The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [134]
For those who survived the initial Selektion on the railway siding – known as the Ramp – there were plenty more. Regular barrack inspections would take place to ascertain whether prisoners still had the strength to work effectively, and those who could not, according to the most arbitrary criteria, were gassed. Selektion also took place in the prison hospital where SS doctors would regularly cull the ‘hopelessly ill’ patients. The historian Gideon Greig has identified seven areas of camp life where the absolutely pitiless phenomenon of Selektion regularly operated, against which there was no appeal.43 Selektion officers would carry canes, which could be used as weapons but were more often used to direct inmates without having to come into physical contact with them. ‘All those able to find a way out, try to take it,’ recalled Primo Levi of the process, ‘but they are in the minority because it is very difficult to escape from a selection. The Germans apply themselves to these things with great skill and diligence.’ 44 Driven by thirst one day, Levi – Häftling (prisoner) number 174517 – opened the window of his hut to break off an icicle to drink, but a guard snatched it away. ‘Why?’ Levi asked, only to receive the reply, ‘Hier ist kein warum’ (Here, there is no why).45 Yet in a sense there was; the SS did not want Levi to drink water because they did not want strong inmates, but rather weak, preferably dying ones as the numbers ‘selected’ could always be immediately replenished. Hearing a fellow prisoner thanking God that he was not selected, Levi recollected thinking: ‘Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.’46
To visit Auschwitz–Birkenau today is to be brought face to face with sights that bring home the horror as powerfully as any book or academic study ever could. Ladders were required to climb up the mountains of shoes that were taken from the victims. (In 2004, when 43,000 pairs were cleaned, some Hungarian money was found tucked into a pair, having somehow survived the official and unofficial looting of the camp.) Huge piles of shaving brushes, toothbrushes, spectacles, prosthetic limbs, baby clothes, combs and hairbrushes, and one million articles of clothing are displayed there. Most of the Jews’ belongings had already long been expropriated and used by the Nazis, but these were left behind when the guards fled the Russians in January 1945. Seven tons of human hair were left, which otherwise would have been used in the German textile industry. Suitcases, of which there are thousands upon thousands in enormous piles, were chalked with the name and birthdates of their owners, such as ‘Klement Hedwig 8/10/1898’. When the prams were taken away from Auschwitz, in rows of five rolling towards the railway station, it took an hour for them all to pass.47 Writing to SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl in January 1943 about ‘the material and goods taken over from the Jews, that is, the emigration of the Jews’, Himmler even went into detail about what would happen to the crystals to be found in their watches, because in warehouses in Warsaw ‘hundreds of thousands – perhaps even millions – are lying there, which for practical purposes could be distributed to the German watchmakers’.48 On another occasion he (at least temporarily) saved five Jewish diamond jewellers from extermination because of their expertise in fashioning the Reich’s highest decoration, the Knight’s Cross with oak leaves and diamonds, which was only ever awarded to twenty-seven people.49
On 14 September 1942, Albert Speer authorized 13.7 million Reichsmarks to be spent on building huts and killing facilities at Birkenau as fast as possible.50 Four gas chambers, numbered I to IV, were