Sinnreich erdacht (ingeniously devised): we know that if the Germans did not exactly plan the deaths through disease and starvation in the ghettos, they at least welcomed the high mortality. We know that they carefully prepared the massacres by means of shootings. And it took some planning to design and construct the gas chambers in Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and the original gas chambers, those in Auschwitz (the improvised gas chamber of Block 11 and crematorium 1) and Auschwitz-Birkenau (bunkers 1 and 2, which were originally peasant cottages). But real technical ingenuity and advanced engineering skills became important when the SS commissioned the firm of Topf & Söhne to supply ovens for four modern crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau (there were no crematoria in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, and the other concentration camps where crematoria were built, such as Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, did not play an important part in the German genocide of the Jews).10 The crematoria in Auschwitz were necessary to allow the camp to operate both as an extermination camp and as a supply of labour to industries both in Auschwitz and, in 1944, elsewhere in the Reich. Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were isolated places, and the environmental mess that came with the mass burials or the burning of bodies on open pyres did not impede industrial production or attract unwanted attention. Auschwitz was located in the midst of a densely populated and intensely developed area, and rapid and final disposal of the remains of the murdered was the only way it could operate as a factory of death. Each of the four crematoria built in Auschwitz-Birkenau was equipped with a gas chamber. But the gas chambers were, so to speak, the simple and straightforward part of those buildings. The ovens were the technological cores, as the speed of cremation was the rate-limiting step in the killing operation. On 9 April 1946, the American psychiatrist Gustave Gilbert visited former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss in the Nuremberg jail, where he was kept as a defence witness in the trial against Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Gilbert recorded in his diary Höss's dispassionate discussion of the extermination process. ‘The killing itself took the least time’, Höss told him. ‘You could dispose of 2,000 head in a half-hour, but it was the burning that took all the time.’11
It did not only take all the time, but also required much thought. In order to accommodate the daily massacres in the gas chambers, each muffle in the furnaces designed and built for the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau was to have the enormous capacity of ninety-six corpses per twenty-four hours (with fifteen muffles in crematoria 2 and 3 each, and eight muffles in crematoria 4 and 5 each, this resulted in a total daily cremation capacity in Auschwitz-Birkenau of 4,416 corpses per day). In order for the massacres to continue, day after day, week after week, month after month, the ovens, the flues, and the chimneys had to be extraordinarily resilient to cremate thousands of corpses between the massacre of one transport and the arrival, generally twenty-four hours later, of the next train with deportees. In addition, they had to be economical. When civilian crematoria incinerate a body, they do not have to be concerned about the availability of the fuel to heat the oven, and they can easily recoup the costs of the fuel through the usually substantial fee they charge the client for the service. But in the death camps, fuel was a big concern. Not only was it strictly rationed within the context of the war economy, but also the expense could not be charged to a third party: it came out of the general operation budget. Indeed, fuel economy was one of the reasons for the firm of Topf & Söhne being so successful in its business relations with the SS. In the history of cremation, there was no precedent for either the cremation capacity or the economies achieved in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The development of the ovens in Auschwitz had been the result of an evolutionary process that can be reconstructed on the basis of archival evidence. Each muffle of the original ovens designed and installed in crematorium 1 had a daily capacity of some fiftyseven corpses, but within a year Topf & Söhne had been able to increase the productivity of each muffle by almost 70 per cent. Yet this remarkable story of technical betterment was meant to remain unknown. If history had unfolded as SS Chief Heinrich Himmler imagined it in the war years, the camp ought to have disappeared not only from the earth, but also from the record of history. In a speech given in Posen (Poznan) in October 1943, Himmler discussed the responsibility of the SS for the genocide of Europe's Jews, and he reminded the assembled that ‘in our history, this is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory’.12 This secrecy did not serve the commercial interests of Topf & Söhne. In developing the Auschwitz ovens, the company had broken new ground in thermo-mechanical engineering, and under normal circumstances it would have sought publication in the relevant trade journals. Such avenues were closed to the company –and not only because it was participating in genocide. The ovens themselves broke German law because they were based on multi-corpse incineration, which made the identification of ashes impossible, and because they brought the corpse into direct contact with the flame. The German cremation law of 1934 stipulated that the body should be incinerated through the application of hot air, and that only one corpse at a time could be cremated in a muffle: these ashes, this name. Yet, in order to safeguard its commercial interests, Topf & Söhne did something that broke the confidentiality agreement with the SS: it applied in November 1942 for a patent for a Kontinuierliche arbeitender Leichen-Verbrennungsofen für Massenbetrieb (Continuous Opera-tion Corpse Incineration Furnace for Intensive Use). This patent application is very important as it explicitly refers to the high mortality in ‘the gathering camps in the occupied territories in the East’ and the impossibility of burying ‘the great number of deceased inmates’. It goes on:
A number of multi-muffle ovens were installed in some of those camps, which according to their design are loaded and operated periodically. Because of this, these ovens do not fully satisfy, because the burning does not proceed quickly enough to dispose of in the shortest possible time the great number of corpses that are constantly presented. The last can only be done in ovens which are fed continuously and hence also work continuously.13
Fritz Sander, the engineer who developed the design to be patented, confessed in March 1946, during an interrogation by Soviet officials, that this new installation ‘was to be built on the conveyor belt principle. That is to say, the corpses must be brought to the incineration furnaces continuously. When the corpses were pushed into the furnaces, they would fall onto a grate, then slide into the furnace and be incinerated. The corpses would serve at the same time as fuel for heating the furnaces.’ When challenged why he had volunteered to design such ovens when he knew they were to serve a genocide, Sander responded: ‘I was a German engineer and key member of the Topf works, and I saw it as my duty to apply my specialist knowledge in this way to help Germany win the war, just as in wartime an aircraft construction engineer builds airplanes, which also kill human beings’.14 Obviously Sander did not realize the elemental distinction between a weapon to be used in an armed conflict and a tool designed to kill unarmed and powerless prisoners.
The patent application describes the continuous-cremation furnace-as a structure in which the corpses are inserted at the top, and as they slowly slide down a system of inclined grids they are quickly reduced to ashes. It does not provide data on the capacity of the furnace, but in 1985 Rolf Decker, manager of incinerator production at the Ruppmann company in Stuttgart, made an engineering assessment of Topf's continuous-cremation furnace.15 He assumed that the furnace could be initially loaded with fifty corpses, and in the upper part of the furnace the bodies would dry out through evaporation; after falling into the second part, these corpses would be burned, while the first part would be reloaded. After falling into the third part of the furnace, the remains would be completely reduced to ashes. ‘On the basis of the plan one may only theoretically calculate the capacity and duration, because exact data can only be determined through practical trials.… With continuous operation one could arrive at an incineration capacity of around 4,800 corpses per 24 hours.’ The most important achievement was not only in capacity (which could be easily expanded to 7,200 corpses per day), but also in economy
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