Auschwitz by Laurence Rees

September 1 and the start of the war—another sign that the conflict acted as a catalyst to radicalize Nazi thinking. The disabled were, to these fanatical National Socialists, another example of Ballastexistenzen, now especially burdensome to a country at war. Dr. Pfannmueller, one of the most notorious figures within the adult euthanasia program, expressed his feelings this way: “The idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower of our youth must lose its life at the front, in order that the feeble-minded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the asylum.” 57 Not surprisingly, given the mentality of the perpetrators, the selection criteria included not just the severity of the mental or physical illness but also the religious or ethnic background of the patient. Thus, Jews in mental hospitals were sent to be gassed without selection and, in the East, similar draconian methods were used to clear Polish asylums of patients.
    Between October 1939 and May 1940 about 10,000 mental patients were killed in West Prussia and the Warthegau, many by the use of a new technique—a gas chamber on wheels. Victims were shoved into a hermetically sealed compartment in the back of a converted van and then asphyxiated by bottled carbon monoxide. Significantly, the living space thus released was used to house the incoming ethnic Germans.
    At the start of 1941 the adult euthanasia campaign was extended to concentration camps in an action known as 14f13, and the program reached Auschwitz on July 28. “During evening roll-call it was said that all the sick can leave to be healed,” says Kazimierz Smoleń, 58 then a political prisoner at the camp. “Some inmates believed it. Everyone has hope. But I wasn’t so convinced of the good intentions of the SS.” Neither was Wilhelm Brasse, who listened to his Kapo, a German Communist, describe what he thought the fate of the sick would be: “He told us that in Sachsenhausen camp he had heard rumors that people are taken from hospitals and that they disappear somewhere.”
    About 500 sick inmates—a combination of volunteers and those selected—were marched out of the camp to a waiting train. “They were all
worn out,” says Kazimierz Smoleń. “There were no healthy people. It was a march of specters. At the end of the line were nurses carrying people on stretchers. It was macabre. No one yelled at them or laughed. The sick people were pleased, saying, ‘Let my wife and children know about me.’” Much to the joy of the remaining prisoners, two of the most notorious Kapos were included in the transport, one of them the hated Krankemann. The rumor in the camp was that he had fallen out with his protector, the Lagerführer Fritzsch. Both Kapos—in fulfillment of Himmler’s prediction of the fate of Kapos once they had returned to ordinary prison life—were almost certainly murdered on the train before it reached its destination. All the other inmates who left the camp that day died in a gas chamber in a converted mental hospital at Sonnenstein near Danzig. The first Auschwitz prisoners to be gassed were therefore not killed in the camp but transported to Germany, and they were not murdered because they were Jews but because they could no longer work.
    The summer of 1941 was not only a crucial time in the development of Auschwitz, it was also a decisive moment in both the course of the war against the Soviet Union and the Nazis’ policy towards the Soviet Jews. Superficially, during July the war seemed to be going well with the Wehrmacht making good progress against the Red Army. As early as July 3rd, Franz Halder of the German High Command wrote in his diary, “It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.” Goebbels echoed such thoughts in his own diary on July 8th, writing, “No one doubts any more