In March and April of 1933, tens of thousands of potential “enemies” of the state were rounded up by the SA and SS and placed in concentration camps. Many were indiscriminately murdered. In late 1933 Dachau, where many such murders occurred, was reorganized into a highly efficient facility in which systematic, policy-based brutality was institutionalized, although capricious individual brutality was discouraged. After 1934 the concentration camps were under SS control. The SS also had the lead role in the purge in which the leader of the SA, Röhm, and many other prominent SA leaders were killed. This greatly diminished the influence of the SA, which was a larger, but less well trained, reliable, and loyal Nazi paramilitary organization.
The SS also became responsible for internal security. It operated the secret police, the Gestapo, which was notorious for its reign of terror and torture in Germany and later in the occupied territories. The SS was responsible for party security and intelligence (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD); it also provided concentration camp guards (Death’s Head Units) and the general service battalions that later became its military arm, the Waffen SS. Transfers among these units were common, partly to maintain the unity of the organization.
Before the war the SS, together with the SA, enforced boycotts of Jewish business and beat up and occasionally killed Jews. On November 9, 1938, they broke into Jewish homes, killed Jews, deported many Jews to concentration camps, and burned down synagogues and other Jewish institutions. This was the famous Kristallnacht, crystal night, named for the broken glass produced by the night’s destruction.
When the war started, small SS units accompanied the army and fought so well that the size of the Waffen SS was greatly expanded. The Waffen SS too participated in civilian massacres and the killing of prisoners. Accompanying the army were special SS detachments or “task forces” (Einsatzgruppen), directed to seize intelligence information and round up troublemakers. They came to be known for swift, brutal action. They murdered the leaders of the Polish people – doctors, intellectuals, lawyers, priests, government officials, teachers. They isolated Jews in ghettos and later transported them to special areas.
Four Einsatzgruppen were created specifically to murder Jews in territories conquered by the advancing German army. These groups received special training, which included further propaganda against Jews. They followed the army, gathered Jews, and shot them, sometimes after they had forced them to dig the trench that was to serve as their grave. During the summer and fall of 1941, about 500,000 Jews were killed.
Killing face to face, the Einsatzgruppen were exposed to the immediate sensory consequences of their acts: tangled naked bodies (including women and children) lying in trenches, the squirming of those not immediately killed. This resulted in nightmares, heavy drinking, nervous breakdowns, and even suicides. Dying and dead bodies are indiscriminate in their humanness: this explains their impact on perpetrators who accepted and even favored the idea of killing Jews.
The Nazis did not begin to question the goal. The process had too much momentum; the idea of turning back did not arise. Their prevailing mindset led the SS to ask how to do it better, not whether to do it at all. Once a goal is established, a commitment to it develops, and a system is created to fulfill the goal, difficulties need not lead to its abandonment. If anything, the difficulties led to renewed commitment to exterminate the Jews of Europe and get rid of the “problem” forever.
A series of changes in methods followed. First, an SS auxiliary was organized from ethnic groups in Russia, mainly Ukrainians, who were militantly anticommunist and powerfully anti-Semitic.d16 The Ukraine was the land of pogroms; cultural preconditions were present for Ukrainians to become part of the machinery of mass killing. By the middle of 1942, these SS auxiliaries were heavily engaged in the murder of Jews.17
Another innovation was to fill a large van with Jews, route the carbon monoxide exhaust back into the van, and drive it around until everyone inside died. Special units of Jewish prisoners, the Sonderkommando (literally, special command) were forced to unload the bodies. The vans were later replaced by the extermination camps, in which victims were killed in gas chambers disguised as communal bath or shower rooms. This method was used to kill three to four million Jews – the vast majority of those murdered by the Nazis.
At Auschwitz, the largest extermination and forced labor camp, cyanide gas (Zyklon B) was used for efficiency and “humanitarian” reasons – the speedy death of victims. Jews arrived in cattle cars. Many were immediately sent to the gas chambers; Jewish prisoners then removed gold teeth and hair (to be used in mattresses) and burned the bodies in great ovens. Others were selected for forced labor in many enterprises, includng SS-run factories and I.G. Farben, the huge chemical company. They were slowly starved to death on inadequate rations. Some were taken to gas chambers when they weakened. Others simply died. Some were killed in camp hospitals by injections into the heart; some were executed for an infraction of one of the many camp rules. Others died from one of the imaginative Nazi punishments, such as packing many people into a tiny cell without an air supply. Although directed by SS guards and supervised by Nazi doctors, the extermination process itself was now mostly in the hands of the Ukrainian guards, who herded Jews into the gas chambers.
Many of the SS who set up the camps and then remained as personnel were veterans of the euthanasia program and thought of themselves as having special skills or expertise. They could focus their attention on the use of their professional skills. In a public television interview a medical orderly, a transfer from the euthanasia program who had administered deadly injections, described himself as a knowledgeable technician who helped prisoners to a relatively painless death.
The Nazis recognized the importance
