How It Was Used in the Nazi System of Terror and Genocide and in the Economy of the Third Reich

place called "East," became the destination for hundreds of transports of Jews dispatched from all over Europe. The exact date when the slaughter of Jews began in Auschwitz is not known. In their accounts and testimonies former prisoners and 55-men describe a number of cases in which transports ofJews were killed in the gas chambers at Crematorium I, but only in one instance was the autumn of 1941 cited as a date of the arrival of a transport. In a postwar deposition, Commandant H6ss stated that he was unable to give the exact date; once he wrote that it may have been in December 1941 orJanuary 1942, in another place he claimed that it was in the spring of 1942, or before the women's camp was established, that is before March 26,1942. The first transport of Jews for which the exact date of arrival at the camp is known is the transport of several hundred Jews brought from By tom, then in Germany, on February 15, 1942.' Mass inflow, however, began with the first registered transport of Jewish women from Slovakia, who arrived on March 26,1942.5 It was followed by transports from France, the first on March 30,1942; from Poland on May 5,1942; the Netherlands on July 17; from Belgium, on August 5; Yugoslavia, on August 18; Theresienstadt in the Protectorate, October 7; Norway, December 1; Greece, March 20,1943; Italy, October 23; and Hungary, May 2,1944. According to the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, in January 1942 about five million Jews lived in those countries, excluding the western Ukraine, Byelorussia, and unoccupied France; they were potential victims of Auschwitz. The territories of Europe involved in the deportation and mass murder of Jews fell, in effect, into four zones: 1. the lands east of the Bug River (Einsatzgruppen zone); 2. the General Government (Central Poland-zone of operations of the death camps of Treblinka, Sobib6r, Belzec, and concentration camp LublinMajdanek); 3. Polish lands incorporated into the Reich, the so-called Warthegau (Wartheland) (zone of operations of the Chelmno-Kulmhof death camp);6 and 4. the remaining parts of Central, Western, Southern, and Northern Europe (Auschwitz-Birkenau camp operation zone). .' This division did not result from a preconceived schema; rather, it reflected ;J " certain practices that allowed for numerous exceptions. The fact that the majority of "Austrian, German, and Slovakian Jews were deported to the Soviet Union (Miflsk,~, Kovno, Riga), to the ghetto in tod± (Litzmannstadt), or to a number of places in the Lublin area may serve as an example. Moreover, although Auschwitz was, above all, the place where Jews from outside occupied Poland were massacred, a substantial number of Polish Jews 000,000) from the central (General Government), western (Upper Silesia, Zagl~bie D~browskie), and northern (Ciechan6w and Bialystok) regions of occupied Poland also died there. 7 The genocidal role of Auschwitz expanded when, in 1943, other killing centers ceased operations: Chelmno in April, Belzec in June, Treblinka in September, and Sobib6r in October. After Operation Emtefest (Harvest Festival), the last mass execution at Majdanek, on November 3, 1943, the Auschwitz camp essentially became, for a time, the only center specifically oriented toward the mass murder of the Jews. An exception was the three weeks the Auschwitz Concentration Camp 375 death camp at Che!mno subsequently resumed operations. Until spring 1944 the concentration camps inside the Reich were excluded from the annihilation campaign against the Jews; before that, under Himmler's order of October 1942, Jewish prisoners were to be sent to Auschwitz or Majdanek in order to leave other camps "free ofjews" (Judenfrei). In the spring of 1944, as a result of economic difficulties and especially a depleted work force, enforcement of the principle of a ''Jew-free Reich" was interrupted and Jewish labor was increasingly used in German industry. From that same time, Auschwitz was not only a site of mass murder. Simultaneously it exploited prisoner labor in its subcamps-mainly in Silesia-and it served as a transit point for the Jewish work force withdrawn from the territories threatened by the Red Army offensive. A huge sifting of human material took place there; those who were fit for work were left alive and sent to industrial plants, the rest were murdered and burned. In this way 600,000 people, including some 438,000 Hungarian Jews, 60,000 to 70,000 Jews from l6d" and prisoners of Majdanek, Plasz6w and the Jewish labor camps in the General Government passed through Auschwitz. Jewish citizens of almost all the countries of Europe, and even from other continents, were in the transports to Auschwitz. Of at least 1.1 million Jews sent there, about one million lost their lives.