The author is a historian and chairman of the Slovak anti-fascist movement.
The commentary is published on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
Of course, much is written and talked about the Holocaust. These tragic events must be constantly remembered. The historian is faced with the question of how to talk about these beastly events. It is best, in my opinion, to use the statements of people who witnessed this greatest racial murder in history.
Its intensity and literally industrial precision caused consternation after the end of the war. The Nazis many times without personal remorse and actually just “following orders” murdered thousands of people and, unfortunately, found active collaborators among the members of the occupied and satellite nations within Europe.
The bullet holocaust was too expensive
Mass executions took place on the territory of the Soviet Union even before the Wannsee Conference, at which the final solution to the Jewish question was decided in January 1942. The most terrible tragedy happened in the Babyn Jar gorge, which is now part of Kyiv.
On September 29 and 30, 1941, Nazi commandos murdered a total of 33,771 persons of Jewish origin, including the elderly, women and children, with firearms. However, it turned out that shooting victims was ineffective for the Nazis.
According to the evaluation, it was said to be expensive and, in addition, it had an effect on the psyche of the killers. This phase is usually called the bullet holocaust. It occurred throughout the occupied territory of the Soviet Union. Apparently, these experiences also led to the aforementioned Wannsee conference being convened.
Gas cars were the new way of murdering racially inconvenient people. They were trucks with a cabin into which a hose was introduced through which exhaust gases flowed into the cargo area. However, in a letter from the head of the security police and SD Ostland, Haptsturmführer Truhess, it is said that even this method was not suitable for the Nazis:
“Transports with Jews, who are to be subjected to a special way of treatment, arrive every week at the command of the commander of the security police and security service of Belarus. The three gas cars that are there are not enough for this purpose. Please send one more gas car (five ton). At the same time, please send us 20 gas pipes for the three cars we have here, because the pipes we have are already leaking gas.”
Furthermore, the exhaust fumes did not kill all the victims loaded into the trucks. The Nazis shot the survivors, which reportedly caused them psychological problems again. Based on these “experiences” and the ineffectiveness of such methods of murder, the Nazis invented extermination concentration camps.
Leather for lamp shades
These were conceived as death factories and most of them were placed on the territory of occupied Poland. Even today, their names are synonymous with racial hatred and the mass liquidation of people whom the Nazis considered inferior. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek, Chelmno, Sobibor and Malý Trosinec on the territory of Belarus.
As evidenced by Hans Frank’s diary entry on August 24, 1942, the situation became significantly radicalized after Wansee:
“The fact that we are condemning 1,200,000 Jews to death by starvation needs to be mentioned only in passing. It goes without saying that if the Jews do not die of hunger, we hope that this will happen as a result of the activation of anti-Jewish measures.”
So, if not death by starvation in a large number of ghettos on the territory of occupied Poland, then liquidation in camps equipped with gas chambers. Certainly the most famous murderer in Auschwitz-Birkenau was the doctor Josef Mengele, who performed inhumane experiments on twins.
However, atrocities were committed by many SS men, including women. Among these female beasts was Ilse Koch, the wife of the Buchenwald camp commandant. Buchenwald concentration camp guard Andreas Pfaffenberger testified at her trial:
“After the inspection of the tattooed prisoners, those of them who had the most interesting and artistically made tattoos were placed in the hospital and there they were killed by injections given to them by Karol Baigs, an ordinary convict. The bodies were then transferred to the hospital morgue, where pieces of tattooed skin were excised and processed. The leather thus processed was given to Standertenf’s wifeüHerr Koch, who used these pieces of leather as lampshades and other decorations in her house.’
It might seem that it is difficult to imagine anything worse. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The French witness before the international tribunal in Nuremberg, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, testified about the treatment of pregnant women:
“They performed abortions on Jewish women who came to the camp in the first months of pregnancy. Women in the last months of pregnancy were allowed to give birth to children, but then they drowned the newborn in a bucket of water.”
A specialist in killing little boys
Gradually, the transports of Jews from all over occupied Europe, but also from the satellite states, intensified. New and new trains of victims arrived in the camps, and the killers decided how to eliminate as many victims as possible. According to the testimony of the Polish witness Seweryna Szmaglewska, before the international tribunal in Nuremberg:
“At the time when the Jews were exterminated the most in the gas chambers, an order was issued that children should be thrown into the crematorium ovens or into the crematorium pit without first being suffocated with gas…. Children were thrown alive. The screams of these children could be heard throughout the camp… about the number of children murdered (we imagined) according to the number of prams that were handed over to the warehouse. Sometimes it was a hundred, sometimes a thousand (daily).”
I realize that this is difficult reading, but I believe that these atrocities need to be talked about objectively and openly. Of course, after the end of the war, there were investigations into these mass extermination actions. The Polish investigating judge Zdzislaw Lukaszewicz said about the murder in Treblinka:
“In order to fit more victims into the chambers, people were driven in with their hands raised and small children were thrown on their heads. SS officer Sepp Heitreider was a specialist in killing little boys, whom he took by the legs and killed by banging their heads against the fence.
Finding the objective truth about the number of murdered is difficult. At the end of the war, the Nazis did everything to erase all possible traces of these inhuman acts. Of course, it was not possible, and after all, even the implementers themselves testified about their deeds at the trials.
The Polish government’s central report on the Auschwitz concentration camp states that “during July 1944, they murdered up to 12,000 Hungarian Jews per day, and since the crematorium could not absorb such a large number of bodies, they threw them into deep pits and covered them with quicklime.”
Written testimony from the deposition of Wilhelm Hottl, Deputy Gruppenführer of the Foreign Section of the Security Administration (RSHA) states that
“about four million Jews were murdered in various concentration camps. In the same period, about two million Jews were murdered in other ways. A large part of them were shot by operational groups of the security police during the campaign against Russia…”
The testimony of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, confirms that “I believe that at least 2,500,000 victims were killed and executed there in gas chambers and by burning, and that at least another half a million people died of hunger and disease.”
This statement coincides with what was published by Slovak prisoners Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, who managed to escape from the Birkenau concentration camp in April 1944 and shocked the world public with their report.
And that was the news about the killing in one camp. It is noteworthy that the representatives of the then Slovak state also took part in this genocide. More than 70,000 of our Jewish fellow citizens did not survive this racial hysteria.
Dieter Wisliceny, the Nazi adviser for solving the Jewish question in Slovakia, stated in Nuremberg: „…the first 17,000 transported Jewish workers were followed by another 35,000 Jews, namely entire families… Some of them remained alive, especially those who could be used for work. The others were exterminated.“
Wisliceny spoke here about the first wave of deportations from March to October 1942. The then President of the Slovak State, Jozef Tiso, in a letter to Pope Pius XII. On October 8, 1944, he wrote: „The government of the Slovak Republic did not carry out incriminated actions against Czechs and Jews because of their national or racial affiliation, but out of the obligation to defend their nation from the enemy…“
When the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on January 27, 1944, they found the rest of the impoverished and ungovernable prisoners there. The rest were dragged off by the Nazis on death marches. Before, it was enough to blow up the gas chambers.
The first reports were considered by many to be Soviet propaganda. It wasn’t like that. Allied troops also gradually liberated the concentration camps, and the atrocities of the Nazis came to light. Even today, we cannot be silent about them. It is said that you can forgive, but it doesn’t pay to forget.
