Mila 18 - Leon Uris

The extermination centers are located at railheads and generally in secluded sites. They are guarded by Waffen SS and Ukrainian and Baltic Auxiliaries. A staggering amount of planning, material and manpower is being used to carry out this operation at a time when Germany is conducting a war on many fronts. For example, rail cars are at an urgent premium for the purpose of shipping war materials to the Russian front, yet importation of Jews from German-occupied countries into Poland seems to have taken a priority over army needs. In addition, thousands of engineers, scientists, and key personnel are tied up in this operation as well as desperately needed manpower. We can safely estimate that from two to three hundred thousand men are directly or indirectly involved. All of this effort testifies to the insane will of the Nazis as well as to the urgency of our situation.

These camps follow a basic pattern. Deception is carried out and secrecy maintained. This certainly indicates the Nazis are aware of the evil they are perpetrating. At each camp, deportees arrive and are weeded at selection centers. A few are set aside for slave labor. The rest, including women and small children, are moved to a “sanitation center” under the illusion of receiving a disinfectant shower. Hair is shorn. The guards play out the game to the end by issuing bars of soap (which later turn out to be made of stone), and victims are asked to remember the number of the peg on which their clothing is hung. Many women attempt to hide children in their clothing or throw them off trains to peasants, but they are almost always found out.

When the occupants are in, an iron door is sealed and an attendant carries out the gassing. The first gassings were from the carbon monoxide exhaust of engines. This method proved slow and petrol costly, therefore a prussic acid mixture called Cyclon B was developed by the Hamburg Insecticide Company. Death is in minutes.

Jewish slave laborers clean the chambers and remove the corpses to crematoriums, where they are burned. At first cremation was in open pits, but the stench was unbearable. The Jewish laborers generally last only a few weeks before losing their sanity.

There are many variations, but this is the general pattern. Gold teeth are pulled from the corpses before burning. Anything of value is taken for the German war effort. Everything else—clothing, eyeglasses, shoes, artificial limbs, even dolls—is stored in warehouses, then scrutinized for hidden valuables. Hair is baled and shipped to Germany for use in the manufacture of mattresses and to waterproof submarine periscopes. In one camp, bodies have been boiled down for their fat content, to be used in the making of soap.

In addition to the Polish camps, we have reason to believe several camps in Germany have extermination facilities. Dachau, among others, is used as an “experimental medical” center. Humans are compelled to undergo experiments, such as the grafting of bones, transplants of organs, testing beyond human limitations in freezing, electrical shock, etc. In all camps, extermination and labor, the indignities, abuses, torture, and rape are universal. These are amplified in the attached supplementary reports.

The German extermination facilities are capable of murdering a minimum of a hundred thousand persons a day in Poland. We do not have the additional numbers who are killed inside Germany. The Polish camps are currently working at full capacity. New gas chambers and crematoriums are being constructed to increase the rate.

The Polish camps are:

LUBLIN DISTRICT

Belzec —Located on the Lublin-Tomaszow rail line near Rawa Ruska, handling Jews from the Lwow-Lemberg area with a capacity of ten thousand a day.

Sobibor— Near Wlodawa, between Wlodawa and Chelm. Capacity believed to be six thousand a day.

Majdanek —An early concentration camp in the Lublin suburb Majdan-Tartarski under the personal direction of Odilo Globocnik, SS Gruppenführer of Poland. Capacity in excess of ten thousand a day.

WESTERN POLAND

Chelmno —The oldest extermination center (in operation at the end of 1941), nine miles from Kolo, on the rail line between Lodz and Poznan, exterminating Jews in western Poland.

CENTRAL POLAND

Treblinka —Most recently discovered by underground efforts, located in the Sokolow Podlaski province near Warsaw, liquidating Jews from the Warsaw ghetto as well as Radom, Bialystok, Grodno, the Baltics, Czenstochowa, Kielce.

SOUTHERN POLAND

Auschwitz —Located just outside the Silesian village of Oswiencim. The concentration camp has some fifty satellite labor camps. Extermination facilities are in a compound named Birkenau. Capacity in excess of forty thousand a day. Gypsies, Russian POWs, political, criminal, and other prisoners are liquidated here as well as Jews.

SUPPLEMENTARY REPORT # 1

by “Jan” on the Majdanek extermination camp in Lublin

I was able to enter Majdanek disguised as a Polish laborer, one of hundreds who work on construction jobs in the outer compounds.

At 0700 I left Lublin by horse and cart with a party named “Leopold.” We were halted at a rail terminal approximately one kilometer from the main gate of the camp. The terminal is adjacent to the main highway. We sat and waited while several thousand Rumanian Jews were herded over the highway on a march to the camp gate.

A line of Red Cross vans waited alongside the terminal building. German guards loaded these vans with aged, cripples, infants, and others unfit to walk the mile. Leopold told me these Red Cross vans are actually sealed, escape-proof cabins. Once they are in motion, the carbon monoxide from the exhaust is routed back into the van so that by the time they reach Majdanek the occupants are dead.

(Note:

This same method was used in both Chelmno and Treblinka but ruled out as too slow and costly. It is used only to supplement the main extermination facilities.)

I entered the outer compound at 0800 through a gate which bore a sign: LABOR BRINGS FREEDOM. My crew was working on a brick barrack in the outer camp, fifty meters from the inner camp, for use by a new guard contingent. I was able to place myself on the third-story roof in a hidden spot and in a position of observation through a pair of field glasses which I brought in in my lunch box.

I should estimate that the entire camp area covered six or seven hundred acres. At its closest point it was only a kilometer and a half from Lublin. The outer camp contains guard barracks, the commandant’s home, a general store, garage, and other service buildings of a permanent nature.

The inner compound is composed of forty-six barracks made of wood of the type used as German army stables. Air and light came through a narrow row of skylight windows. I was told that each barrack holds nearly four hundred prisoners. Obviously they are crammed with room only for slabs for beds and a narrow passageway to the main door.

The inner compound is surrounded by double walls of barbed wire five meters high. Between the two walls is a continuous patrol by Ukrainians with Alsatian dogs. I am told that the inner wall is electrified at night.

High guard towers with floodlights and machine guns stand every twenty-five meters along the outer wall.

Leopold called my attention to the set of barracks nearest us. He told me these are warehouses. The Rumanian Jews whom I had seen earlier at the rail terminal were already filing into the first barrack, which is a selection center. Only a few were taken into the camp. The rest trekked over an open plot to a concrete building marked by signs I could clearly identify as SANITATION CENTER.

The “sanitation center” is very pretty, with lawns and trees and flowers planted around it.