Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949 by David Cesarani

Author:David Cesarani [Cesarani, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780230771758
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2016-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

The war economy and the expansion of Auschwitz

The concentration camp outside the Polish town of Oswieçim in Upper Silesia, renamed Auschwitz following the German conquest of Poland, became a nodal point for the exploitation of labour by the SS and a focus of Himmler’s ambitions to create an industrial empire. For all that, it did not impinge on the fate of the Jews until spring 1942. Then, for about six months, Jews from several countries were sent there for slave labour at the same time as it was used as a place to kill local Jews, mainly from East Upper Silesia, who were deemed surplus to the workforce. In July 1942 the much expanded camp was haphazardly integrated into the ‘final solution’. Throughout the second half of the year, the extension camp at Birkenau was employed as a site for improvised mass murder while purpose-built killing facilities were being constructed. However, as with so many of his grandiose plans, Himmler’s aspirations for Auschwitz took an inordinately long time to realize and when they reached maturity it looked as though the moment for them had passed.122

Auschwitz was conceived as a concentration camp in which to detain and terrorize Poles. It was the brainchild of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, when he was an SS police leader in occupied Poland in late 1939. One of his assistants located what seemed to be the ideal setting for a terror camp: a vacant Polish army barracks just outside the town, adjacent to a railway line and close to a junction with the main Katowice–Cracow railway. However, there were disadvantages: the buildings were in poor repair, the surrounding land was marshy, and both the sewage disposal system and fresh water supply were inadequate. In January 1940, Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, led the last of several SS commissions to survey the site. He approved it. Three months later, Himmler appointed Höss to command the new establishment and it took all his drive plus ingenuity to obtain the necessary materials to complete the job. Höss did not lack for labour, though: he used 300 Jews from the town to do much of the heavy manual work. After that was completed, the Jews were banished; not a single Jew set foot inside Auschwitz concentration camp for almost two years. Instead, it was soon packed with Polish political prisoners who endured the customary SS camp regimen of pettifogging rules enforced by extreme violence. Höss brought with him from Sachsenhausen thirty veteran prisoners, criminals, who served as the core of the internal prisoner administration, the kapos. They ensured that life in the camp was brutish and miserable.123

At this stage, Auschwitz consisted of twenty two-storey brick barracks to hold the prisoners, plus wooden stables and a former tobacco warehouse. The barracks complex was enclosed by barbed wire and entered through a gate that was topped off with a curvaceous wrought-iron sign announcing ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, ‘work is liberating’. As more prisoners arrived, the parade ground was partially built over and the enclosure became crowded with additional structures.

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