The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [130]
Zyklon (meaning Cyclone) and B for Blausäure (prussic acid) was originally intended by Auschwitz’s camp commandant Rudolf Höss to ‘spare’ a ‘bloodbath’, by which he meant the SS having to kill Jews and others individually. Höss himself was a very early Party member, joining in November 1922; the number on his membership card was 3240.22 In the words of one historian of Auschwitz, ‘the use of Zyklon B alleviated the process of murder’.23 In all, around 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz–Birkenau, more than 90 per cent of whom were Jews. Auschwitz was the camp headquarters where 30,000 prisoners were kept, and nearby Birkenau was a 425-acre camp – larger than London’s Hyde Park – where around 100,000 lived, worked and died. The slogan Arbeit Macht Frei (work makes you free) fashioned in metal above the front gate at Auschwitz was of course another cynical Nazi lie, as work there was intended to make the inmates die, and no inmate was ever freed by the Germans in the history of the camp.
After they were rounded up in their local communities from all across German-occupied Europe, Jews were transported by train to Auschwitz or one of the other five extermination camps in eastern Europe. Typically they were allowed to take between 15 and 25 kilograms of personal belongings on the journey. This was intended to lull them into thinking that they would be resettled in communities ‘out east’. Such lies were needed in order to keep them docile, and to trick them into entering the gas chambers without panicking, fighting back or trying to escape. On the long journeys, often by cattle truck – those from Greece could take up to eleven days – they were given little or nothing to eat and drink, and were provided with no lavatories.
Once the transports arrived at the siding at Birkenau, there would be the first Selektion (selection), where SS officials would choose the able-bodied men and women – numbering roughly 15 per cent – who would be taken to the camp barracks to join work details, leaving the old, the weak, the infirm, the children and the mothers of children, who would be immediately walked to the gas chambers and exterminated. No fewer than 230,000 children died at Birkenau, almost all within an hour of arriving there, whereas average life expectancy for men who survived the initial selection was six months to one year, and for women four months. Death came in many forms besides gassing and executions, including starvation, punishment beatings, suicide, torture, exhaustion, medical experimentation, typhoid, exposure, scarlet fever, diphtheria, petechial typhus and tuberculosis. Oswald ‘Papa’ Kaduk – his nickname came from his ‘love for children’ – gave Jewish children balloons just before they were squirted (abspritzen) in the heart with phenol injections at the rate of ten per minute.24
Those who were selected to be gassed were walked straight to the underground chambers, and were told that they were going to be given a shower. The word ‘showers’ was written in all the major European languages, and there were even false shower heads in the ceiling of the gas chambers. The victims were also told that if they did not hurry up the coffee that was waiting for them in the camp afterwards would get cold.25 Once in the undressing room, they were told to hang their clothes on the hooks provided, and then they were herded into the chambers and the heavy metal doors were suddenly locked behind them. Green Zyklon B pellets were then dropped through holes in the roof, and within fifteen to thirty minutes – accounts differ – everyone inside was dead.
Much of the physically arduous task of running the gas chambers fell to the Sonderkommandos (special units), prisoners who also had to undertake the work of cleaning and preparing the chambers and crematoria. ‘The only exit is by way of the chimney,’ the Italian chemist Primo Levi was told on entering Auschwitz. ‘What did it mean?’ he wondered. ‘Soon we were