By the end of the summer of 1941, SS leaders understood that the “solution of the Jewish question” required implementing a more effective method of killing civilians than the rather chaotic execution of pogroms. From then on, the four Task Forces or action groups in charge of eliminating all “inferior” social groups in Eastern Europe implemented a systematic policy of annihilation.
A significant advance in the organization of the extermination of the Jews took place in Babi Yar, a glen located on the outskirts of kyiv. Deceived under the pretext that they were going to be relocated elsewhere, 31,771 people were executed in a hollow that measured approximately ten meters deep and extended 400 m long. The Nazis stripped them naked and machine-gunned them, creating a chilling mountain of corpses. “I was so shocked by the vision that I can’t look for long,” confessed Fritz Hoffer, a truck driver from the Operations group 4a.
The person responsible for this massacre, and for other mass executions such as the one that occurred in the vicinity of the small Rumbula train station, south of Riga, and which claimed the lives of 25,000 people in two days, was the Police leader Friedrich Jeckeln. But his system, efficient in numerical terms, was not sustainable because the psychological impact it had on the perpetrators. Nor did the plan of the SS group leader Herbert Backe, inspired by the Holodomor, to kill with hunger and cold, saving bullets, the millions of individuals considered “redundant.”
A Jewish prisoner about to be executed by a member of Einsatzgruppe D, near the Ukrainian village of Vinnitsa, 1941.
Wikimedia Commons
The final decision on how to proceed and what method to use to wipe out the Jews rested with Heinrich Himmlerhead of the SS and the Reich Central Security Office (RSHA). His alternative approach, as explained Xavier Irujoprofessor of genocide studies, in The mechanics of extermination (Criticism), involved the establishment of a system of annihilation that primarily depended on causing death by starvation, supplemented by large-scale gas operations to be carried out in the extensive network of Nazi concentration camps and by mass executions by firearm and other alternative forms of murder directed by the Nazis. Task Forces.
The system, supported by the famous conference held on January 20, 1942 in Wannsee, launched the “ABAC sequence”a strategy that included four different stages that combined a three-phase scheme:
a) Displacement (translocation): the forced relocation of Jews from their places of origin to transit camps or ghettos.
b) Concentration of the victims in confined spaces with insufficient food and in terrible living conditions. Some enclosures that functioned as waiting points where fear and desperation germinated.
c) Displacement (transfer): transfer to camps located in remote and isolated regions, journeys marked by brutality and inhumanity that already caused a large number of deaths.
d) Extermination: executions in concentration camps industrially (gas chamber) or by exploiting the victims to death.
waiting for death
The mechanics of the Holocaust, a “method guided by an impeccable pattern” with some perfectly defined execution protocols and at a pace that even exceeded the expectations of the murderers, Irujo, director of the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada (Canada), recounts it in a work as chilling as it is mandatory reading. The researcher, supported by archival material and many testimonies from survivors, delves into the seeds of Nazi terror and describes step by step how Hitler and their hierarchs undertook and perfected the greatest crime in the history of humanity.
In their quest to create a purely Aryan society, the Nazis established between 1933 and 1945 more than 42,000 places of detention: about 30,000 forced labor camps, around 980 concentration camps, more than 1,500 ghettos and as many facilities for prisoners of war. Despite the differences in the nature and use of these sites, the researcher assures that “the only difference between concentration camps, labor camps and extermination camps often depends on the time it usually took for a prisoner to die. This period could vary from two hours to more than a year in some cases.”
Cover of ‘The mechanics of extermination’.
Review
Almost all of them revolved around issues such as isolation, confidentiality, victim deception operations and the trivialization of the death penalty. From the ghettos —more than 1,143 were established in the occupied territories of the east—the professor states that they were not mere transit places on the Jews’ path to death, but “execution sites that contributed significantly to the total death toll of the Holocaust.”
The mechanics of extermination It adds to the immense bibliography generated as a result of the Nazi genocide perpetrated in the context of the World War II as a harrowing and profound study of how the ideas that Hitler outlined in his My fight they ended up generating a death industrialization project without any kind of parallel. Take this phrase from Adolf Eichmann in February 1945, when the defeat was already irreversible, to understand that, at the top of the pyramid of the universe of the Third Reich, there was only hatred of the Jews: “I will laugh when I jump into the grave feeling that I have killed five million Jews. That gives me great satisfaction and gratification.”