1. The origins of the center for the mass extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz

During the Second World War, researchers estimate, approximately five to six million Jews perished in Europe as a result of the fulfillment of the anti-Semitic policy of Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators in the occupied countries. Deprived of the elementary conditions for life, Jews died in ghettos, prisons, and various kinds of camps; they were savagely murdered, shot, and, from 1942, put to death on a mass scale in gas chambers.

Anti-Semitism, one of the main ideological currents of the Nazi movement created by Adolf Hitler, lay at the basis of this genocidal Nazi German policy. Anti-Semitism became unofficial state doctrine in Germany after Hitler assumed the post of chancellor on January 30, 1933. Under Nazi incitement, numerous acts of terrorism, harassment, boycotts, and other forms of persecution directed against German citizens of Jewish origins occurred across the country, culminating before the war in the great pogrom against German Jews-inspired by the Nazi leadership and carried out by Nazi hands-on the night of November 9/10, 1938, as a result of which many synagogues, Jewish-owned stores, and other property were burned down and ransacked throughout Germany; about a hundred people died, and 30,000 Jews were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps.1

These acts of terrorism were accompanied by the issuing of increasingly numerous laws, regulations, and ordinances that discriminated against Jews in various areas of public life, from removal from a range of professions and posts to compulsory uncompensated property forfeiture ("Aryanization"). The apogee of these legal steps was depriving Jews of citizenship and all associated rights, on the basis of 1935 legislation (the "Nuremberg Laws") and the accompanying enabling regulations.

The aim of these discriminatory steps was to shunt Jews to the margins of public life and compel them to leave Germany. As a result, 247,000 of the 522,000 Jews living in Germany when Hitler came to power emigrated or left Germany in the years from 1933 to 1939.2

After the start of the war, removal from Germany continued to be the goal of Nazi policy in relation to the Jews. At first, they were transferred to occupied Polish territory.

In 1940, after the conquest of France, one of the options considered in the Foreign Ministry and the Reich Main Security Office for "solving the Jewish problem" was to resettle Jews on the island of Madagascar, which belonged to France. This concept applied no longer to German Jews alone, but to all the Jews living on the European continent.3

In 1941,4 in connection with Hitler's decision on the total extermination of the Jews in Europe, all these alternatives became irrelevant.

The idea of the physical extermination of the Jews was an obsession of Hitler's that accompanied him from the beginning of his political career in the 1920s.5 Until 1941, however, the conditions for putting this idea into practice did not exist.

Hitler revealed the conception of "solving the Jewish question" through the physical destruction of the Jews in the most naked and unequivocal way on January 30, 1939. During a speech in parliament on the occasion of the sixth anniversary of his coming to power, he declared that, in the event of the outbreak of a new world war, the Jews would be annihilated.6

Polish Jews were the first to fall victim to extermination. From the earliest days of the occupation they were murdered in numerous individual and group executions.

However, the German authorities began the execution of Jews on a mass scale in 1941 in the Soviet territory that the Wehrmacht occupied. The operational units (Einsatzgruppen) of the Security Police and the Security Service, advancing behind the front lines, committed mass executions of Jews, communist party and labor union activists, officials from local administration and economic institutions, intellectuals, and political officers ("commissars") turned over by the army after being captured.7

The lightning successes on the Eastern Front and the belief in the impending collapse of the Soviet state were impulses that encouraged Hitler to make the decision about exterminating the Jews throughout Europe.

On July 31, 1941, on personal orders from Hitler, Reich Marshall Herman Göring directed the chief of the Security Police and Security Service, SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich,8 to prepare in coordination with the central offices of the Reich a plan for the "final solution of the Jewish question"9 that, as it soon turned out, was intended to be a plan for the total physical annihilation of the European Jews.

The plan that Heydrich developed for the deportation and extermination of the Jews must have been approved by Göring and Hitler no later than October 1941, since the construction of the center for the extermination of Jews in Bełżec began already on November 1, 1941.

At this stage of the "final solution of the Jewish question," its aims were known only to a narrow circle of people including-aside from Hitler and Göring-Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, and the people charged with directly carrying it out, among them Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz; Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader of the Lublin District; and Christian Wirth, the first commandant of the extermination center at Bełżec. Outside of this company, there was no talk of extermination, but only of deportation to the East.

Only on December 12, 1941, in Berlin, did Hitler reveal the decision about the destruction of the Jews to a broader group of high-ranking party functionaries-but without initiating them into the details.10

Because the realization of such a vast undertaking-encompassing the mass arrest of Jews all over Europe, deportation to extermination sites, killing, and the disposal of the corpses-required the cooperation of many German institutions, Heydrich, still following Göring's instructions, decided to summon representatives of these institutions to a conference where he would present the action plan that had been prepared. The conference was scheduled for December 9, 1941. As a result of changes in the political situation connected with the attack on the United States by Germany's ally Japan, and the declaration of war on the United States, the conference was rescheduled for January 20, 1942.

Delegates representing the ministry of internal affairs, the ministry of foreign affairs, the ministry of justice, the Reich Main Security Office, the Reich chancellery, the NSDAP (Nazi Party) chancellery, the office of Governor General Hans Frank, and the General Government Security Police and Security Service were among those who attended the conference in the suburbs of Berlin (Wannsee district).

Heydrich informed them that, under the plan he had worked out, Jews from all over Europe would be detained, interned in transit ghettos (in fact, camps), and then transported to the East. There, they would be separated by sex and put to work building roads. In the course of this labor, a large part of them would be "eliminated" by natural causes and the remnant, who survived, would be "treated appropriately" because in the future, in case of release, they would constitute a danger to Germany (see the excerpt from the protocol, p. 254).

The major conclusion that could be drawn from Heydrich's remarks was the declaration that the Jews "evacuated to the East" were supposed to die there. Heydrich did not reveal in what way the "appropriate treatment," or killing, of the Jews who did not die of natural causes would be carried out, even though it had already been decided that gas chambers would be used for this purpose, and that extermination would take place in special extermination centers.11

The largest center for the extermination of Jews went into operation in 1942, within the confines of the Auschwitz concentration camp, founded for Polish political prisoners in 1940.

The decision to open a center for the mass extermination of Jews within the bounds of Auschwitz was conveyed orally by Heinrich Himmler in the summer of 1941,12 bypassing official channels, directly to the commandant of the Auschwitz camp, Rudolf Höss.13

In choosing Auschwitz as a site for the destruction of Jews, Himmler was guided, as Höss writes, by two considerations: "in view of its location in terms of transportation," and "because this area could easily be isolated and concealed."14

Like other centers for exterminating Jews, the one established within the confines of Auschwitz was to be equipped, according to information conveyed to camp commandant Rudolf Höss by Adolf Eichmann during a visit to Auschwitz by the latter, with stationary gas chambers similar to the ones that had been used up to that time in the "euthanasia centers."15 In view of the scale of the planned operation, however, there was a realization that carbon monoxide would have to be replaced with some other poisonous gas. It would soon turn out that hydrogen cyanide, known under its trade name of Zyklon B, was best suited to this purpose.

From the Publisher

The ninth volume in the Voices of Memory series is unique. Previous volumes presented such various aspects of the Holocaust of the Jews as medical experiments, punishment, the evacuation and liquidation of the camp, and the history and functioning of the gas chambers and crematoria.

Now we are attempting a comprehensive account of the Holocaust of the Jews in Auschwitz. One reason for this is the moment at which readers will be able to share in the results of our work. Last year marked the passage of 70 years since several particularly dramatic events in the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau: the deportation of Jews from Hungary and the Litzmannstadt ghetto in Łódź, the murder of the prisoners brought here from the Theresienstadt ghetto (in the present Czech Republic), and the mutiny by the Sonderkommando prisoners forced by the camp authorities to work in the crematoria. Historians refer to 1944 as the apogee of the extermination. More than half of all the Auschwitz victims perished then. It was also when the Roma prisoners who remained alive in the so-called Zigeunerlager were killed in the gas chambers.

We are offering our readers an opportunity to explore the story of the Jewish victims of Auschwitz in a systematic way. An important element of the ninth volume of Voices of Memory is tracing the routes and organization of transports to the camp, and characterizing deportation from individual countries. This gives the reader some idea of the enormous logistical, organizational, and material resources that Nazi Germany put into the Endlösung der Judenfrage. The publication makes apparent the weight that the German state apparatus attached to effectively conducting its operation to exterminate the Jews.

By the same token, these facts bring to light the vast suffering of the Victims. Behind the names of countries, regions, cities, transit camps, and train stations lie the despair of hundreds of thousands of innocent people torn away from their communities, homes, and friends. The number of deportees is further proof of the scope of the crime. Countless Jewish congregations and local communities were erased from the map of Europe. The thousands-strong Sephardic community of Salonika in Greece that had flourished for centuries and the few hundred Jews of Norway alike met total destruction. What marks the pages of this book is the scrupulous, merciless, bureaucratic hatred directed against all these Jews-men, women, and children.

A systematic presentation of the successive stages of murder-arrival at the camp, selection and killing in the gas chambers, attempts at effacing the vestiges of the atrocity, and the exploitation of the victims' belongings- helps make sense of what we know about Auschwitz.

The Auschwitz camp was not only a gigantic center of direct extermination, but also the largest concentration camp in the Third Reich. Among other things, this meant that the annihilation that took place in Auschwitz had many witnesses. A relatively large proportion of these concentration camp prisoners lived, including a few members of the Sonderkommando and some subjects of the criminal medical experiments. It is hard to imagine the dimensions of the trauma experienced by these Survivors. Nevertheless, many of them regarded it as their duty after the war to tell their stories and inform people about Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

They gathered in relatively large numbers for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camp. To the witness the former prisoners bore through their presence, we would like to add our own witness-the responsibility for the memory of those events contained on the pages of this book-the scholarly research, first-hand accounts, documents, and photographs.

We want our work to be a kind of homage to the memory of the Victims.

We will be satisfied if it also becomes a helpful instrument in the work of educators and teachers, and a kind of guide for the memory of all who are interested.

Andrzej Kacorzyk

Director of the International Center for Education

about Auschwitz and the Holocaust