ON THE DARK SIDES OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: INDUSTRIALISED GENOCIDE
The systematic mass murder of Jews and Roma and Sinti during the Nazi dictatorship in Germany is often characterised with terms such as "killing machine" or "factories of death" - and indeed the planned killing of some 6 million Jews could only be carried out using industrial processes.
In the course of 1941, the Nazi leadership decided that the so-called "final solution" to the "Jewish question", which had been discussed for decades, would not be a mass resettlement but the extermination of the Jews. At the "Wannsee Conference" on 20 January 1942, under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the police and secret services, the organisational details were decided.
The systematic mass murder in Eastern Europe began in June 1941, after the German attack on the Soviet Union. In just under a year, task forces ('Einsatzgruppen') of police and SS shot more than half a million people. There were several massacres, such as at Babi Yar, near Kyiv, where some 34,000 Jews were murdered in two days. However, as the German government had long calculated that around 5.8 million Jews would have been killed, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS and chief of the police, instructed his subordinates to find a more effective method than shooting.
Rudolf Höss, commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp, later recalled that Adolf Eichmann, the "manager of the genocide", told him in the summer of 1941 that he wanted to look for a gas that was easy to obtain and could be used without any construction work. In September, the murderous effects of Zyklon B, a pesticide based on hydrogen cyanide, were tested. The decision to use "Zyklon B" created the central technical prerequisite for industrialised murder. In January 1942, the SS had a gas chamber built in Auschwitz-Birkenau, followed by a second one in June, after which the capacity was gradually increased.
The victims underwent a strictly rationalised process. Special trains from the European countries controlled by Germany brought about 1000 Jews at a time. Up to 90% were sent to the gas chambers at the railway station as "unfit for work". Already deprived of their civil rights, they were immediately stripped of their valuables, then their identity cards, their clothes and finally their hair: step by step they were reduced to objects, products on a conveyor belt that ended in the crematoria. Between January 1942 and November 1944, when the camp was at full capacity, approximately 1.1 million people died in Birkenau.
The railway connection, which was essential for industrial facilities, was a decisive criterion in the construction of further extermination camps. As was the practice in many factories, the technology was improved step by step. .
Former police inspector Christian Wirth further developed the killing method in the Belzec concentration camp: in order to become independent of gas supplies from industry, he had exhaust fumes from engines blown into the gas chambers. His method was successful: In Treblinka, the largest death factory after Auschwitz, the exhaust fumes from Russian tank engines were fed into the gas chambers. The capacity of the killing machinery there was, according to one survivor, up to 500 deaths per hour, and was increased by a conversion to up to 15,000 people per day.
To dispose of the corpses, the SS used cremation ovens, as were known in Germany for cremations. Germany's leading crematorium manufacturer, „Topf and Sons“ of Erfurt, was commissioned to build them at Auschwitz. The engineers designed four ovens, but were also involved in optimising the gas chambers by improving the intermediate ventilation. In order to increase the capacity of the ovens to cope with the large number of victims, the engineer Fritz Sander designed a model that would work continuously with an even supply of corpses: a cremation conveyor belt. "Topf and Sons“ applied for a patent in 1942, but it was never granted.
The Nazi death camps perverted the idea of industrial mass production into its absolute opposite. Instead of producing products for human use, they destroyed human beings and produced ashes instead of products.
