings [329]
In the spring of 1942 Himmler refined a scheme to exploit concentration camp labour for both armaments production and the private profit of the SS. However, systemic incompetence and corruption ensured that little of value to the Reich was produced under SS auspices; on the contrary, the camp programme was a drain on Germany’s transport, manpower and general economic resources. Though millions of prisoners were put to work, mostly of a primitive kind, the SS never seriously attempted to reconcile its desire to extract useful services from its slaves with a consequent need to treat them with minimal humanity. Because its foremost aspiration was to produce mass death, it failed to produce much else save a ghastly harvest of human hair, gold teeth and discarded clothing.
At the beginning of June 1942, amid further mass deportations from the districts of Lublin and Galicia, the SS extended the policy of dispatching victims immediately on their arrival in camp reception areas. The concept of resettling Jews in the east had been abandoned, although a figleaf of pretence was sustained. Germany’s leaders now anticipated that their summer offensive in Russia would end the war, and thus the usefulness of Jewish slave labour. The Slovakian government acquiesced in the shipment of 50,000 of its citizens to Auschwitz. A programme of deportations of western European Jews was introduced, conducted in collaboration with local security forces—the Nazi empire lacked resources to cleanse the occupied territories without the assistance of indigenous bureaucracies and law-enforcement agencies. Among the explicit purposes of the German government was to ensure that as many foreign regimes as possible were complicit in the massacre of Jews. In this, it achieved considerable success.
Posterity is fascinated by the ease with which the Nazis found so many ordinary men—to borrow the title of Christopher Browning’s classic study—willing to murder in cold blood vast numbers of innocents, of all ages and both sexes. Yet there is ample evidence in modern experience that many people are ready to kill others to order, once satisfied that this fulfils the wishes of those whose authority they accept. Hundreds of thousands of Russians were complicit in the deaths of millions of their fellow countrymen at the behest of Stalin and Beria, before the Holocaust was thought of. Germany’s generals may not themselves have killed civilians, but they were happy to acquiesce in and even enthuse about others doing so.
Postwar testimony shows that implementation of the Final Solution required only a modicum of patience and practice to overcome the scruples of some novice mass murderers. On 13 July 1942, Reserve Police Battalion 101 arrived in a convoy of trucks at the Polish village of Josefów, whose inhabitants included 1,800 Jews. Mostly middle-aged reservists from Hamburg, on their arrival they were ordered to gather around their commander, fifty-three-year-old Maj. Wilhelm Trapp, a career policeman affectionately known to the unit as “Papa Trapp.” In a choking voice and with tears in his eyes, he told them they had a most unwelcome assignment, ordered at the highest level: to arrest all Jews in the village, remove to a work camp men of working age, and kill the remainder. He said this was justified by Jewish involvement with partisans, and the Jews’ instigation