Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution' (2005) BBC

Frenzied Killing (March 1944-December 1944) (1/2)

Frenzied Killing (March 1944-December 1944)



"Murder and Intrigue" explores the complex web of international politics spun during the last nine months of 1944. By that spring, the Allies knew about Auschwitz and had the military capability to bomb it. Yet despite the pleas of Jewish leaders, the British and Americans decided not to bomb the railways or gas chambers. During the spring and summer, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz at a time when the killing machinery had been honed to perfection. That autumn saw a significant act of resistance in Auschwitz, when a group of Jewish prisoners revolted. Amazingly, before their deaths, some secretly wrote about their experiences.



In the final segment, Linda Ellerbee talks with Gail Smith, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former special assistant to the president and senior director of African affairs at the National Security Council during the Clinton Administration; and Jerry Fowler, who has taught human rights law and policy at George Mason University Law School and directs the Committee on Conscience at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

TRANSCRIPT

Frenzied Killing: Episode 5



By 1944, 550,000 people had already been murdered here at Auschwitz. But now, during just a few weeks in spring and early summer, that figure was to increase by over 300,000. 4 years after it first opened, a period of frenzied killing was to begin at Auschwitz unlike anything the camp had yet seen.



But the history of Auschwitz in 1944 is not just one of murder. There is also intrigue. For this was also the year that the Nazis sent unlikely messengers to neutral territory—to try to sow seeds of confusion among the Allies.



Subtitles: Do you understand comrades, what this is about? Things are getting hot for the Germans. They can see the writing on the wall. They want to negotiate.



And as the Allies learnt more about Auschwitz, the pressure on them grew - what were they going to do about it? This is the story of Auschwitz, the Nazis and the Allies in 1944—one of death, deceit and mystery.



SHOW TITLES



The vast majority of those who were murdered at Auschwitz in 1944 came from one place—Hungary. In March 1944, German troops entered Budapest. For the Nazis, this was a rich country, ripe for plunder. And though already allied to the Nazis, the Hungarians had been unreliable partners as far as Hitler was concerned. Not least in their refusal to deport the 760,000 Hungarian Jews.



Shortly after they were established in Budapest, the SS called a Hungarian named Joel Brandt, one of the most politically active members of the Jewish community, in for a meeting. On the 25th April 1944, he went to see SS Lt Col Adolf Eichmann. We know what was said from Brandt's subsequent interrogation by British intelligence, as well as his post war testimony. Eichmann, infamous for organising the mass murder of the Jews, was about to make a surprising proposal to Brandt.



Subtitles: I am prepared to sell 1 million Jews to you. Who do you want? Men and women who can produce children? Old people? Babies? Sit down and tell me, Herr Lieutenant Colonel. You ask me who should live and who should die. I can't do that. I don't want to lose any of my people. I can't sell you all the Jews of Europe. But I can let 1 million go. We are interested in goods not money. Travel abroad and liaise with your international authorities and the Allies and then come back with a concrete offer.



Peretz Révész, The Committee for Help & Rescue, Hungary: "We tried to understand what was going on. It was possible that the Germans were just bluffing us. But we couldn't understand why."



But events elsewhere cast doubt on the Nazis' genuine desire to sell the Hungarian Jews, because this man, SS Lt. Col. Rudolf Höss, was returning to Auschwitz. Höss had been removed as the original Commandant of Auschwitz the previous November, promoted to a job in Berlin but now he'd been ordered to return to the camp to oversee the murder of the Hungarian Jews. At the Auschwitz main camp, Höss—a committed Nazi -held planning meetings with his senior staff.



\Excerpt from Höss post-war biography: "Auschwitz became the greatest human extermination centre of all time. The reasons behind the extermination program seemed to me to be right. There's nothing new in anti-Semitism - it's always existed all over the world. It's only come into the limelight where the Jews have pushed themselves forward too much in their quest for power."



Fuelled partly by these prejudices, Höss prepared for the arrival of the Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2 miles away from Auschwitz main camp. He oversaw the completion of a railway line allowing new arrivals to be brought directly into Birkenau.



Birkenau, part concentration camp, part extermination centre, had been the site of mass murder at Auschwitz since 1942. Here not just Jews but Polish Political prisoners and others the Nazis thought a threat to their rule were imprisoned. Crucial to the operation of Birkenau were 4 crematoria with gas chambers attached, where those selected to die were murdered and burnt.



Stanislaw Hantz, Polish Political Prisoner, Auschwitz: "What can't be shown, especially in Birkenau, is above all the stench of burning bodies. It spread a long way - kilometres from the camp. It wasn't just that the fire burnt for one day, went out and that was it. It burnt for months on end. Whether it rained or not, whether it snowed or not, the fire burned all the time."



Höss and his SS colleagues now anticipated that so many people were about to be murdered here the crematoria ovens simply would not cope, so huge cremation pits were prepared. One prominent visitor to Auschwitz during May 1941 was none other than Adolf Eichmann. Höss knew him well.



Excerpt from Höss post-war Biography: "Eichmann was completely obsessed with his mission and also convinced that this extermination action was necessary in order to preserve the German people in the future from the destructive intentions of the Jews."



Eliezer Einsenschmidt, Jewish Prisoner, Auschwitz: "Eichmann's visit I remember. His whole appearance. All the SS people had the same expression—they were always furious-looking, to show how important they were, to show they were important people."



Yet at the same time as organizing the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, Eichmann allowed Brandt to leave Hungary on the 17th of May 1944. His task: to see if the Allies would exchange 10,000 trucks for 1 million Jews. There was considerable urgency to Brandt's mission, because in Hungary the deportations were already underway. A task now performed with the essential co-operation of the Hungarian authorities. In the small town of Sárvár, close to the border with Austria, Alice Lok Cahana, her elder sister Edith, and the rest of their family prepared to leave.



Alice Lok Cahana, Jewish Prisoner, Auschwitz: "The scene of going out of Egypt came to my mind and we saw the cattle trains I told my sister this is a mistake, they have cattle trains here, they don't mean we should go in cattle trains. So we found ourselves in the cattle train they're closing the door on us and they're leaving a bucket for sanitary use and a bucket for water and I told Edith I would never use sanitary use bucket in front of these people no matter what happens and the 2 of us went to the corner of the cattle train."



Joel Brandt arrived at Istanbul in neutral Turkey, on the 19th of May. He met representatives of various groups with links to the Jewish leadership in Palestine, at the Pera Palace Hotel.



Subtitles: Do you understand comrades, what this is about? Things are getting hot for the Germans. They can see the writing on the wall. They want to negotiate. I don't understand why nobody from the leadership in Jerusalem is here. It's a matter of days, of hours Eichmann isn't waiting. Every day 12,000 are crammed onto trains. We must cable Jerusalem immediately and insist on somebody coming here, who name is known in the world - Chaim Weizmann or Moshe Shertok. Yoel, you can't cable these things We never know if our cables arrive on time and if they are not garbled. We have a messenger.There is a train going the day after tomorrow. This will take too long. Why not by plane, ideally tonight? Don't think it's so easy, Yoel. We don't get a plane.



Whilst Brandt encountered the first difficulties with his mission, the Hungarian Jews were arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau. As a general rule the taking of photographs was prohibited at Auschwitz, but one member of the SS did record the arrival of this Hungarian transport. No one knows just why these pictures were taken, but they constitute the most valuable visual record in existence of what happened here. The Nazis wanted to see who could work as forced labor and who could not. The first part of this selection process was to separate the women and children from the men, and then to choose from within each group who should die at once.



Alice Lok Cahana: "When we arrived, I told Edith nothing can be so bad like this cattle train. I'm sure they will want us to work and for the children they will give better food. So they're saying right now the children should separate and go in another hut, group. Go line up with the children."



Alice, who arrived at Auschwitz with her family on a similar transport to this, had decided to stand with the mothers and children. She could not have picked a more dangerous spot.



Alice Lok Cahana: "I went to that group with the children and I was very tall for my age and suddenly the German soldier asked me 'Haben Sie Kinder?' - 'Do you have children?' I said 'No, I am just 15', in German, and then he put me to another group."



That moment saved her life. Alice was taken from the group with mothers and children, all of whom were selected for immediate murder, and was placed with fit and healthy young women who were chosen as slave labor. The moment of selection captured in these photographs, took only seconds. It was a procedure every new Jewish arrival endured.



Morris Venezia, Jewish Prisoner, Auschwitz: "A couple of Germans were separating us—when he was looking at the old people he put to the right and the young people to the left. So this is where they separate us. The right lane they took them right away to the gas chamber."



Dario Gabbai, Jewish Prisoner, Auschwitz: "My family was done already was down to the crematoria there, they perished right away you know, when they take direct to the crematoria after a couple of hours you don't exist anymore."



On average, 75% of the people on each transport from Hungary were selected to be murdered straight away. As the transports continued to Auschwitz, Joel Brandt traveled to Aleppo in Syria and on the 11th of June 1944 met with a representative of the Jewish Agency. Also present was a Major from British counter intelligence, who recorded the conversation. Brandt was about to hear bad news.



Subtitles: What happens if you do not return to Budapest? Then, comrade Shertok all the Jews in Hungary will be murdered. After 2 months there will be no more left of us than of the Warsaw Ghetto. Dear Joel, I now have to tell you something painful. You cannot go back to Budapest. The British request that you go to Cairo. Does this mean the British keep me as a prisoner? Do you know what you are doing? This is simply murder. If I don't return our people will be slaughtered. My wife, my mother, my children will be the first. I have come here as an envoy. But not as an envoy of the enemy. For me the Germans are the enemy. Just like the Allies. I am here as the envoy of 1 million people who are sentenced to death. Their lives depend on my return. Who gives you the right to arrest me? What have I done to England?



The British believed they knew why the Nazis now proposed a deal. The Germans were losing the war. The Red Army was marching on the Reich. And the Nazis said the trucks they wanted in exchange for Jews would be used only on the Eastern Front, in the war against the Soviet Union. Heinrich Himmler of the SS, who was behind the Brandt mission, wanted to split the Allies. On May the 31st 1944, at the Foreign Office in London, the Brandt proposals were considered by a Committee of the War Cabinet. Their conclusion was that the idea of exchanging trucks for Jews was 'blackmail' and should be rejected.



But during the discussion there was another, less idealistic reason suggested to refuse the Nazis' offer. Which was that to accept it might 'lead to an offer to unload an even greater number of Jews on our hands.' Shortly after the British decision, the Americans and Soviets also agreed that there should be no negotiations with the Nazis.



Peretz Révész, The Committee for Help & Rescue, Hungary: "The Germans kept repeating that the Jews are almighty, that the Jews rule the world. They kept saying America and England do whatever Jews ask, but we could see that that wasn't true."



Meanwhile, the Allies did not communicate their rejection of the Brandt mission to the Nazis here in Budapest. So, Brandt's wife, Hansi, together with Rudolph Kasztner, another Jewish activist, was able to plead repeatedly with Adolf Eichmann for a gesture that would show the Nazis were prepared to negotiate with the Allies. Both Rudolph Kasztner and Hansi Brandt later testified as to how the meetings went.



Subtitles: Why Herr Lt. Col. Do you not spare the children at least? We could ensure that they are looked after by us. You have to understand - I have to clear the Jewish crap out of the provinces. No arguments or tears will help! You probably do not have any children and that is why you have no pity on them. You are taking a great liberty Mrs. Brandt. If you speak to me like that I advise you to stop coming to see me.



Eichmann was not prepared to spare one person's life as a result of humanitarian pleas. But he and his SS colleagues were prepared to listen to another argument. They announced that one train full of Jews could leave Budapest for a safe destination, as a so-called gesture of good faith. The price per seat on the train: 1,000 US dollars. On the 30th of June 1944, a train containing 1,684 Hungarian Jews pulled out of Budapest station. A special committee, on which Rudolph Kasztner sat, had decided the final passenger list.



Eva Speter, Passenger on Kasztner train: "The Kasztner list was compiled on purpose like a Noah, Noah's Ark. Everybody and everything should be represented this will be the only part of Jews. Of Europe who remain alive there should be a representative portion."



But this was a strange Noah's Ark. Massively over-represented on the train were Kasztner's own relatives and people from his home town of Kolozsvar. And places were also given to several hundred rich Hungarian Jews who subsidized anyone on the train who couldn't pay.



Eva Speter: "If you have to save your life you'll try it in every way, even in a criminal way if it comes to that, but you have to save it, your life is the first you are nearest to yourself whatever people try to say. When they were in the train we were afraid, we never knew what will be our future."



Eichmann had promised that the train would travel to neutral Switzerland, but it didn't. At Linz, in Austria, the train stopped and Jews on board were told to get out and take a shower.



Eva Speter: "I was standing naked before the doctor and looking very proud into his eyes and ah, thought he should see how a Jewish woman is going, how a proud Jewish is going to die, because most of us knew that in Auschwitz from the taps there didn't come any water but gas. And ah, from the taps came fine warm water, afterwards we dressed up and returned to our train. It was a very relieving experience after we were ready to die there."



The train traveled on to Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany where those on board stayed for up to six months before the Nazis finally allowed almost all of them to travel to neutral Switzerland. The 1600 Jews who had left on the Kasztner train in June represented less than half of 1% of the Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz. The Spring and early Summer of 1944 was to be the most notorious period in the history of the camp. The 4 crematoria with gas chambers were struggling to cope with the numbers the Nazis wanted to kill.



Two of them lay here in the western part of the Birkenau complex, with the gas chambers above ground. Two more were positioned close to the railway line that took new arrivals into the heart of Birkenau. These had the gas chambers in the basement. The Nazis had hugely increased the number of Jewish prisoners in the Sonderkommando they made work in the crematoria in order to deal with the massive numbers they wished to murder. So much so that a crematorium and gas chamber like this was operated by around 100 Jews and just 4 Germans. The torment endured by the Sonderkommando, forced, on pain of their own immediate death, to assist in the killing process, is one of the most shocking parts of the history of Auschwitz.



Morris Venezia, Jewish Sondercommando, Auschwitz: "When people was in that gas chamber you could hear some kind of a voice calling "God". It looked like those voice coming from kind of a catacombs which I still got the kind of voice I've still got in my ears"



These wire columns contained the Zyklon B gas pellets which were lowered in from above by the Nazis. And while it was always the Nazis themselves who committed this act of murder, it was the prisoners of the Sonderkommando who had to perform the horrendous task of collecting the bodies, taking them out and up a small lift to burn either in the ovens of the crematorium, or increasingly in the open air.



Dario Gabbai, Jewish Sondercommando, Auschwitz: "When the big you know transport from ah, Hungary came in then they were daily you know, they wanted to finish them fast, that's why they had the pits to go through."



This photograph, which a Sonderkommando risked his life to take, shows bodies lying by the open cremation pits at the height of the Hungarian action.



Morris Venezia: "Everyday they were burning dead bodies everyday, everyday, everyday. You get used to it. We know it, if we wondered that, we had a bullet in our head. It was like a robot."



On occasion, when killing small numbers of prisoners, the gas chambers were not used and the Sonderkommando were forced to be stand just inches away from the murders.



Dario Gabbai: "We had to take them they bring 1 by 1 we take them by the ears and behind him was an SS shoot him in the back and the guy would come down with a lot of blood was some of us there with the water putting down. After a while you don't know nothing, nothing, nothing bothers you. That's why your conscience you know gets inside of you and stays there until today you know, somebody else is in inside of me that tells me from time to time you get awake what happened why we did such a thing."



By now the Allies knew about this place and its role as an extermination camp.



Gradually, from early 1944 onwards, the level of knowledge about what was happening here had been increasing amongst the Allies, thanks to the escape of a handful of Auschwitz prisoners and the work of the Polish resistance. This culminated in a document which drew together the available intelligence and which came to be known as the 'Auschwitz Protocols'. It included sketches showing the position of the major crematoria and gas chambers at Birkenau.



As a result, from June 1944 Jewish organizations asked that the railway lines to Auschwitz and the gas chambers of the camp be bombed, requests which reached the American government only a few weeks after the landings on the D Day beaches.



Assistant Secretary of State John Mc Cloy rejected the requests saying the bombing was "impractical" and would lead to 'diversion of considerable air support' that was essential elsewhere. A clue as to the strength of McCloy's opposition to the bombing requests comes from this inter-office memo, where his own assistant Colonel Gerhardt writes "I know you told me to 'kill' this…"



In Britain, requests to bomb Auschwitz were once again referred to the Americans, and so the idea died. But the Americans went on in August 1944 to bomb the IG Farben factory being built at Monowitz just four miles from Birkenau.



Libuša Breder, Jewish Prisoner, Auschwitz: "Ah, we heard the aeroplanes coming and we wanted them to put the bombs on the camp at least we could run and hundreds and hundreds of planes were coming and we are looking up and no bombs. So this we could not understand. So absolutely god forgot us and people of the war forgot us, didn't care about what's going on and they knew what's going on there."



On a bombing run on 25 August the Americans accidentally took this picture of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Whether or not, of course, it would have ever been possible to destroy with a precision attack the crematoria and gas chambers, clearly visible here, and whether that would have made the Nazis stop committing murder at Auschwitz, is one of the great unanswered questions of history.



What is certain is that back in Budapest the protests about the deportations made by several foreign governments—including the British and Americans—did have an effect. The pressure reached a peak in early July when the Hungarians intercepted cables demanding those involved be punished. The Hungarian Prime Minister, Döme Sztojay and Edmund Veesenmayer, Hitler's representative in Hungary, met to discuss the intercepts. We know what was said from a detailed report Veesenmayer sent the next day to Berlin.



Subtitles: And then we have a telegram. With the names of 70 Hungarian and German persons—who are considered to be mainly responsible for the deportations. Right, there is my name. And yours as well, of course. I personally don't care about these threats.

But such protests and threats from the international community did influence the Hungarian head of State, Admiral Horthy. With the war clearly going against the Nazis he decided that the time had come to distance himself from his erstwhile ally. Horthy informed the Germans on the 7th July that the deportations of the Jews must cease. The Hungarian authorities would no longer co-operate.



After the official halt of the Hungarian transports, the Nazis at Auschwitz focused greater attention on inmates who had been imprisoned here at Birkenau for some time—the Gypsies. They lived in family groups in some of the worse conditions in the camp.



Franz Rosenbach, Gypsy prisoner, Auschwitz: "The atmosphere was terrible, because many of the small children and people in the blocks were ill, and everyone was mixed up together. The children were screaming: 'Mum I'm hungry, give me something to eat or something to drink. But they weren't allowed to drink the water because of the risk of catching typhus."



Franz Rosenbach survived only because he was eventually transferred elsewhere as slave labour. But his mother died at Auschwitz along with 21,000 of the 23,000 gypsies sent there.



Franz Rosenbach: "You see there were moments, moments which one really prefers not to think about. Such moments. The things that were done to us left you wondering why. We were beaten, kicked, degraded, but you didn't know why. You had no idea why. Simply because we were different."



Under Nazi rule the Gypsies who were to proportionately suffer more than any other group apart from the Jews. The Nazis considered them anti-social, despised their way of life, and thought them racially dangerous. On the evening of the 2nd of August 1944, the Nazis moved to liquidate the Gypsy camp. It was to be one of the most appalling single nights in the history of Auschwitz.



Alice Lok Cahana: "The Gypsy camp was very close to our barrack and we could hear it and the night was unbelievable. Full of screaming and crying and smoke and horrendous sounds. They took the Gypsies and the Gypsies were crying they knew where they are taking them."



Wladyslaw Szmyt: "Everybody defended themselves, defended themselves to the last. They bit, they scratched. The Germans had driven in trucks. They threw the children in them, and if one of them jumped out, they would hit him on the leg or the arm with a wooden club, break it and throw him back in, so that he couldn't jump out again, couldn't get out because his limb was just hanging there. When I saw this, I started yelling… And people grabbed me - Poles - as they were afraid that the Germans would come and throw a hand grenade in or something. They rolled me in a blanket to keep me quiet and sat with me."



The Gypsies were taken to the crematoria, many here to crematorium 5—and killed within its network of gas chambers. By the autumn of 1944, after the Gypsies had been murdered here, and the massive transports of Jews from Hungary and then the Lodz ghetto in Poland had ceased, the number of people killed at Auschwitz dropped to fewer to 1,000 a day from a peak of 10,000 in May. The Sonderkommando who worked in these gas chambers now began to fear for their own lives.



Dario Gabbai, Jewish Sondercommando, Auschwitz: "They were changing us. You know, we knew that our days were always numbered and we didn't know when the end would be."



Here in crematorium 4 at around 1.30 pm on Saturday, the 7th of October 1944, the Sonderkommando fought back. They set fire to the crematorium and armed with pickaxes and rocks they attacked their SS guards. Meantime the Sondercommando in crematorium 2 also rose up. After a few minutes of hand to hand fighting with the SS some Sondercommando managed to escape into the nearby woods, but all of them were later captured and shot. And the SS even sought revenge against those Sondercommando who had not taken part in the revolt.



Henryk Mandelbaum, Jewish Sondercommando, Auschwitz: "They didn't know what to do with us. So they had a kind of discussion and then they told us to lie face down on the ground holding our hands behind our backs and every 3rd person was shot. Some of my friends in the Sondercommando lost their lives and the rest had to go back to work. There was never much hope for us. I'm telling it like it is."



Dario Gabbai: "They didn't kill us because there were 4,000 cadavers that had to go into the ovens and we are the only ones that could do it and that's why they save us. But after that day they took most of us they left only 92 of us all the others they took and they killed them all around."



The same month as the Sondercommando revolt, there was a coup in Hungary. On the 15th of October 1944, Horthy's non-compliant regime was overthrown by the Nazi backed Arrow Cross militia. Eichmann immediately called Rudolph Kasztner in for a meeting. Kasztner later wrote a report about what was discussed.



Subtitles: Well, Doctor as you can see I'm back! Now listen well. This new government works on our instructions. So the Jews of Budapest are going to be deported after all. And this time on foot.



The Jews of Budapest, who had up to now largely escaped deportation, were now Eichmann's target. They were not to be sent to Auschwitz, but to Austria, where they would be used as slave labor. And because of the shortage of trains, they were to walk there. So during November tens of thousands of Jews from Budapest were forced out of the city and made to trek west. Many thousands died en route. But Eichmann incurred the displeasure of senior figures of the SS, concerned, in the light of how badly the war was going for them, that so much potential forced labor was being squandered. And so Himmler summoned Eichmann to a special meeting in December 1944 on his private train. Another SS Officer, Lt Col Becher, who also worked in Hungary, was present as well. After the war Becher testified as to what was said.



Subtitles: If until now you have exterminated Jews from now on, if I order you as I do now you must be a fosterer of Jews. I must remind you that it was I who set up the Head Office of Reich Security and not Muller or yourself, and that I am in command. If you can't do that, you must tell me so.



Himmler knew the German Army was struggling to hold back the Allies, and by January 1945 the SS here at Auschwitz were also well aware that the end was near. All reference to this place as a site of mass murder was to be eliminated.



Eva Mozes Kor, Jewish Prisoner, Auschwitz: "We woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of explosion, they were blowing up the gas chambers, the crematorium Outside the SS were waiting for us and ordered us to march, anybody who could not march fast enough was shot on the spot. We arrived in Auschwitz 1 which is about an hour walk at 1am. The Nazis again disappeared as if the earth swallowed them up."



Eva Mozes Kor, and twelve hundred other prisoners thought too weak to evacuate from the area, were now left for a few days to fend for themselves at Auschwitz main camp. Most of the guards had gone - but another SS unit had been ordered to come to the camp and shoot them. No prisoners were supposed to be left alive to testify to just what had happened here. Meanwhile, more than 50,000 other inmates of Auschwitz, thought fit enough to become slave laborers, were marched in sub zero temperatures railway junctions, where they were to be put on trains and sent West.



Ibi Mann, Jewish Prisoner, Auschwitz: "If anyone even dared to bend down to get muddy snow off their shoes they were shot; that was the end. We weren't allowed to bend over we could only walk quickly, quickly, quickly. On both sides of the roads there were ditches, big ditches and the ditches were full of bodies."



Also on the march amidst the chaos of this retreat were prisoners who had never thought they could possibly leave the camp alive—the Sonderkommando.



Dario Gabbai: "We survived that because the Russians were coming from Krakow and down and the Germans had got panicky and every place we went the Germans 1 by 1 when asking us if you work in the Sondercommando we were shot."



Once they reached the railhead, the Auschwitz prisoners were crammed into open wagons to continue the journey west, in temperatures that could reach as low as minus 20 degrees.



Morris Venezia: "Oh, the wagon was very packed, one guy was up and he was German he told us he was German who knows maybe a convict who knows and he wanted to sit down he couldn't stand no more this guy. So he told me I've got some cigarettes would you let me sit down, when I have cigarette you know ah, when I have some cigarettes so he gave me 2-3 cigarettes, I got up and he sit. So the cigarettes in 5-10 minutes were gone, I told him get up. Get up. Stand up. He wouldn't stand up.



So what I did was, me and a couple of my friends would sit on him and about 30 minutes, 1 hour, he was suffocated that guy and was thrown out of the wagon. I was happy. How did I feel? They killed all my family about 30, 40 people of my family and I killed 1 German, that was nothing."



Interviewer: "It was a murder, wasn't it? You did murder a fellow prisoner?"



Morris Venezia: "I was happy at the time, I told you, because he was a German. I wouldn't do that to, I wouldn't do that to one of, of ours, but anyway I wanted to be seated too over there, because I got tired too. Why should he live, because he gave me 2, 3 cigarettes? That's why he didn't wanna get up, so we sit on him and he passed away. Easy."



The Germans who were actually complicit in the murders at Auschwitz knew they were even more at risk from retribution as the war neared its end. Members of the SS, like Rudolf Höss, the former Commandant of Auschwitz, now tried to escape capture. And the story of Höss and his colleagues' attempt to evade justice and the Allied attempt to prosecute them is one of the most troubling in this entire history.



END CREDITS

Source: http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/about/transcripts_5.html

Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution', is a BBC six-episode documentary film series presenting the story of Auschwitz through interviews with former inmates and guards and re-enactments, first televised on BBC One on 11 January 2005. The series prominently featured the music of Gorecki Symphony No 3 , Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel" and Handel's Harpsichord Suite No. 4 In D Minor, HWV 437: Sarabande.



In the United States, this series first aired on PBS television stations as Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State in early 2005 and was released, under that title, in a 2-DVD box set (Region 1), by BBC Warner, on 29 March 2005.

BBC Press Releases

Auschwitz: The Nazis & the 'Final Solution'



BBC TWO, January 2005



With a number of recent high profile Hollywood films such as Schindler's List and The Pianist and iconic books such as The Diary of Anne Frank it is easy to assume that everyone is familiar with the Holocaust and Auschwitz.



Yet a recent BBC survey suggests that almost half the adult population (45%) claim to have never even heard of Auschwitz.



Amongst women and people aged under 35 the figure is even higher at 60%.



Even among those who have heard of Auschwitz, 70% felt that they did not know a great deal about the subject.



Most of them (76%) were unaware of its roots as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners; the majority (74%) did not know that people other than Jews were killed there and only a few recognised the name of the camp commandant or knew who finally liberated the camp at the end of the war.



The BBC's research informs a definitive new series which has been made to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 2005.



Written and produced by Bafta Award-winning producer Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis & the 'Final Solution' offers a unique perspective on the camp in which more than one million people were ruthlessly murdered.



"We were amazed by the results of our audience research" says series producer Laurence Rees. "It's easy to presume that the horrors of Auschwitz are engrained in the nation's collective memory but obviously this is not the case.



"We were particularly startled by the fact that less than 40% of younger people have even heard of Auschwitz.



"The research reinforced the importance of making this series and trying to ensure the atrocities that unfolded at Auschwitz are never forgotten."



The series is the result of three years of in-depth research, drawing on the close involvement of world experts on the period, including Professors Sir Ian Kershaw and David Cesarani.



It is based on nearly 100 interviews with survivors and perpetrators, many of whom are speaking in detail for the first time.



Sensitively shot drama sequences, filmed on location using German and Polish actors, bring recently discovered documents to life on screen, whilst specially commissioned computer images give a historically accurate view of Auschwitz-Birkenau at all its many stages of development.



"The name Auschwitz is quite rightly a byword for horror," says Laurence Rees. "But the problem with thinking about horror is that we naturally turn away from it.



"Our series is not only about the shocking, almost unimaginable pain of those who died, or survived, Auschwitz. It's about how the Nazis came to do what they did.



"I feel passionately that being horrified is not enough. We need to make an attempt to understand how and why such horrors happened if we are ever to be able to stop them occurring again."



The BBC will be marking Holocaust Memorial Day (27 January 2005) with a number of other television and radio programmes, including a live event on the day, an international musical performance in and around the museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a documentary that traces one woman's story of survival told through her grandson's eyes.



Notes to Editors



The research findings were based on a nationally representative postal survey of 4,000 adults aged 16+ conducted by IPSOS RSL as part of their weekly Quest survey.



All respondents recruited were mailed a questionnaire to complete covering a number of topics, with quota controls imposed, within region, by age within sex and social class.



Fieldwork was conducted during February 2004.



Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/12_december/02/auschwitz.shtml

The Killing Evolution

by PBS



The Nazis did not start World War II with a plan to eliminate the Jews. This solution evolved—especially from 1939 to 1941—as they tried different techniques to accomplish their goals. Particularly in Germany and Poland camp commandants experimented with various killing methodologies and consulted with one another on their successes and failures. The ability of a single camp to kill 2,000-3,000 people per hour took years to achieve. At first, though, murder was done at close range-man-to-man, woman, or child.

Death by Firing Squad



In 1941, SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski told his superior Heinrich Himmler that the Nazis had been murdering Jews, including women and children, at close range and in cold blood all summer. Bach-Zelewski was worried about this method's traumatizing effects on his men. Himmler recorded in his diary the General's concerns: "And he said to me, 'Reichsfuhrer, these men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we producing here- either neurotics or brutes?'"



Himmler realized he had to find new methods that would spare his troops the psychological strain of killing human beings at close range.

Carbon Monoxide



According to the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, Adolf Eichmann suggested using "showers of carbon monoxide while bathing, as was done with mental patients in some places in the Reich." Instead of leading to water, the showerheads were connected to canisters of carbon monoxide.



The birth of this method had varied sources, including one ironic twist. Artur Nebe, a Nazi-killing squad commander, had come home drunk from a party one night and passed out in his garage with his car still running. The carbon monoxide gas from the exhaust nearly killed him.



As Nebe related the incident to his SS comrades, this near-miss convinced him that gassing could be used effectively against the Jews and other Nazi enemies. Gas would be cheaper than bullets, and no Nazi would directly take a life.

Hell Vans



The Nazis' experimented with another methodology using carbon monoxide. Deported Jews from the Lodz Ghetto were led through a basement corridor and then up a ramp to a small windowless room that turned out to be the cargo area of a large van. Once the van was full, the doors were slammed shut, and as it was driven to a nearby forest, exhaust fumes were routed into the back, asphyxiating the trapped victims.



After the van reached its destination, the bodies were buried or burned. Zofia Szalek, a German residing in the Polish town of Chelmno, describes what she witnessed: "We could hear the screams, but we couldn't see the people. They were loaded in and murdered there. It was hell. That's why we called these vans 'Hell Vans.'"

Zyklon B

The most effective and efficient technique developed for killing at Auschwitz depended on the same pesticide that was used to kill the lice in prisoners' clothing. The disinfectant, sold under the trade name of Zyklon B, was in plentiful supply. Once exposed to properly heated air, the crystals produced lethal gas.



In the fall of 1941, the basement of cell block 11—the Auschwitz building where some of the most despicable punishments were meted out—was sealed and locked down. August Kowalczyk, a Polish political prisoner on a nearby work detail, witnessed the entire event. He reports that because they were still experimenting, Nazi judgments in error caused the murders to take place over a two-day period, instead of the expected half hour.

Massive Gas Chambers and Crematoria

By the early spring of 1943, four huge crematoria became fully operational at Auschwitz II (Birkenau). They housed eight gas chambers and forty-six ovens that could dispose of some 4,400 corpses per day. Trains would arrive at the camp and those most fit—approximately 10-30 percent of the arrivals—would be selected for a work detail. The remaining prisoners were sent to the gas chambers.



Prisoners assigned to a unit known as the Sonderkommando had to move the bodies from the gas chambers to the furnaces. Several bodies at a time were burned in a single oven. In May 1944 a serious bottle-neck occurred at Auschwitz, because the deportation and extermination of the Hungarian Jews was under way.



Numbering about 725,000, plus thousands more who were Christian converts but still counted as Jews by Nazi racial criteria, the Hungarian Jews were the largest Jewish group that remained alive in Nazi-dominated Europe. Between late April and early July 1944, more than 380,000 of them were brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most were gassed and cremated. When the demand for corpse disposal overtaxed the camp’s ovens, camp authorities, needing to speed up the process, again resorted to burning bodies on pyres, using the huge pits that had been dug behind Crematorium V.



Precise counts of how many people actually were murdered in death camps can never be made because those marched off directly from the trains usually were not registered. However, a calculation that is both conservative and reliable indicates that at least 1.1 million people were gassed to death at Auschwitz—90 percent of them Jews.



Even with all of the death technology, the Germans could not cremate everyone they murdered during the Holocaust. As they retreated from the advancing Allied forces, they blew up the gas chambers and crematoria to destroy the evidence at Auschwitz. But the evidence lingered. In camps throughout Poland and Germany, tens of thousands of bodies remained stacked or spilling out into the cold winter snow.

Surprising Beginnings

March 1940 to September 1941



Auschwitz, the site of the largest mass murder in the history of the world did not start out as a death camp. In the spring of 1940, Rudolf Höss, a captain in the SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite defense organization that answered only to Hitler and advanced his plans, became Commandant of a new Nazi concentration camp at the southwestern Polish town of Oswiecim. Auschwitz, as the Germans called it, was in territory that Hitler had invaded the previous year.



Höss was directed to create a concentration camp for 10,000 prisoners, using old Polish army barracks, but as he later wrote in his memoirs, "The task wasn’t easy. In the shortest possible time, I had to create a camp for 10,000 prisoners using the existing complex of buildings which were well constructed but were completely run down and swarming with vermin."



“True opponents of the state had to be securely locked up... Only the SS were capable of protecting the National Socialist State from all internal danger. All other organizations lacked the necessary toughness.”

– Memoirs of Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz



Auschwitz I, as the camp came to be called, was built primarily to confine and oppress Polish dissidents whom the Nazis considered to be a threat to their occupation. Polish Jews were confined elsewhere, increasingly in ghettos. Höss adopted the motto of Dachau, another concentration camp where he had previously worked: Arbeit Macht Frei ("Work Makes You Free").



“Watch your bread so that no one steals it. This is what you were preoccupied with, and this was a constant vigilance.”

– Kazimierz Piechowski, Polish political prisoner, Auschwitz



The Polish prisoners were subjected to appalling treatment from the SS. More than 10,000 died within twenty months. The camp received little support from Nazi headquarters and Höss often had to scrounge for supplies.



Jerzy Bielecki was one of the first Polish prisoners at Auschwitz. The SS thought he was with the Polish resistance and sentenced him to “hanging torture,” a brutal punishment where the prisoner carried his full body weight on his arms that were pulled behind his back in an unnatural position:



“He wanted to hang me on the hook. He said, ‘Stand up on your toes. Finally he hooked me and then he kicked the stool away without any warning. I just felt Jesus Mary, oh my God, the terrible pain. My shoulders were breaking out from the joints. Both arms were breaking out from the joints. I’d been moaning and he just said, ‘Shut up you dog. You deserve it. You have to suffer.’”



Writing in his memoirs, Rudolf Höss admits that Auschwitz was a concentration camp where cruel and brutal treatment was routine. Despite this—during the early 1940s—the facility was almost a backwater in Nazi-occupied Poland.



Auschwitz, however, was about to change. The town was situated on major railroad lines. Its surrounding area was rich in natural resources, particularly fresh water, lime, and coal. This made it an excellent location for IG Farben, the German industrial conglomerate, to build a factory that would manufacture war materials.



March 1940 to September 1941



Industrialization interested Heinrich Himmler, Commander of the SS. His dream was that IG Farben's activities would fund the creation of a model Nazi settlement where Auschwitz prisoners would work as slave laborers and the SS would profit by selling coal and gravel as well as labor to IG Farben.



Toward the end of 1940, Himmler visited Auschwitz and ordered the camp tripled in capacity from 10,000 to 30,000 prisoners. Auschwitz would be a backwater no longer, it would become the largest concentration camp in the Nazi empire. Over the succeeding months and years, a series of architectural plans were drawn up, detailing even greater expansion of the Nazi vision for Auschwitz.



While Himmler formulated his ideas for a bigger and greater Auschwitz during the spring of 1941, Adolf Hitler completed plans to invade the Soviet Union. Hitler's plans for Russia would in turn cause a radical change in the function of Auschwitz.



Because it was the home of communism, the Nazis feared and despised the Soviet Union. They also believed that Joseph Stalin's Red Army was made up of inferior human beings and would not be hard to defeat.



“They [the Russians] were—in civilisation terms—not as far on as the West. You just have to imagine the following: France—a civilised nation with flushing toilets. Russia—predominantly toilet behind the house.”



Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Of the three million Soviets troops taken prisoner in the invasion, two million were dead within nine months, either shot, starved, or worked to death.



Jerzy Bielecki, a Polish political prisoner at Auschwitz, watched what happened to the Russian prisoners who were forced to work in gravel pits.



“The prisoner overseers beat them mercilessly, kicked them, clubbed them. They would fall to the ground. It was a macabre scene. I had never in my life seen anything like it. Neither did I later on, even though I remained in the camp for a long time after. ”

– Jerzy Bielecki



“I saw an SS-man, a junior officer, walking around the gravel pit with a pistol in his hand. It was sadism. ‘You dogs! You damned communists! You pieces of shit!’ Horrible words like these. And from time to time he would direct the pistol downwards and shoot: Pow. Pow. Pow.” (Jerzy Bielecki).



“During an evening roll call, we were told that all the sick among us could go away for treatment. Some people believed it.”

– Kazimierz Smolen, Polish political prisoner, Auschwitz



Not only the Soviet prisoners of war suffered as the Germans moved east. Hitler did not want to keep alive any prisoners who could not work.



In the autumn of 1939, Hitler authorized a secret Euthanasia Program, which administered so-called mercy deaths first to handicapped children and later to mentally and physically disabled Germans adults. These people were taken to special institutions where they were gassed with carbon monoxide. Himmler wanted to extend this program to concentration camps, including Auschwitz, to eliminate the need to transport people who could not work. He realized that he had to find a better and more efficient way to murder people—psychologically better for the killers, not for the victims.



March 1940 to September 1941



One of Höss' deputies at Auschwitz developed an efficient method that featured crystallized prussic acid, mass produced under the trade name Zyklon B, and widely used as a pesticide. At Auschwitz it was being used to fumigate barracks and disinfect prisoners' clothes. When the crystals dissolved in air, they created a lethal gas. Block 11, the most feared location in Auschwitz, was chosen for the first Zyklon B experiments.



On a day in late August or early September 1941, the doors and windows in the cellar of Block 11 were sealed.



August Kowalczyk, a Polish political prisoner at Auschwitz, watched what happened the day Zyklon B was first used on Block 11:



“Our attention was drawn by SS men running around with gas masks. The windows of the bunker had been covered up with sand, and in the cellar Soviet prisoners of war were assembled. And it turned out the following day that the SS—actually, it was [Gerhard] Palitzsch in particular who attracted attention because he was running around like crazy. It turned out that the gas hadn't worked properly and that many of the prisoners, the people, were still alive. So they increased the dosage—added more crystals—and finished the job.”



Rudolf Höss later wrote that the experiment with Zyklon B had a calming effect on him: "I was always horrified of executions by firing squads. Now I was relieved to think that we would be spared all these bloodbaths."



But the bloodbaths would continue and grow even larger when a new camp was built a mile and a half from Auschwitz, at a place the Poles called Brzezinka, and the Germans Birkenau. It also became known as Auschwitz II.

Source: http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/40-45/killing/