Due to present circumstances, we shall have to expect a later date of completion for this vehicle. It will then not only be kept available as a model but also be used as a reserve vehicle. Once it has been tested, the other vans will be withdrawn from service and will undergo the same alterations.
II. To Gruppenleiter II D
SS-Obersturmbannführer Rauff
for examination and decision.
by order of
Just
What is it possible to say in the face of such words? What kind of numbing needs to have occurred for somebody to be able to write of men, women and children in this way – ‘the load’, ‘the cargo’? There is only one moment when the memorandum writer, almost accidentally it seems, refers to human emotion and not machinery: ‘It has also been noticed that the noise provoked by the locking of the door is linked to the fear aroused by the darkness’ (my emphasis).
And how to connect these words with the individual deaths of 97,000 people over this six-month period? Soon, aided by the technical improvements suggested here, to become an estimated 300,000–350,000 deaths. Like killing every individual in a city the size of Nottingham or Hull, in ten of these Saurer lorries. This single memorandum should be a central image in our understanding of the Holocaust, because the vast majority of the mass murders were not ‘spontaneous’ shootings or pogroms – they were planned, timetabled, ordered, recorded methodically, currency and possessions of the victims catalogued obsessively, by an army of bureaucrats like Just and Rauff here, hundreds of thousands of them, who after the war melted back into German society, almost without trace.
So what of the sender and recipent of this memorandum? What do we know about these men? Very little about Willy Just, the author of these words. He was born in 1899, had served in the First World War, and then became a welder and mechanic, before joining the Schutzpolizei, the protective police department. He later moved to the Gestapo, and joined the SS in 1938, ending his career in Berlin in Amstgruppe II D (the Technical and Automative department of Himmler’s RSHA, the Reich Main Security Office).fn4
More is known about his boss Walter Rauff, who was head of Amstgruppe II D at the RSHA and became a key figure in the development of the gaswagen as mobile gas chambers. But Rauff’s mechanical innovation and re design of lorries could not have happened without the prior expertise of several other specialists from scientific backgrounds. The original impetus that eventually led to the creation of the gaswagen derived from Himmler’s concern that the Einsatzgruppen (mobile execution squads) mass shootings were having a demoralising effect on his men. After witnessing a mass shooting of Jews in Minsk in August 1941 Himmler had asked Dr Artur Nebe, his head of the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt (Reich Criminal Police), to come up with more efficient methods of mass killing. Nebe then turned to two chemists, who worked at the KTI (the Kriminaltechnische Institut = Criminal Technical Institute) in Berlin – Dr Walter Heess, who was the head of the KTI (and had gained his doctorate in chemistry in 1925), and his younger colleague, Dr Albert Widmann (doctorate in chemistry from the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart in 1938), who was a specialist in toxicology. Heess and Widmann had earlier been closely involved in advising on the most effective lethal chemicals to be used in the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme.fn5 They (together with a third colleague, the chemist Dr August Becker – doctorate from the University of Giessen, 1933) recommended, and oversaw the use of, bottled carbon monoxide, which was then procured from BASF and used to kill patients at the six psychiatric hospitals across the Reich.
In September 1941, Dr Nebe asked Dr Heess whether he thought exhaust gas could be used for mass killings instead of bottled gas. Dr Heess and Dr Widmann then discussed this, rather bizarrely, according to Widmann’s account, on a tube journey in Berlin – between Wittenberg-Platz and Thiel-Platz as he later recalled. Dr Widmann then travelled to Minsk, later in September, and oversaw the very first test of gassing human beings using exhaust fumes – five mental patients were killed in an airtight room, with exhaust from a truck outside pumped in using a hose. Building on the success of this experiment, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the RSHA, then turned to Rauff and asked him to design and develop a mobile gaswagen. Rauff did this relatively quickly, using five trucks ordered from Saurer in Switzerland, and then calling on the skills of Friedrich Pradel, head of the Security Police motor division, and his chief mechanic Harry Wentritt, whose workshop was located at the Security Police’s headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in Berlin. Between the three of them, the gaswagen soon became a reality – Rauff’s initial ideas being developed by Pradel and Wentritt, who customised the Saurer trucks by designing a U-shaped pipe that could link the exhaust to the sealed compartment at the back of the truck.
The historian Christopher Browning describes the moment that Wentritt drove the prototype grey Saurer truck to the courtyard of the KTI for testing in October 1941. Dr Widmann then gave the young chemists in his department a kind of seminar in the optimum way of killing human beings:
Widmann … explained that through adjusting the timing of the ignition, one could maximise the amount of poisonous carbon monoxide in the exhaust. He also explained how to measure the carbon monoxide content within the sealed compartment … One of his men donned a gas mask and conducted the measurement.
Some days later, Dr Heess drove two of the young chemists who had witnessed this demonstration to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. There they found the Saurer truck again, surrounded by SS officers, and they watched as forty naked Russian POWs were led to the truck and locked into the rear compartment. The truck then drove for ten minutes or so, and Heess and his young students followed on foot. Groaning could still be heard, but after twenty minutes there was silence, and a check from the peephole in the driver’s cab confirmed that all were now dead. Another test; another success for the chemists of the Reich.
Now full production of the gaswagens could go ahead – thirty trucks were ordered, larger ones from Saurer (which could take around fifty to sixty people), smaller ones from Opel and Diamond (for around thirty people). These trucks then were modified, under the supervision of Wentritt, and with the help of a Berlin company, Firma Gaubschat (which supplied sealed metal compartments that could fit inside the trucks). Within a matter of weeks, by 8 December 1941, the Sonderkommando under the command of Hauptsturmführer Herbert Lange, had started killing Jews using the new gaswagen, at Chelmno. The vans (Saurers and Diamonds) were also sent to the Eastern Front, to the Einsatzgruppen operating in Riga, Vitebsk, Minsk and Moghilev – seen as timely Christmas presents by the unit commanders, who had been so concerned about the psychological traumas being suffered by their men in the process of mass shootings.
Later in the war, in 1942, Rauff led an Einsatzkommando in Vichy-occupied Tunisia, where he continued his work killing Jews and partisans. And had El Alamein not halted the Nazi forces in North Africa, Rauff would have brought his gaswagen to exterminate the Jews right across the Middle East. In 1943 he took charge of Gestapo operations in north-west Italy; he ended the war as an SS Standartenführer (equivalent to colonel), and was arrested by the Americans in Milan in 1945, then transferrred to a camp in Rimini, from where he escaped. He managed to get to Rome, and was sheltered by Vatican officials until he was joined by his family. From here they sailed for Syria on fake Red Cross papers (an established procedure for many fugitive SS officers aided by the Vatican). From Syria, Rauff and family eventually made their way to South America. He ultimately found sanctuary in Pinochet’s Chile, where he died on 14 May 1984.