More Nazi info for you, Len. Be sure to point out any parts you believe to be falsified, OK.
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Chelmno and Operation Reinhard
Source:
Konnilyn Feig, Hitler's Death Camps, New York, Holmes and Meier, 1981.
Before the Nazis developed the killing centers and extermination camps, they used the Einsatzgruppen to kill the Jews and other undesirables. But those massacres showed that there were glaring problems inherent in the extermination of masses of people, among them were the need of speed, efficient and complete body removal, secrecy, and disposal of belongings. Killing centers, however, provided both expediency and secrecy, and the later extermination camps made possible the full range of physical and psychological abuse that the Nazis wished to employ in the destruction of the undesirables.
Himmler designed the killing centers exclusively as places of secret and instant death. Today there is widespread misunderstanding and ignorance about the four killing centers, which were all on isolated occupied Polish territory and had short histories. Writers often confuse the centers with the camps. Very few people survived the centers, and those who did have seldom written about them; almost nothing remains of the centers; few people have visited them; all are located deep in rural Poland, and the Polish government would like them to remain obscure because they are reminders of a separate form of dying for Jews -- these factors all contribute to the confusion. The key to understanding is that the killing centers were only killing centers -- they had no other function. The prisoners there did not die on the way to death -- they were killed.
In 1941 Himmler called in his gassing specialist, Christian Wirth, known as the Technocrat of Destruction, and ordered him to design and implement an extermination program with Chelmno as the pilot project. Sometime in 1941 Hitler gave the verbal order for the Final Solution, treating it as a secret of the highest order. Hitler and Himmler created Operation Reinhard -- the camouflage term for the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka program -- under the command of Odilo Globocnik. Instead of reporting to the SS-WVHA, as did Majdanek, Auschwitz, and other concentration camps, Operation Reinhard reported to the office of the Fuhrer -- the Reich Chancellery Office. Although keeping the control of the program close to him, Hitler delegated responsibility for the practical aspects to Himmler. The staff turned to the euthanasia program (T-4) for ideas and trained personnel. They selected the sites and sent out construction teams. T-4 construction workers helped with the buildings. And high-level T-4 personnel came to the centers after the revolts to deliver funeral operations for their fallen SS comrades.
Operation Reinhard German camp workers were not told of the program goals and their precise duties until they reached the centers. Upon their arrival the SS officers oriented them by comparing center goals with the euthanasia program, which was very familiar to the workers. Then the SS swore them to absolute secrecy. Each worker signed a pledge that contained the following commitments:
1. I have been instructed that under no circumstances will I discuss with anyone outside or with co-workers anything dealing with the operation
2. I understand the top secrecy of any of the occurences of the so-called "Jewish Relocation"
3. I may not take any pictures
4. I promise to keep my word to the best of my ability
5. I understand that after completion of my service, this oath of secrecy will still apply [footnote 38]
Operation Reinhard issued in a new phase of mass murder. Himmler replaced the mobile killing units with stationary death factories, and the gas chamber period began. The authorities had no intention of accomodating prisoners in the killing centers for any length of time -- they exterminated them almost immediately upon arrival. Administrative structures were very simple. Because the centers were never linked to the war effort, only minimal industrial activity existed. And most inmates or transients were Jews, although there were some Polish Christians.
The Nazis built Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka, and Chelmno as killing centers for the sole purpose of extermination the Jews of Europe and as many Gypsies as could be found. All four were constructed on Polish soil primarily because of the widespread Polish railway system, which had stations in the smallest towns. In addition, the Polish countryside, which was densely forested and thinly populated, made secrecy possible. Not one killing center existed longer than seventeen months. The SS obliterated each of them, intending to remove all traces. Polish scholars estimate conservatively that in these four camps, 2,000,000 Jews and 52,000 Gypsies, one third of whom were children, were killed. Yes, the concentration camps had their gas vans, their gas chambers, their crematoria, and their mass graves. People were shot in them, given injections, gassed, and hundreds of thousands died of starvation and disease. But even in Birkenau, where some have estimated that 1,000,000 Jews were killed, there was a chance of life. In the killing centers the only inmates kept alive for a short time were those selected to process the bodies of their fellow Jews.
First came Chelmno -- the pilot extermination project -- rude and crude, conferring death by three gas vans, borrowed from the Eastern Front. No crematoria, just mass graves in the woods. Chelmno exemplified extermination in the primitive style. Then came Belzec with its diesel-run gas chambers, which were inefficient and time consuming, and its primitive open-pit burning to dispose of the bodies. Sobibor, in a small and obscure corner of Poland, was next. It too had gas chambers and mass graves.
And finally came Treblinka. Learning from the mistakes at the other three, Nazis were here able to construct an unusually efficient destruction instrument that managed to destroy the lives and bodies of 1,000,000 human beings in only twelve months -- a truely monsterous carnage. In order to create a killing center with such efficiency, it was necessary to invent the killing machinery and process. And for that, the SS technicians and experts had no precedents on which to rely. They had to depend on original thinking to accomplish the task. It was at Treblinka that the technicians finally triumphed over the insurmountable difficulties of secretly destroying the lives, bodies, and posessions of huge numbers of people in a short period of time [footnote 39].
After the Solibor Revolt, Himmler ordered the centers closed. He sent the German camp personnal to the Trieste area on the Adriatic Coast, to continue the operation there. Assigned to a group known as the Arm Unit, the men's task was to carry out the technical preparation for the mass killing of Jews in that area. In a rice factory near Trieste they set up a burning facility. Partesian activity, however, made program implementation impossible. On November 4, 1943, Globocnik wrote to Himmler from Trieste: "I have on Oct. 19, 1943 completed Action Reinhard and closed all the camps." He asked for special medals for his men in recognition of their "specially difficult task." Himmler responded warmly to "Globos" on November 30, 1943, thanking him for carrying out Operation Reinhard. By the end of the war, partesians had killed Wirth and Sobibor Commandant Reichleitner, Globocnik commited suicide" [footnote 40].
[38] Ruckerl, 120-126; oath 125-126
[39] Ruckerl, NS-Prozesse, 35-42
[40] Ruckerl, 130-131
Footnotes' source:
Ruckerl, Adalbert, hrsq.; NS-Prozesse. Karlsruhe: Verlag C. F. Muller, 1972
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Deposition of Walter Burmeister
Gas-van Driver, Chelmno Extermination Camp
Source:
Klee, E., W. Dressen, V. Riess. The Good Old Days. New York: The Free Press, 1988, pp 219-220.
"As soon as the ramp had been erected in the castle, people started arriving in Kulmhof from Lizmannstadt in lorries... The people were told that they had to take a bath, that their clothes had to be disinfected and that they could hand in any valuable items beforehand to be registered...
When they had undressed they were sent to the cellar of the castle and then along a passageway on to the ramp and from there into the gas-van. In the castle there were signs marked "to the baths". The gas vans were large vans, about 4-5 meters long, 2.2 meter wide and 2 meter high. The interior walls were lined with sheet metal. On the floor there was a wooden grille. The floor of the van had an opening which could be connected to the exhaust by means of a removable metal pipe. When the lorries were full of people the double doors at the back were closed and the exhaust connected to the interior of the van...
The Kommando member detailed as driver would start the engine right away so that the people inside the lorry were suffocated by the exhaust gases. Once this had taken place, the union between the exhaust and the inside of the lorry was disconnected and the van was driven to the camp in the woods were the bodies were unloaded. In the early days they were initially burned in mass graves, later incinerated... I then drove the van back to the castle and parked it there. Here it would be cleaned of the excretions of the people that had died in it. Afterwards it would once again be used for gassing...
I can no longer say what I thought at the time or whether I thought of anything at all. I can also no longer say today whether I was too influenced by the propaganda of the time to have refused to have carried out the orders I had been given."
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Deposition of Theodor Malzmueller
Member of SS staff, Chelmno Extermination Camp
Source:
Klee, E., W. Dressen, V. Riess. The Good Old Days. New York: The Free Press, 1988, pp 217-219.
"When we arrived we had to report to the camp commandant, SS-Hauptsturmfuehrer Bothmann. The SS-Haupsturmfuehrer addressed us in his living quarters, in the presence of SS-Untersturmfuehrer Albert Plate. He explained that we had been dedicated to the Kulmhof [Chelmno] extermination camp as guards and added that in this camp the plague boils of humanity, the Jews, were exterminated. We were to keep quiet about everything we saw or heard, otherwise we would have to reckon with our families' imprisonment and the death penalty...<>p> The extermination camp was made up of the so-called "castle" and the camp in the woods. The castle was a fairly large stone building at the edge of the village of Kulmhof. It was there that the Jews who had been transported by lorry or railway were first brought...
When a lorry arrived the following members of the SS-Sonderkommando addresses the Jews: (1) camp commandant Bothmann, (2) Untersturmfuehrer Albert Plate from North Germany, (3) Polizei-Meister Willy Lenz from Silesia, (4) Polizei-Meister Alois Haeberle from Wuerttenberg. They explained to the Jews that they would first of all be given a bath and deloused in Kulmhof and then sent to Germany to work. The Jews then went inside the castle. There they had to get undressed. After this they were sent through a passage-way on to a ramp to the castle yard where the so-called "gas-van" was parked. The back door of the van would be open. The Jews were made to get inside the van. This job was done by three Poles, who I believe were sentenced to death. The Poles hit the Jews with whips if they did not get into the gas vans fast enough. When all the Jews were inside the door was bolted. The driver then switched on the engine, crawled under the van and connected a pipe from the exhaust to the inside of the van. The exhaust fumes now poured into the inside of the truck so that the people inside were suffocated..."
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