Well, he could deduce numbers. Say: sixty persons per car, an average of sixty cars per train. Deduction: three thousand six hundred persons per transport.
By February, the transports were running at the rate of one per day. Deduction: twenty-five thousand persons per week; one hundred thousand persons per month; one and a quarter million persons per year. And this was the average achieved in the depths of the Central European winter, when the points froze and drifts of snow blocked the tracks and the partisans materialised from the woods like ghosts to plant their bombs.
Deduction: the numbers would be even greater in the spring and summer.
He stood at the bathroom door. Charlie, in a black slip, had her back to him and was bending over the wash basin. With her hair wet she looked smaller; almost fragile. The muscles in her pale shoulders flexed as she massaged her scalp. She rinsed her hair a final time and stretched a hand out blindly behind her. He gave her a towel.
Along the edge of the bath she had set out various objects — a pair of green rubber gloves, a brush, a dish, a spoon, two bottles. March picked up the bottles and studied their labels. One contained a mixture of magnesium carbonate and sodium acetate, the other a twenty-volume solution of hydrogen peroxide. Next to the mirror above the basin she had propped open the girl’s passport. Magda Voss regarded March with wide and untroubled eyes.
“Are you sure this is going to work?”
Charlie wound the towel around her head into a turban.
“First I go red. Then orange. Then white-blonde.” She took the bottles from him. “I was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl with a crush on Jean Harlow. My mother went crazy. Trust me.
She squeezed her hands into the rubber gloves and measured the chemicals into the dish. With the spoon she began to mix them into a thick blue paste.
SECRET REICH MATTER. CONFERENCE MINUTES. 30 COPIES. COPY NUMBER…
(The figure had been scratched out.)
The following participated in the conference of 20 January 1942, in Berlin, Am grossen Wannsee 56/58, on the final solution of the Jewish question…
March had read the minutes twice that afternoon. Nevertheless, he forced himself to wade through the pages again. “Around 11 million Jews are involved in this final solution of the Jewish problem…’Not just German Jews. The minutes listed more than thirty European nationalities, including French Jews (865,000), Dutch Jews (160,000), Polish Jews (2,284,000), Ukrainian Jews (2,994,684); there were English, Spanish, Irish, Swedish and Finnish Jews; the conference even found room for the Albanian Jews (all 200 of them).
In the course of the final solution, the Jews should be brought under appropriate direction in a suitable manner to the east for labour utilisation. Separated by sex, the Jews capable of work will be led into these areas in large labour columns to build roads, whereby doubtless a large part will fall away through natural reduction.
The inevitable final remainder which doubtless constitutes the toughest element will have to be dealt with appropriately, since it represents a natural selection which upon liberation is to be regarded as a germ cell of a new Jewish development. (See the lesson of history.)
In the course of the practical implementation of the final solution, Europe will be combed from west to east.
“Brought under appropriate direction in a suitable manner …the toughest element will have to be dealt with appropriately…”
“Appropriate, appropriately”. The favourite words in the bureaucrat’s lexicon — the grease for sliding round unpleasantness, the funk-hole for avoiding specifics.
March unfolded a set of rough photostats. These appeared to be copies of the original draft minutes of the Wannsee conference, compiled by SS-Standartenfuhrer Eichmann of the Reich Main Security Office. It was a typewritten document, full of amendments and angry crossings-out in a neat hand which March had come to recognise as belonging to Reinhard Heydrich.
For example, Eichmann had written:
Finally, Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich was asked about the practical difficulties involved in the processing of such large numbers. The Obergruppenfuhrer stated that various methods had been employed. Shooting was to be regarded as an inadequate solution for various reasons. The work was slow. Security was poor, with the consequent risk of panic among those awaiting special treatment. Also, this method had been observed to have a deleterious effect upon our men. He invited Sturmbannfuhrer Dr Rudolf Lange (KdS Latvia) to give an eyewitness report.
Sturmbannfuhrer Lange stated that three methods had been undertaken recently, providing an opportunity for comparison. On 30 November, one thousand Berlin Jews had been shot in the forest near Riga. On 8 December, his men had organised a special treatment at Kulmhof with gas lorries. In the meantime, commencing in October, experiments had been conducted at the Auschwitz camp on Russian prisoners and Polish Jews using Zyklon B. Results here were especially promising from the point of view of both capacity and security.
Against this, in the margin, Heyrich had written “No!” March checked in the final version of the minutes. This entire section of the conference had been reduced to a single phrase:
Finally, there was a discussion of the various types of solution possibilities.
Thus sanitised, the minutes were fit for the archives.
March scribbled more notes: October, November, December 1941. Slowly the blank sheets were being filled. In the dim light of the attic room, a picture was developing: connections, strategies, causes and effects… He looked up the contributions of Luther, Stuckart and Buhler to the Wannsee conference. Luther foresaw problems in “the Nordic states” but “no major difficulties in south-eastern and western Europe”. Stuckart, when asked about persons with one Jewish grandparent, “proposed to proceed with compulsory sterilisation”. Buhler, characteristically, toadied to Heydrich: “He had only one favour to ask — that the Jewish question in the General Government be solved as rapidly as possible.”
He broke off for five minutes to smoke a cigarette, pacing the corridor, shuffling his papers, an actor learning his lines. From the bathroom: the sound of running water. From the rest of the hotel: nothing except creaks in the darkness, like a galleon at anchor.
SIX
NOTES ON A VISIT TO AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU BY MARTIN LUTHER, UNDER STATE SECRETARY, REICHS
