… camp, dubbed simply Auschwitz II, was located near the original in Birkenau, designed to hold more “serious criminals.” Auschwitz III was also constructed and consisted of ten camps, Monowitz being the largest. Auschwitz-Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, was the extermination camp. The gas chambers at this camp were of enormous size and technologically superior to those found in the Aktion Reinhard camps.
New methods of extermination also became practiced at Auschwitz. Zyklon-B, a poisonous gas made up of Prussic acid and originally used for pest control, was used in place of carbon monoxide to exterminate Jews. Zyklon-B was manufactured by the German corporation Tech and Stabenow and originally tested on Russian POWs. Unlike the camps of Aktion Reinhard, where victims’ corpses were buried in surrounding meadows, Auschwitz possessed two large crematoriums (constructed in the spring of 1943) equipped with five ovens that could turn 2, 000 corpses into ash within twenty-four hours. And to facilitate the transport of Jews to the camp, a complex network of railway lines was constructed.
The use of Zyklon-B, the construction of massive crematoriums and the development of sophisticated transportation routes made Auschwitz the most efficient death camp in the Reich. Fischer states: “Auschwitz became the most monstrous death factory of the whole Nazi annihilation system.” Auschwitz was not only a mass extermination camp, but a center for Nazi medical research. Within its sinister fences, Nazi doctors experimented with and sterilized subjects of “subhuman origin.” Some of the doctors Noakes mentions include: Carl Clauberg, who sterilized women by injecting irritant fluids into the uterus; Horst Schumann, who castrated male and female Jews by means of large doses of X-rays, and Josef Mengele, nicknamed the “Angel of Death”, whose primary research was conducted upon identical twins. Mengele hoped to increase the proliferation of the Aryan race by discovering the secret of identical twin births. Medical experiments conducted upon prisoners at Auschwitz were cruel and torturous. The fact that Jews were seen as subhuman vermin became justification for the torture of innocent people, many of whom were children.
The death toll at Auschwitz reached incredible heights. Noakes maintains that “Most scholars now regard a figure of 1 million Jews killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau as a reasonable estimate. In addition, there were tens of thousands of Poles, Russian POWs and 6, 400 Gypsies who died in the camp.” Whereas the camps of Aktion Reinhard aimed to exterminate solely those Jews, Gypsies and political prisoners living in the General government, Auschwitz became the death factory for Europe’s entire Jewish population. Jews from Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Greece, Hungary (beginning in 1944) and Slovakia were all herded into trains and transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. All deportation and transportation matters lay in the hands of the RSHA’s leader, Adolf Eichmann.
Many countries’ governments willfully handed over their Jewish inhabitants, such as Croatia and Slovakia, while Romania collaborated with the Nazis by killing their Jews themselves! (As the war escalated, this practice came to a halt). Largely anti-Semitic Vichy France rounded up their Jewish population into trains and deported them to Auschwitz. On the other hand, many countries resisted deportation of its Jewish population. The Danish king helped Jews find refuge in Sweden, and in turn, the Swedish government managed to rescue a great many Jews from Hungary. Italian officials refused collaboration with Nazi demands of Jewish deportation even after Germany controlled the country. Until the Nazi puppet government of Sztojay was installed in 1944, Hungary likewise resisted collaboration.
The Finnish government, though an ally to Germany, took special measures to protect its Jewish inhabitants. Noakes emphasizes that, “Where the German grip was tight, as in Holland, the majority of the Jews perished.” Factors such as geographical setting also played a huge role in how governments reacted to Jewish deportation. For instance, it was far easier for a remote country such as Finland to resist Jewish deportation than Holland, a smaller, flatter country right next door to the Reich. Further, Denmark’s close proximity to neutral Sweden gave Danish Jews an advantage not shared by Jews living in countries like Belgium, or occupied France. Noakes maintains that Vichy France’s willingness to cooperate with the Nazis stemmed from France’s history of anti-Semitism which resulted from the Dreyfus Affair of the 19 th Century.
Yet, France’s anti-Semitism, unlike Germany’s racial brand, was of a religious and economic nature, and it was for this reason that Marshall Petain refused to hand over French Jews to the Nazis. Though the collaborative actions taken by Vichy President Laval were despicable, many Jews were spared due their loyalty to the French state: .”.. the number of Jews deported to Germany from France was restricted to around 76, 000 out of the well over 300, 000 who were living in France at the time of the German invasion in 1940.” It is extremely difficult for one studying the Holocaust to comprehend how such a horrible historical event could have taken place. The highly systematic, calculated and pre-meditated atrocities committed by the Nazis in the extermination camps makes one wonder how its perpetrators could have actually carried out the tasks that they did. Many of them have therefore been portrayed as vile, inhuman monsters when in reality, most of the perpetrators led very normal lives, and felt their actions justified as national duty favoring a stronger, more pure Germany.
Few of the SS officials tried in the Nuremburg trials were found to have been clinically insane. It is likely that a great majority of the Holocaust’s perpetrators were so convinced of anti-Semitic Nazi ideology, that conducting experiments upon human subjects differed little from conducting experiments upon laboratory rats. The very idea of Jews being likened to vermin may have aided these convictions. Throughout their writings, Noakes and Fischer emphasize the vagueness of the word “perpetrator.” For perpetrators of the Holocaust could range from high-ranking officials such as Hess, Himmler or Eichmann, to the train conductors transporting Jews to Auschwitz, all the way to those German citizens who did nothing to protest Nazi atrocities. Noakes takes a sympathetic stance toward the German people, stating that, “many remained remarkably ignorant even about the restrictions to which the Jews were subjected in their daily lives… .” Germans did know…
that whatever it was that was happening to the Jews was very nasty.” In a sense, Noakes sees the citizens of the Reich as remaining blindly obedient to the actions of the Nazis. Regarding the mentalities of high-ranking Nazi perpetrators, Fischer sees the actions which they carried out as reflections of their “rigid” personalities: If Eichmann or Himmler saw themselves as decent men, then why did they order mass killings? The answer lies in their… robotic, personality structure. Eichmann, Himmler, Hess and Mengele were true believers with all the strength and intensity that accompanies the will to believe. A strong will to believe combined with a stubborn, inflexible personality type is then, according to Fischer what drove these men to commit the atrocities of the Holocaust. All these men needed was to be given something to believe strongly about, and Hitler gave it to them.
I find this argument plausible, yet leaning toward generalization. Were the mentalities of Himmler and Eichmann that comparable? I think a far more detailed look at their personalities might prove otherwise. Nevertheless, both indeed carried out the orders of one of the most tyrannical governments to come to power during the 20 th Century. An exact estimate of how many Jews were killed during the Holocaust has never been calculated, and figures range anywhere from four to seven million.
Noakes asserts that the most reliable source comes from Eichmann himself, whose estimate was voiced through one of his subordinates (Wilhelm Hoe ttl of the RSHA) and calculated at roughly 6 million. Out of these 6 million, four million were killed in the extermination camps.