An Industrial Solution

Yesterday was the seventieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

Sunday has two anniversaries; one of them is the Nazi declaration of war on the US (and you’ll see the other one on Sunday).

But today is the seventieth anniversary of the war’s most ghastly contribution to human history; it was the opening of a “camp” near the Polish village of Chelmno, on the grounds of a former baronial manor.  It was a placid looking place that would add a new word to the world’s vocabulary of evil: the German Vernichtungslager.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Concentration camps – places to put people who were for whatever reason inconvenient or needed to be held in one place – had existed for quite a while.  They got the name from the British during the Boer War, when they “concentrated” the families of Boer fighters in a few easily-guarded locations. They turned out to be ghastly places – not so much because the Brits intended it as through bureaucratic incompetence.

When the Nazis took power in Germany, their agenda bode ill for lots of people – gays, the mentally ill, Romany (“Gypsies”), Jehovah’s Witnesses, political dissidents of all stripes, and especially the Jews.  And, following Lenin’s lead, they started straight in with their own Konzentrazionslagern – the Germans called them “KZs” – as a place to put all manner of undesirables.  There were hundreds of KZs, starting with Buchenwald in 1937, in Germany and in every corner of the Reich. They served many purposes – holding tanks for political prisoners, forced labor camps, even propaganda facades.  And thousands died in the KZs – from disease, malnutrition, overwork exposure, the brutal and capricious “discipilne”, even the whim of the guards; 50,000 at Buchwald and Ravensbrück, similar numbers at Dachau, Nordhausen, Theresienscadt, and Sachsenhausen and many, many more.

But the process of hauling a prisoner off to a KZ, there to die slowly of any number of causes, didn’t serve the goal of ridding the world of Jews (first; the Slavs and other “Lower” races would follow) fast enough.   The Nazis, being analytical Germans, experimented with many different means of killing people without all the procedural overburden, and removing impediments like “the human will to survive and endure”, from the equation; roaming teams of SS who’d shoot people in the hundreds were the first method, tried over the previous year and a half since the fall of Poland.

The idea had been broached to make the process more an industrial than military one.  The next question was “what sort of industrial process”.  The idea of using some sort of poison gas was broached.

Being a nation of engineers, the Nazis thought to prototype a couple of different approaches, to remove all the variables and find the optimal approach before switching into full production.  Among the variables to be removed was the pesky issue of “neighbors”; unlike the KZs, which would be tucked in next to towns and factories and farm regions all over Germany and the occupied countries, the new camps, Vernichtungslagern, or “Extermination Camps”, and called “VZs” by the Germans, would be be located in rural Poland – a backward place in those days, far from any potentially friendly borders, away from prying media eyes, and very sparsely populated by European standards.

And it was at Chelmno, seventy years ago today, that the first approach – vehicle exhaust gases piped into the back of a panel van jammed with 60-odd victims.

The Chelmno gas van.

…followed by burial in a mass grave in a nearby forest, was first tried.

Like any good engineers and scientists, they kept meticulous notes.  The exhaust gas -mostly carbon monoxide – was just too slow.  And burial was far too labor intensive; at another “prototype” VZ at Treblinka, cremation seemed to work much more efficiently. All of the data points led to the conclusion that carbon monoxide was far too slow and inefficient a means of killing; when the Nazis designed camps to optimize the approach, they settled on Zyklon-B, a form of prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide) in pellet form, which worked twice as fast.

And so both of the “prototype” plants were shut down after relatively short runs in service; about 152,000 Jews, Poles and Gypsies died at Chelmno in the next two years.

We’ll have more on Treblinka later.

———-

If the above seems banal – it’s intentional.  The most jarring thing about reading about the Holocaust was its turning of modern industrial methods – the 1940’s equivalents of “Lean Six Sigma” and “Total Quality Management” – to the process of genocide, reducing it to a bean-counting, widget-producing exercise.  Genocide – the planned destruction of an entire race of humanity – had always been a brutal, bloody thing.

Seventy years ago today, the effort to turn it into just another waterfall project got underway for real.

15 thoughts on “An Industrial Solution

  1. Makes me weep for humankind. FDR came close when he interred thousands of innocent Japanese Americans. And fascist Islam is on track to repeat the evils of history. When will they ever learn?

  2. “I wouldn’t put FDR anywhere close to Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot.”

    Given his complete indifference to the plight of European Jewry – and he was very well aware of what was going on – I don’t see much moral distinction to be made.

  3. “just another waterfall project”

    I guess we should be glad they weren’t agile. *shiver*

  4. “When will they ever learn?”

    They won’t. There will always be someone who thinks they know better than me what is good for me. They will have loads of charisma, be smarter than all get out, and able to convince people to give them power so they can make things right. Then, having that power, and running into resistance, they will remove the resistance. It is an old, sad story, but it keeps coming back.

    They won’t learn, and it’s enough to make one weep.

  5. Kermit; the illegal incarceration of Japanese Americans in WWII, was indeed a travesty! Hundreds of small businesses that took years to build and gave the livlihood to the families that owned them, disappeared overnight. Yet, in spite of their treatment, thousands of them either volunteered to serve their adopted country themselves, or they sent their sons to do so. In fact, many of them served in the indomitable 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit in U.S. military history! In fact, Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii served in that unit, receiving severe wounds including losing an arm. He himself was decorated for his heroism. Despite the fact that he is a blatant liberal Democrat (although I can’t fathom why, since it was Democrats that had his family imprisioned), I respect him for his service and his valor.

  6. Senator Daniel Inouye was more than decorated: he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I wouldn’t say “Democrats” imprisoned Japanese-Americans in the hysteria following Pearl Harbor. If that’s the case, then until December 7, 1941 there were a whole lot of “Republicans” who favored just letting Hitler’s Nazi, Mussolini’s Fascist, Stalin’s Soviet, and Hirohito’s Militarists run amock over the rest of the World because it was none of our business.

  7. “I wouldn’t say “Democrats” imprisoned Japanese-Americans in the hysteria following Pearl Harbor.”

    Then you’re full of it, pal. The odious FDR signed Executive Order 9066 on February 14, 1942, at a time when the Democrats were solidly in control of both the House and the Senate.

  8. Geez, oldjohnnie, I didn’t realize that some people put such a distinction in the term “decorated” that the fact that a soldier won the CMOH has to be called out specifically.

  9. Well bubba, when you start hanging party labels as driving forces behind the actions of World War II leaders and soldiers, you’re playing with perfect hindsight. Maybe my decorated uncle who fought in the jungles of New Guinea shouldn’t have been the lifelong Democrat he was, but he was. Odious FDR was his Commander in Chief. And bosshoss, CMOH recipients are Americans and the 442nd distinguished itself in part BECAUSE of the treatment of our Government (with Democrats in control at the time). Today we have some Muslims in service who would get bad mouthed on the street and spied on at deeper levels because they may have other motives. We really should be careful with party labels when we’re all asked to serve and sacrifice, and do.

  10. All – there are some things that should transcend partisanship. Service in the military is one of them. At least in theory, most of us do both – serve the military and do politics – to serve our country and leave a better world for our kids.

  11. Mitch, that works for me. Your historical narrative about KZ camps is good. I spent some more recent time in a former Soviet Republic that went back and forth during WW2 and then fell behind the Iron Curtain for 45+ years. All families were touched. Nobody won until the Soviet system died of its own disgusting weight.

  12. I honor and respect all veterans, decorated or not. I furthermore respectfully decline to have my remarks characterized as making service a partisan matter. With that said, and notwithstanding the fact that he was CiC, FDR was loathsome, and his policies ranged from the merely wrongheaded to the out and out criminal.

  13. Let us not forget that it was the Americans who “death marched” the Native American people to concentration camps to finish what they started with disease and rifle. It was after all the good old US of A’s ability to dwindle the number of natives that Hitler was so interested when he was researching death camps and how at gun point the USA move thousands of indigenous people with no food hundreds of miles to there deaths.

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