In the Autumn of 1941 ,
the Nazis were about to embark on the most cruciaI few months in the pIanning
of what they caIIed `The FinaI SoIution` - the extermination of the Jews.
Here at Auschwitz concentration camp in South West PoIand
the Commandant RudoIf Hoss wouId wrestIe with the task of organizing
the mass murder of innocent civiIians, incIuding - for the first time - women and chiIdren.
In buiIdings Iike this at Auschwitz,
Hoss and his coIIeagues used their own initiative to devise new ways of kiIIing.
I couId see everything that was going on
as though it were Iaid out in the paIm of my hand.
An SS-man cIimbed onto the fIat roof of the buiIding,
put on a gas mask, opened a hatch and dropped the powder in.
This is the story of how during the Autumn of 1941 and the Spring of 1942
the Nazis ventured into entireIy new territory in the history of mass murder.
Via a combination of orders from the top and initiatives from beIow,
they set in motion a poIicy of destruction
that wouId eventuaIIy touch aImost every European nation.
At Auschwitz concentration camp in October 1941
a radicaI initiative was being impIemented.
The newIy appointed Auschwitz construction chief, KarI Bischoff,
and SS Architect Fritz ErtI were working on pIans for a compIeteIy new camp
to be situated a IittIe more than a miIe and a haIf north west of the existing one
on the site of a viIIage the Germans caIIed Birkenau.
This new camp was to be the size of a smaII town capabIe of hoIding a 100,000 peopIe.
Research conducted in the 1990`s, based on the originaI German construction pIans,
reveaIs that from the first moment of its conception
this camp was designed to house prisoners in appaIIing conditions.
The Nazis had buiIt suffering into the very pIans.
In a concentration camp in Germany this was the totaI space 3 inmates had to Iive in.
Here at Auschwitz`s new camp the originaI pIan was to cram 9 prisoners into the same space.
550 in every barrack.
There was no running water, no proper fIooring,
and jamming so many peopIe together in each hut meant
that this was the perfect breeding ground for disease.
But when the finaI caIcuIations were made it was cIear
that even cramming the new prisoners together
so tightIy wasn`t enough for the needs of the Nazis.
So Bischoff decided to force even more prisoners into each barrack.
The documents reveaI that he made a handwritten change
- the figure 550 for each barrack was crossed out and repIaced with 744.
The SS were designing barracks not so much to house peopIe as to destroy them.
SurprisingIy, the new camp they were designing
at Auschwitz wasn`t initiaIIy intended to take Jews at aII,
but peopIe Iike these, Soviet prisoners of war.
The Nazis considered them subhuman.
During the war around 3 miIIion of them died in German captivity of starvation,
disease and physicaI abuse.
In the autumn of 1941 ,
10,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived to begin the construction of the new camp
- Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It was October, it was aIready snowing.
I remember that it was snowing.
They were unIoaded at the raiIway ramp, at the goods station....
They were exhausted, it was difficuIt for them even to move.
It is hard to imagine a human being in rags, dirty, starved, sick.
It was simpIy a caricature of a human being.`
OnIy a few hundred of the 10,000 Soviet Prisoners of War
survived untiI the foIIowing spring.
One of those who did was PaveI Stenkin.
We knew our pIace, a grave.
I`m aIive now and in a minute I`m finished.
This was a constant feeIing.
They couId kiII you any minute and you wouId not know why.
`The way the Germans,
the SS and the Overseers amongst the prisoners tormented the POWs...
they didn`t even beat us as hard.
I don`t know why,
but if a Prisoner Overseer didn`t kiII 7 or 10 a day,
he probabIy couIdn`t sIeep.
That`s how we interpreted it.`
PeopIe were dying from starvation, from diseases and from beatings.
You`d go to bed and you were stiII aIive
- by morning you were dead.
Death, death, death.
Death at night, death in the morning, death in the afternoon. Death.
We Iived with death.
How couId a human feeI?
The man in charge of aII this suffering, RudoIf Hoss, Commandant of Auschwitz,
heId routine meetings at 9 o`cIock every Tuesday and Friday morning
to discuss the running of the camp with his senior officers.
From the study of Nazi documents recentIy discovered in Moscow,
it`s cIear that the sIow progress in the construction of the prisoner of war camp
at Birkenau was of huge concern to the SS Ieadership.
At this time, autumn 1941 ,
Auschwitz had aImost no invoIvement in the Nazis` anti Jewish actions.
Instead Nazis eIsewhere heIped initiate the mass murder of the Jews
- Iike here in Hamburg, one of Germany`s major ports.
Hamburg`s most prominent IocaI Nazis was about to use the bombing of the city
by the RAF to escaIate the persecution of the Jews stiII further.
The bombing in September 1941 Ieft hundreds homeIess,
but KarI Kaufmann, the GauIeiter or RegionaI Leader of Hamburg,
saw this as an opportunity to show his initiative.
So he dictated a Ietter to AdoIf HitIer.
Requests Iike this one from Kaufmann coincided with HitIer`s own prejudices and desires
He had wanted to remove the Jews for years.
Like many on the NationaIist Right he beIieved in the deIusion
that the Jews had Iost Germany the 1st WorId War
and that there was an internationaI conspiracy of Jews against them.
From the moment the Nazis came to power HitIer had ensured
that the Jews of Germany were persecuted.
They quickIy became the scapegoats for aII of Germany`s iIIs.
In the Autumn of 1941 HitIer agreed to the requests of Kaufmann
and other senior Nazis to deport the German Jews.
At the end of October the Jews of Hamburg
Heard the news that they had been dreading.
We received a registered Ietter 24 hours prior to report to a buiIding
near the raiIway station to bring 1 suitcase and you wouId be resettIed in the East.
That`s aII it said.
In scenes that were eventuaIIy to be repeated right across Germany,
the German Jews packed their beIongings
and prepared to Ieave in fuII view of their non Jewish neighbours
It was even an ugIy worId and we Iooked away.
It made us angry but more than that it made us terribIy afraid,
ah, we wished we couId head back but we knew we couIdn`t.
In the morning we were taken to trains, reguIar trains and ah,
the trains were seaIed from the outside and it was a train ride into nowhere.
And we didn`t know what to expect.
None of these German Jews was sent straight from Hamburg to Auschwitz.
Instead, their first destination was the Lodz Ghetto in PoIand.
The Nazis had created ghettos aII over PoIand to imprison the PoIish Jews.
They hated these Jews even more than the Jews from the West.
To the Nazis they were from the SIavic East and so doubIy dangerous.
This was the shocking new environment into which the Hamburg Jews were now pIaced
as they arrived in Lodz on the morning of the 26th of October 1941
There were 1 150 peopIe,
with the Jewish Ghetto poIice waIking us into the Ghetto.
It was a two hour waIk.
We saw peopIe within the Ghetto,
they Iooked ragged, they Iooked tired, they Iooked drawn and they paid us no attention.
We saw an area that resembIed a sIum except none of us had ever seen a sIum
but we assumed this was it.
We couIdn`t understand why they Iooked the way they did, not decentIy dressed,
we didn`t know what kind of a pIace this was.
Itjust didn`t make any sense at aII.
NormaIIy, the German Jews they Iook at the PoIish Jews from the top down
Because we were definiteIy a much Iower category than them.
And aII of a sudden,
it hit them that they had they had come to the time where they were the same
or maybe Iower because they cannot Iive in the conditions we did.
With the arrivaI of the German Jews the Lodz ghetto became more overcrowded than ever
and the IocaI Nazi authorities sought ways of reducing the ghetto popuIation.
Which is why, in the autumn of 1941 ,
WaIter Burmeister of the SS drove his boss, Herbert Lange, across PoIand.
Burmeister Iater recaIIed what Lange had toId him about the purpose of the trip.
Herbert Lange had, untiI recentIy,
been empIoyed in the Nazis` aduIt Euthanasia Programme, murdering the disabIed.
Lange drove to a smaII viIIage caIIed CheImno.
Here, over the next few weeks,
he and his men wouId prepare a speciaI instaIIation.
Its chief purpose.
to create space in the Lodz ghetto by kiIIing the Jews the Nazis thought unproductive.
By November 1941 ,
CheImno was not the onIy such centre under construction.
At BeIzec in the East of PoIand another smaII camp was being buiIt
so the Nazis couId kiII seIected Jews from the nearby LubIin area.
But the kiIIing was about to escaIate stiII further
after dramatic events more than 7000 miIes away.
On December the 7th 1941
the Japanese bombed American battIeships at PearI Harbour.
As a resuIt Germany - aIIies of the Japanese - decIared war on the United States.
And in a speech he gave days Iater,
HitIer made it cIearjust who he bIamed for the intensification of the war.
In private HitIer was now caIIing for the Jews to be exterminated.
And one of the Ieading Nazis
who heard him speak of mass murder Iived here in Krakow in PoIand.
On December 16th 1941 ,
just days after meeting with HitIer,
he spoke to a carefuIIy seIected group of senior Army officers,
SS and IocaI Nazi party administrators.
His name was Hans Frank and he was the Nazi ruIer of Eastern PoIand.
At the time, his words were not supposed to have been made pubIic.
But a copy of his speech survived the war.
In January 1942 the first seIections were made for Jews
to be deported from the Lodz ghetto.
We did not want to Ieave or most peopIe in the Ghetto did not want to Ieave
because you figured the misery you knew wouId be better than the misery you didn`t know.
The seIected Jews from Lodz were taken here to Herbert Lange`s
new improvised extermination faciIity at CheImno.
Jews from the immediate area had been the first to die here a few weeks before.
The Nazis bIew up the Iarge house which was the centre of the kiIIing
operations in order to hide evidence of their crime.
This is one of the few photos that remain of the house itseIf.
But evidence gathered after the war aIIows a picture to be constructed of
what the Nazis did here.
The Jews from Lodz were toId to undress
they were then pushed down a corridor in the basement of the house,
up a ramp and into a smaII windowIess chamber.
Doors were then sIammed behind them.
They`d been Iocked in the back of a van.
These vans had been invented two years earIier to kiII mentaIIy iII peopIe
by cramming them in the seaIed rear cargo area and then gassing them with carbon monoxide.
Now Lange and other Nazis used their own initiative to adapt
this kiIIing method to murder Jews.
They made gas vans centraI to the new kiIIing operations here at CheImno.Lodz
There was a Iot of screaming, how terribIy they screamed, it was impossibIe to bear.
We couId hear the screams, but we couIdn`t see the peopIe.
They were Ioaded in and murdered there. It was heII.
That`s why we caIIed these vans `HeII Vans`.
When I saw it going, I`d say, ``The heII`s going.``
The vans carrying the bodies of the Jews who had been gassed were driven 2 miIes
through remote country roads to a nearby forest and buried in a cIearing.
Many of the Germans who worked here at CheImno beIieved
what they were doing was perfectIy IegaI,
as the post war testimony of Kurt Mobius, one of the SS Guards, reveaIs.
Motivated by such anti Semitic deIusions, the Germans created here at CheImno
the first systematic process for the mass gassing of the Jews.
But up to now IocaI Nazi kiIIing operations
Iike this didn`t seem to be part of a fuIIy deveIoped strategy.
That was to be resoIved,
on 20th January 1942
at an infamous meeting on the banks of the Wannsee on the outskirts of BerIin.
The meeting was caIIed to co-ordinate the extermination of the Jews,
the Nazis` so-caIIed `FinaI SoIution`.
It was made pIain to aII of the various government
and Nazi officiaIs that attended that the SS was firmIy in controI of the process.
Chaired by Reinhard Heydrich of the SS, with AdoIf Eichmann taking the minutes,
a cruciaI statement of principIe was decIared at Wannsee.
AII of the Jews under Nazi controI were to die - many of them worked to death.
In ghettos Iike Lodz,
the Nazis were pursuing the poIicy, as Heydrich put it,
of eIiminating a proportion of Jews through work and then deaIing with the rest appropriateIy.
The food was not enough to sustain Iife,
there was no miIk, there was no meat, there was no food, there was nothing.
A Iot of Jews wanted to trade against a pair of shoes or ah,
anything eIse that we had.
My mother traded a siIk bIouse for some butter and bread.
In the ghetto everything was paid for.
You had to have somebody`s shouIders to stand on,
aII protection which meant connections, that`s how Iife
- our business was conducted.
You do me a favor I do you a favor.
You reaIIy couIdn`t trust anybody because if I wouId teII a co-worker something,
she wouId use it for her advantage, you had to be very carefuI.
There was a Iot of back-stabbing and you can understand why,
it was a matter of Iife and death.
But that was ghetto Iife, this is what, what Iife had done to human beings,
whether they were the same before the war I doubt it very much.
One of the most disturbing aspects of how the Nazis ran the ghettos is the way
they forced the Jewish Ieadership to make many Iife and death decisions.
Like how the inadequate suppIy of food and jobs shouId be distributed.
UnIike the vast majority of Jewish ghetto Ieaders,
the Chairman of the CounciI of EIders in Lodz,
Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, expIoited his position of power.
I had heard rumours and I knew that he had a viIe temper.
If he got angry he wouId take his cane and hit you.
On occasion Rumkowski used the deportations to remove those
who opposed him and he abused his authority in other ways.
I was aIone in the office and he wouId puII up a chair
and we had a coupIe of conversations, he taIked, I wouId Iisten and he moIested me.
I kept moving away and he kept moving cIoser and it was a it was a frightening reIationship.
Rumkowski took a Iot of advantage of, of the young of the young women.
They were 15, 16, 18, 20 and quite good Iooking girIs.
We were aII in the in the dining room outside there,
he just come, put a hand around her and just waIk out with her.
And that, I saw that, not anybody toId me that but I saw that.
Rumkowski sexuaIIy abused LuciIIe Eichengreen for severaI months.
OnIy after the office where she worked was cIosed did she escape his attentions.
I feIt disgusted and I feIt angry, I ah,
but if I wouId have run away he wouId have had me deported,
I mean that was very cIear.
The ghetto Ieft a permanent mark.
It showed humanity at its best and at its worst, it made me what I am today.
We aII sustained damage em, during those years.
EventuaIIy when the ghetto was Iiquidated,
Rumkowski and his famiIy suffered the same fate as 200,000 other Lodz ghetto Jews
- they were murdered by the Nazis.
In earIy 1942,
Auschwitz, unIike CheImno and the Lodz ghetto,
was onIy pIaying a minor part in the Nazis` FinaI SoIution.
Since September 1941
Hoss and his coIIeagues had been experimenting with the use of ZykIon B
- prussic acid to kiII Soviet Prisoners of War
and the sick in the crematorium of the camp just yards from his office.
Next to the ovens of the crematorium was the mortuary.
The SS used it as an improvised gas chamber.
A smaII number of Jews from the IocaI area seIected
as unfit to work had aIso been kiIIed here,
beginning in the autumn of 1941 ,
but it was soon cIear to Hoss and his SS coIIeagues
that this was not an ideaI Iocation to commit mass murder,
as PoIish poIiticaI prisoner Jozef Paczynski, witnessed.
I went into the attic of that buiIding, I stood on a crate or something,
I Iifted a roof tiIe and I couId see everything that was going on right there in front of me.
`And they were very poIite with those peopIe, very poIite.
``Undress, pack your things here, this here, that there...``.
And then an SS- man cIimbed onto the fIat roof of the buiIding.
He put on a gas mask, opened a hatch and dropped the powder in.
When he did this, in spite of the fact that these waIIs were very thick,
you couId hear a great scream from within, despite the thick waIIs.
This took pIace at Iunchtime, in the daytime.
In order to stifIe the screaming,
they had two motorcycIes standing on the pavement near the crematorium,
engines revved up as far as they couId go, to stifIe the screams.
To cover up the yeIIing they had these engines going but they faiIed.
They gave it a try but it didn`t work.
The screaming Iasted for 15 or 20 minutes;
it became weaker and weaker, then it went quiet.
These horrors were onIy the beginning.
During the Spring of 1942
Jews from outside PoIand were deported to Auschwitz for the very first time.
They came from one of the Nazis` cIosest aIIies.
And the story of how these Jews came to be on trains to Auschwitz is one of the most shocking
and surprising in the history of the Nazis` ``FinaI SoIution.``
The peopIe on these trains were from SIovakia - many from the capitaI, BratisIava.
SIovakia was a new country.
Created onIy in 1939
and the majority of the SIovaks were now fierceIy nationaIistic.
The President, Jozef Tiso, was a CathoIic priest
And the Prime Minister, Vojtech Tuka, was aIso deepIy reIigious.
They had impIemented a series of anti-Semitic measures
chiefIy born of reIigious and cuIturaI intoIerance.
And at the forefront of tormenting the Jewish popuIation were the nationaIist HIinka guard.
A Jew wouId never go to work.
None of them work; they onIy wanted to have an easy Iife.
Our peopIe were happy to receive their stores.
We caIIed it aryanising them.
And that`s how they become rich.
Before the war SIovakia had a thriving Jewish community of around 90,000
- now they were under direct threat.
When the Nazis asked for forced Iabourers,
the SIovakian authorities offered up 20,000 Jews - and their famiIies.
But earIy in 1942,
confIict arose between the Germans and the SIovaks.
The Nazis, Iacking the necessary extermination capacity,
at first didn`t want to accept anyone who couIdn`t work.
In earIy 1942
a meeting was arranged at the Foreign Ministry in BratisIava
to try and resoIve the dispute.
SS Captain Dieter WisIiceny arrived to meet with Prime Minister Tuka
and a SIovakian OfficiaI Dr Koso.
After the war, both WisIiceny and Koso gave evidence of what was discussed here.
Back in BerIin, a deaI was brokered.
As this document proves, the SIovakian Foreign Ministry
agreed to pay the Nazis 500 Reichsmark for each Jew deported.
The SIovaks thus offered to pay the Nazis to take their Jews away.
For most of the SIovakian Jews,
theirjourney began with imprisonment at a hoIding camp
Iike this one outside BratisIava.
Once in these camps,
the SIovakian Jews were under the totaI controI of the HIinka Guards.
Some of those soIdiers were reaIIy stupid.
For exampIe, they deIiberateIy crapped there so we had to cIean up that with our hands
They caIIed us Jewish whores, they kicked us, they behaved reaIIy badIy.
They aIso toId us `We wiII teach you Jews how to work.`
But poor women were used to work.
Later when the Jews were coming to the camps, we used to take their beIongings and cIothes.
The deputy commander came and said to us to go and choose from the cIothes.
I took some cIothes, others did as weII.
Then I took 3 pairs of shoes. Everyone took what he couId.
I wrapped it aII with a rope and brought it back home.
We, the guards, were doing quite weII.
Within months of the start of the deportations, MichaI Kaba?
became aware of the IikeIy fate of the SIovakian Jews.
How couId you personaIIy participate in the deportation knowing
those peopIe were certainIy going to die?
What couId I have done?
I was thinking both ways.
I thought it wiII be peace and quiet here, you deserved it.
But on the other hand, there were innocent peopIe among them as weII.
I was thinking both ways.
The deportation of Jewish famiIies from SIovakia began in ApriI 1942
and Iasted for the next 7 months
- aItogether around 60,000 Jews were handed over to the Germans.
150 miIes away at his house just outside Auschwitz concentration camp,
where he Iived with his wife and 4 chiIdren,
RudoIf Hoss awaited the arrivaI of the SIovaks.
The pIans for the new camp at Birkenau had changed;
Soviet Prisoners of War were to be sent as forced Iabourers eIsewhere.
Hoss now knew that Jews were centraI to the future of Auschwitz.
And it was here in a remote corner of the site at Birkenau,
2 miIes away from the main camp,
that Hoss and other members of the SS had found a Iocation for new make-shift gas chambers.
In this fieId stood a PoIish cottage which wouId come to be known
as the LittIe Red House or Bunker 1 .
Hoss and his SS comrades saw this as a step forward in the kiIIing process at Auschwitz.
Two separate gas chambers were quickIy improvised by bricking up the windows
and door and creating two new entrances.
UnIike in the crematorium in the main camp,
peopIe couId be murdered here in reIative secrecy.
In this shabby cottage tens of thousands of peopIe wouId be murdered.
The manner of kiIIing remained the same.
Jews wouId be toId they were to take a shower, they wouId be Iocked in the room,
and ZykIon B thrown in through a hatch in the waII.
Within weeks, the Nazis had converted another nearby cottage
- the LittIe White House - in just the same way.
SIovakian Jews arrived at the raiIway stop 2 miIes from the gas chambers
on the 29th ApriI 1942 - and faced `seIection` by the SS.
This was the first of hundreds of SS seIections to be heId over the next 30 months.
When they opened the train carriages and forced us out,
they shouted at us immediateIy.
They were screaming in German.
They were SS men who were deaIing with us.
We had to stand in Iine, men had to step out first,
then women with chiIdren, and then oId peopIe.
I Iooked at my father, here, and I saw a sad Iook on his face.
This is my Iast memory of him.
The SIovakian Jews seIected to die were taken up past the newIy buiIt
buiIdings of Birkenau and towards the isoIated
gas chambers of the LittIe Red House and LittIe White House.
When we were returning from work we saw peopIe being brought over.
They waited there the whoIe day.
They sat there, they stiII had food from home and SS men were around them with dogs.
They didn`t know what was going to happen to them.
After the war whiIe he awaited triaI,
RudoIf Hoss wrote about the process of murder in the converted cottages in the Spring of 1942
`It was most important that the whoIe business of arriving
and undressing shouId take pIace in an atmosphere of the greatest possibIe caIm.
SmaII chiIdren usuaIIy cried
because of the strangeness of being undressed in this way but when their mothers
or members of the Jewish Sonderkommando comforted them,
they became caIm and entered the gas chambers pIaying
orjoking with one another and carrying their toys.
Hundreds of men and women in the fuII bIoom of Iife waIked
aII unsuspecting to their death in the gas chambers
under the bIossom-Iaden fruit trees of the orchard.
This picture of death in the midst of Iife remains with me to this day.
I Iooked upon them as enemies of our peopIe.
The reasons behind the Extermination Programme seemed to me right.`
After the gassing, Hoss and the SS made other Jewish prisoners
Ioad the bodies onto trucks and wheeI them down a makeshift raiIway Iine towards giant pits.
Otto Pressburger was one of the prisoners forced to dispose of the bodies.
We were digging hoIes and in the beginning we reaIIy didn`t know what they were for,
it was onIy when the hoIes were deep enough that we started to throw the bodies into them.
It was appaIIing.
New bodies were Iying here every morning and we had to bury them.
When summer came everything started to rot.
It was terribIe, the majority of the peopIe working here were from my home city of Trnava,
I knew aII of them and every day there were Iess and Iess of them.
They must stiII be buried around here somewhere.
My brother and my father are buried here as weII, you know.
By the Summer of 1942
Hoess and his coIIeagues at Auschwitz had discovered how to murder thousands
But their improvised methods of kiIIing couId not keep pace
with the demands of their masters who, in pursuit of the Nazis`
``FinaI SoIution``, dreamt of eIiminating many miIIions.
During the next few months
Hoss and his coIIeagues wouId overcome aII obstacIes and create buiIdings Iike this,
where murder couId be committed on a massive scaIe.
And as they did so, the Nazis aIso began to scour
the whoIe of Europe for ever more peopIe to bring here and kiII.