| AUSCHWITZ THE RACIAL CURE |
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camp commandant had chosen an isolated Auschwitz site for
the killing — a former peasant farmstead, which was made into the gas
chamber Bunker I. They had not yet thought of burning the corpses, and the
site’s meadows allowed long pits for burials.30
On one of Höss’s trips away
from Auschwitz in August 1941, his deputy, SS Captain Karl Fritzch, “on
his own initiative” conducted successful experiments with Zyklon-B (the
German trade name for hydrogen cyanide or prussic acid) on Russian prisoners of
war on Block 11, the punishment block. Zyklon-B “was constantly used in
Auschwitz for the destruction of vermin, and there was consequently always a
supply of these tins of gas on hand.”31
Höss joined in on repetitions of the experiment on his return, observing
the killing while wearing a gas mask, and noting that death came very quickly;
although he later claimed, “During this first experience of gassing
people, I did not fully realize what was happening, perhaps because I was too
impressed by the whole procedure.”*
During Eichmann’s next
visit to Auschwitz, he and Höss decided on the gas “for the mass
extermination operation.” After two provisional sites, operations shifted
in the spring of 1942 to bunkers I and II in the area initially chosen by
Eichmann and Höss. The victims included Jews from Upper Silesia (territory
lost to Poland at Versailles) as well as Russian POWs. Now Höss began to
take pride in the new method. Visiting the extermination camps at Chelmno†
and Treblinka, he observed that their use of carbon monoxide was inferior: the
exhaust gas produced by truck engines was not always sufficient so that a
number of victims were only rendered unconscious and had to be finished off by
shooting. Even after the war, while in Polish incarceration Höss remained
proud of the efficiency of “his” gas. Experience had shown that the
preparation of prussic acid called Cyclon B [Zyklon B]caused death with
far greater speed and certainty |
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* There is some evidence
that Höss and his deputy cannot claim exclusive discovery of Zyklon B as
an agent for killing large numbers of human beings According to testimony at
his trial (by a British Military Tribunal in Hamburg beginning 1 March 1956),
Dr. Bruno Tesch owner of the firm TESTA (acronym for Tesch und Stabenow) which
distributed the gas to Auschwitz, himself conducted experiments bearing on its
feasibility not only as a pesticide but as a means of killing efficiently large
numbers of human beings. There is another report of an Auschwitz SS man named
Breitweiser, who apparently assisted in the early Auschwitz experiments and was
said to comment, upon noting how efficient Zyklon-B was for delousing:
“Now we have the means for the extermination of prisoners.” Yehuda
Bauer and Erich Kulka believe that this intense focus on the use of Zyklon-B
for killing is partial evidence for an even greater centrality of Auschwitz in
the Nazi projections of the Final Solution than has previously been recognized.
The victimization of some sick inmates in those early Auschwitz experiments
with Zyklon-B also suggests the Auschwitz focus from the beginning on its
murderous reversal of healing and killing. It is likely that, with the existing
experience of Zyklon-B for delousing and the known need for an efficient agent
to kill human beings, the idea of using that agent occurred more or less
simultaneously both to the “theorists” at firms making and
distributing the gas on the one hand, and to the Auschwitz practitioners on the
other.32
†Höss had gone to Chelmno partly to investigate methods of
cremation used there. In the summer of 1942, Himmler ordered that mass graves
be opened and corpses burned, and the ashes disposed of “in such a way
that it would be impossible at some future time to calculate the number of
corpses burned.”33 |
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