Himmler orders the expansion of Auschwitz

On 1 March 1941 Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler came to Oświęcim, a town the Germans had annexed to the Reich and renamed Auschwitz. It was his first visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp, founded less than a year earlier in former Polish Army barracks. He was shown round by the camp commandant, SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, and his entourage included the Gauleiter and Oberpräsident of Upper Silesia, Fritz Bracht, the Higher SS and Police Leader in Breslau, Ernst Schmauser, the Inspector of Concentration Camps, Richard Glücks, officials of the regional administration and representatives of the chemical concern IG Farben. After walking round the camp and driving round the surrounding area, Himmler issued instructions that transformed the place: the camp was to be enlarged to hold 30,000 prisoners; some 10,000 prisoners were to work on building the IG Farben plant at nearby Dwory and Monowice; the whole zone around the camp was to be developed for agriculture and industry; and the camp workshops were to be expanded.

Popular chronologies state that on this day “Hitler ordered the expansion of the Auschwitz camp, which was to be run by commandant Rudolf Höss”. This is inaccurate. The instructions were issued not by Hitler but by Himmler, who was in charge of the SS, the police and the whole concentration camp system; no order by Hitler on the matter is known. Nor was Höss a new commandant: he had run the camp since its foundation in May 1940. Finally, it was not an ordinary “prisoner-of-war camp” or a prison, but an SS concentration camp, intended at that time above all for Poles.

A camp for Poles

Oświęcim lay in the western part of the pre-war Kraków province. By Hitler’s decree of 8 October 1939 it was incorporated, together with Chrzanów, Biała and Żywiec, into the Regierungsbezirk Kattowitz (PL) and thus directly into the Reich, rather than into the neighbouring General Government. From the beginning of 1940 the German Security Police in Silesia had been looking for a site for a new camp, because the prisons in Silesia and the General Government were overflowing with arrested Poles. Their choice fell on a complex of barracks in Zasole, the district of the town on the left bank of the Soła: some twenty brick buildings that had been occupied by the Polish Army before the war. The first commission from the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps judged the site unsuitable, but in February 1940 Glücks reported to Himmler that it would serve as a quarantine camp from which prisoners would be sent on to camps inside the Reich. In mid-April the site was inspected by a commission headed by Höss, and on 27 April 1940 Himmler ordered the camp to be established. On 4 May Höss was officially appointed its commandant.

On 20 May 1940 thirty German criminal prisoners were brought from the Sachsenhausen camp; they were given the numbers 1 to 30 and became kapos and block seniors. On 14 June 1940 the first mass transport arrived: 728 Polish political prisoners from the prison in Tarnów. Among them were young men arrested at the border as they tried to make their way through Hungary to the Polish Army in France, members of the underground, schoolboys, priests and a few Polish Jews. The day before, they had been gathered in the municipal bathhouse, and in the morning they were marched to the station – the same one where, on the eve of the war, a bomb planted by an Abwehr agent had exploded. They were given the numbers from 31, which went to Stanisław Ryniak, to 758. According to historians’ findings, roughly a third of them survived the war. The anniversary of this transport, 14 June, is today observed in Poland as the National Day of Remembrance of the Victims of German Nazi Concentration Camps and Extermination Camps (PL).

For its first year and a half Auschwitz was above all a camp for Poles. Those sent there included people arrested in the Intelligenzaktion and the AB-Aktion, operations aimed at the Polish elites, as well as members of the underground, hostages and victims of street round-ups. On 15 August 1940 the first large transport arrived from Warsaw, and in September 1940 reserve Second Lieutenant Witold Pilecki deliberately let himself be caught in a round-up and taken to the camp, where he organised a resistance network and sent reports to the underground command in Warsaw. Conditions were murderous. Prisoners were forced into back-breaking labour on the expansion of the camp, beaten, and punished with “sport”, with the post and with the bunker cells in the prison block. In November 1940 a group of 40 prisoners was shot for the first time. According to German and Polish studies, at least 2,500 people died or were murdered in the camp between July 1940 and March 1941. Over the gate was placed the inscription “Arbeit macht frei”, made by prisoners, which Höss knew from Dachau.

The camp grew from the outset. In the summer and autumn of 1940 the Germans expelled the Poles from the neighbouring streets of Zasole and from the so-called Barracks Settlement, and the houses were demolished for building material. A closed zone was marked out around the camp, the so-called camp interest zone (Interessengebiet), which was to cover about 40 square kilometres. At the beginning of March 1941 the camp held, according to some studies, about 10,000–11,000 prisoners, most of them Poles, guarded by some 700 SS men.

Rubber for the Reich

Himmler’s visit had a direct economic cause. The Reich, cut off by the blockade from natural rubber from South-East Asia, relied on Buna synthetic rubber, produced by IG Farben. Under the Four-Year Plan the concern was to build another, fourth large Buna plant, this time in the east, beyond the reach of British bombers. At the turn of 1940 and 1941 a member of the concern’s board, Otto Ambros, inspected several sites in Silesia and chose a flat stretch of land between the eastern edge of Oświęcim and the villages of Dwory (PL) and Monowice (PL). In its favour were water from the Vistula and the Soła, coal from nearby mines, limestone and salt, good rail connections and tax concessions for industry in the new eastern territories. The decisive factor, however, was the neighbouring camp, which could supply cheap labour. At the beginning of February 1941 the concern’s management chose Oświęcim. At the request of the Plenipotentiary for Chemistry in the Four-Year Plan, Carl Krauch, Hermann Göring asked Himmler to provide prisoners for the construction, and in February Himmler ordered the Jews to be removed from Oświęcim, the Poles fit for work to be kept in place, and camp prisoners to be assigned to the building site.

On 1 March 1941, during the visit, the IG Farben representatives inspected the site of the future plant together with Himmler. The arrangements took concrete form over the following weeks. In April 1941 the Germans deported the Jews of Oświęcim, who before the war had made up roughly half of the town’s population, to the ghettos in Sosnowiec, Będzin and Chrzanów; their houses were set aside for the concern’s German employees. On 7 April the founding meeting of the plant was held in Katowice, and in mid-April the first prisoners began work on the site: demolishing houses in Monowice, levelling the ground, digging ditches. The concern paid the SS three marks for each day’s work by an unskilled prisoner and four for a skilled one. All summer columns of emaciated men walked several kilometres each morning and evening between the camp and the site; later they were taken by train.

Himmler’s instructions also concerned the camp itself and its surroundings. At the turn of March and April 1941 the Germans expelled the inhabitants of the surrounding villages: Babice, Budy, Rajsko, Brzezinka, Broszkowice, Pławy and Harmęże. Most of the buildings were demolished, and in the rest the SS set up farms, fishponds and experimental plantations worked by prisoners. According to the historians Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Himmler also saw in Oświęcim a future model town of German settlement in the east. Expansion of the main camp itself also began.

The dispute over Birkenau

In notes written after the war in a Polish prison, Rudolf Höss claimed that during the visit of 1 March 1941 Himmler had already ordered him to build a second camp at Brzezinka, three kilometres from the main camp, intended for 100,000 prisoners of war. Many studies repeat this version. The chronicle of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, however, lists among the instructions of 1 March only the enlargement of the camp to 30,000 prisoners, prisoners for IG Farben, the development of the zone and the expansion of the workshops. Some historians, among them Jan Erik Schulte, believe that the decision to build the camp at Brzezinka was taken only in September 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, when the SS was counting on hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners as labour. What is certain is that construction of the Auschwitz II–Birkenau camp began in October 1941, and that on the plans it was called a prisoner-of-war camp (Kriegsgefangenenlager). It is also certain that the enlargement of the camp to 30,000 prisoners had been talked about earlier: in January 1941 the Polish underground reported to the government in London that the camp, which then held about 7,000 people, was to be rebuilt for 30,000.

The dispute concerns the chronology, not the significance of the visit. On 1 March 1941 Himmler decided that Auschwitz would cease to be one of many camps for Polish political prisoners and would become a great SS complex: a forced-labour camp for the armaments industry, a reservoir of labour and an economic centre of the SS in the seized territories. No one was yet speaking of mass extermination, but the infrastructure, the railway and the isolated site prepared in 1941 decided, a few months later, the choice of Auschwitz for an entirely different task.

Place in the war

In March 1941 Auschwitz was one of many instruments of German terror in occupied Poland, alongside the Gestapo prisons, the execution sites and the ghettos in which the Germans confined the Jewish population, such as the Warsaw Ghetto. The decisions of 1 March, though economic in nature, set the direction in which the camp was to develop, and the war in the east and the decision to murder the Jews of Europe soon gave it an entirely new meaning. In the summer of 1941 Soviet prisoners of war began to arrive at the camp. At the beginning of September 1941, in the cellars of Block 11, the SS used Zyklon B for the first time, to kill some 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick prisoners, most of them Poles. In October 1941 Soviet prisoners of war began building the camp at Brzezinka, and most of them died within a few months.

From 1942 Birkenau, with makeshift gas chambers in converted farmhouses, and from 1943 with four large crematoria, became the largest site of the extermination of the Jews of all Europe. According to the findings of Franciszek Piper, accepted by historians today, at least 1.3 million people were deported to the Auschwitz complex, of whom at least 1.1 million were killed: about 960,000 Jews, 70,000–75,000 Poles, about 21,000 Roma, about 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and 10,000–15,000 prisoners of other nationalities. The IG Farben plant, next to which the Monowitz camp, later known as Auschwitz III, was set up in October 1942, was built by tens of thousands of prisoners, many of whom died of exhaustion or were killed after selections. By the end of the war the plant had not produced a single kilogram of synthetic rubber. On 27 January 1945 the camp was liberated by the Red Army. Himmler took his own life in British captivity in May 1945, and Rudolf Höss was sentenced to death by a Polish court in 1947 and hanged on the grounds of the camp whose construction he had begun.