Stubble wrote: ↑Tue Sep 02, 2025 12:01 am
You're missing the point. None of them had experience with homicidal gassings. You'd think if those were a thing, then personnel familiar with the process would exist. They didn't.
Instead you have a truck driver designing and manufacturing the homicidal gas van and the homicidal gas chambers, because, no one else had the experience.
Yes yes, you are kicking back on the 'Kaiser's Koffee Kafe', and saying 'they had the experience. Yet, even as you say this, they apparently didn't share their knowledge with the people putting Aktion Reinhardt (there is a t there) together. Because they had to reinvent the gas van...
Now they are 'keepers of secrets'...
It's gone from 'they were chosen for their experience' to 'experience wasn't necessary because killing large groups of people is easy can can be done by a window fitter'.
That's quite the pivot...
This is a pathetic infinite-regress argument, akin to saying because something started at one point, because it hadn't earlier, it cannot have happened, effectively ruling out all innovation, improvisation and adaptation.
T4 personnel transferred to Lublin had worked in T4 centres which gassed psychiatric patients in 1940 to 41. The only other group with similar experience in 1940-July 1941 was Sonderkommando Lange in the Warthegau. There were also the technical advisors to T4, Albert Widmann, August Becker and Helmut Kallmeyer. All told around 500 personnel were working for T4 or were in Sonderkommando Lange, subtracting female secretaries still several hundred men who worked for new institutions/subunits that used carbon monoxide to gas people to death.
From August to November 1941, there was a transition to engine exhaust as a souce for carbon monoxide, with Widmann and Becker involved with both. They assisted other units, specifically Einsatzgruppe B and its staff in Mogilev and Minsk, and the RSHA motor pool section II D 3a in Berlin together with camp staff at Sachsenhausen, to test out engine exhaust gassing and devise engine exhaust gas vans. Those were then sent out to Sonderkommando Lange who set up Chelmno, and to the Eisnsatzgruppen in the east, with four arriving with Einsatzgruppe B, two in December 1941 and two in February 1942 (their dispatch/arrival is documented in both cases).
Once evolved, there was no new special corps of gas van drivers or executors, like any other new weapons system or vehicle there was at best some advice and instruction, not requiring extensive training, based on earlier observations in the test phase (e.g. how much to use or rev the engine to get the best effect). The technical experts checked on this, as seen in August Becker's letter after he visited Einsatzgruppen C and D in spring 1942. The new staff with now acquired experience in devising gas vans, RSHA II D 3a, likewise observed the gas vans and made suggestions for improvement.
Entirely without the benefit of any technical advice, the Lager-SS at Auschwitz figured out how to use Zyklon-B in lieu of carbon monoxide in closed and fixed spaces - at best there was contact with 14 f 13 and Sonnenstein. Also entirely without the benefit of technical advice, some local policemen in Ukraine figured out how to use another chemical, Lorpicrin, to kill small numbers of Jews in one town (this is documented and witnessed).
T4 personnel were in Lublin in small numbers before mid-December 1941, at a time when Belzec had begun construction (from the start of November 1941). After Himmler met with Bouhler in mid-December 1941 to discuss 'euthanasia', more T4 personnel were sent to Lublin. Brack and Bouhler both confirmed this transfer in letters to Himmler and Bormann respectively in June and July 1942. Globocnik's personnel report on AR noted the transfer of 92 personnel from the Kanzlei des Fuehrers i.e. T4. When the Sobibor staff organised a road trip to Berlin in the summer of 1943, they were photographed in the company of T4 managers, who were also photographed attending the funerals of SS officers and men including Johann Niemann killed in the Sobibor revolt.
In April 1942, the Polish underground observing Belzec noted transports coming in but nobody leaving alive, recording also the stories circulating among the local population - some correctly stating gas, some incorrectly guessing electricity. The Polish workers who had been inside Belzec were undoubtedly sworn to secrecy so would not have trumpeted all the details to everyone, but evidently did to some. The underground report also identified the commandant of Belzec as Captain Wirth. Captain Christian Wirth is documented as working in T4 centres and was later documented as the Inspector of Einsatz Reinhardt, and was promoted to Major/Sturmbannfuehrer in spring 1943 along with other promotions from this group.
Belzec was not a preexisting psychiatric hospital requiring conversion of existing rooms to a gas chamber and a space for crematoria ovens. It was a camp - and the construction of the AR camps was directed by officers of SSPF Lublin, notably but not only Richard Thomalla, who was also with the ZBL Lublin. SSPF Lublin had
experience setting up camps, with or without the assistance of the SS construction directorates. It knew how to do this. The guards provided for the camps were former Soviet POWs trained at Trawniki. The trainers had general experience instructing sentries, which is such basic knowledge it requires relatively little training, just practice. The
experience of guarding workers in the preparation phase would have been a great help.
The decision to make available personnel from T4 was evidently discussed at the highest levels, between Himmler, Brack, Bouhler, and is irrefutably documented. Globocnik as SSPF Lublin thereby acquired manpower
not requiring requests for more personnel from other branches of the SS-Police - not from the Security Police/RSHA, not from the Order Police, not from RuSHA, Vomi, the Waffen-SS or any other branch.
The SS-Police hierarchy could have gone to the trouble of setting up an Einsatzgruppe-sized force mixing all branches of the SS-Police, so with German guards instead of Trawnikis, as was done at Chelmno with a company sized force of Schutzpolizei (urban police, not Gendarmerie, from police stations and police battalions). The KZ system had guard battalions generally made up of Reich and ethnic Germans. However there was a shortage of such personnel so KL Lublin was in part guarded by a Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft battalion in 1942. This helps explain why the Trawnikis were used - a greater general comfort with using 'askaris' and colonial troops the further east one went.
If the SS-Police had had a battalion or Einsatzgruppe sized force to spare, it could easily have
trained them in two and a half to three months to run a set of extermination camps. The main wave of arrivals from T4 at Lublin for Belzec was late December, not quite three months before the camp began operating.
The initial group of T4 personnel sent to Lublin and Belzec was heavy on SS and police veterans: Christian Wirth, Josef Oberhauser, Lorenz Hackenholt, Gottfried Schwarz, Johann Niemann and Friedrich Jirmann.
Oberhauser, Hackenholt and Niemann, as well as future T4-AR transfers like Werner Dubois and Siegfried Graetschus, had experience before or at the start of the war in the concentration camps, primarily Sachsenhausen; they were SS. Gottfried Schwarz had served at Dachau and with the Leibstandarte as well as in T4, he was obviously SS as well. Among other T4 veterans who were in Belzec by mid-March 1942 were Kurt Franz, who like Jirmann had served at Buchenwald.
Wirth was a policeman, and other policemen in T4 were also transferred - Gottlieb Hering, Franz Stangl in particular.
There were prewar SS men like Heinrich Gley, Robert Jührs, Karl Schluch and Erich Fuchs who had not been full-time in the KZs or Waffen-SS, but as Allgemeine-SS were on a par with other SS reservists, they were assigned to T4 then to AR.
There were eventually also men who served in T4 having been professional nurses, perhaps NSDAP and SA members, who switched to the SS later on.
But this was at its core a group of SS and Police officers and NCOs, starting off with a clear commander, Captain Christian Wirth, who had overseen T4 centres and been a roving inspector of sorts in this phase as well.
This is from German Wikipedia entries, cross-referenced against Sara Berger, Experten der Vernichtung (2013), who also provides the following reminders on the gassing experiments at Belzec before it 'opened' (pp.47-50)
Wirth and Hackenholt were the driving forces behind the experiments, both knew Widmann and Becker, and evidently knew of the new generation of gas vans using engine exhaust. Hackenholt was a trained bricklayer but had become a skilled mechanic and driver by the time of his service in Sachsenhausen. Other T4-AR personnel had construction experience as well, and the description of the first gas chambers at Belzec indicates they were a bit jury-rigged, not yet fully optimised - making them airtight was a challenge.
Hackenholt converted a vehicle to a gas van, and it continued to be available but was deemed impracticable for large scale operations - Chelmno had more experience with van operations and had three vans. CO bottles were ordered from the usual T4 channels but the supply of these was clearly going to be difficult. As noted in Robert Kuwalek's book on Belzec, a CO bottle was found buried on the grounds of Belzec in the 1960s, which parallels the discovery of CO bottles marked with explicit T4 noms de guerre (Jennerwein) at Majdanek. Static engine exhaust was the logical solution. The CO bottle feed was however still available for early gassings, as long as the supply held out.
Berger sees Kallmeyer's visit to Lublin as an opportunity for testing and calibrating the chambers, which seems correct. Kallmeyer rather betrayed himself when denying visiting Riga but admitting visiting Lublin, however much he waffled around his time there.
To reiterate, one does not need a professional corps of executioners to kill. Professional guillotine operators in Germany and professional hangmen like Pierrepoint in Britain certainly existed, and if one could bring them in, that meant fewer people who were exposed to the act. The Germans did not use hanging for legal executions, but began hanging people after summary courts-martials and on straightforward orders on a very extensive scale from 1939/40 onwards. Perhaps some influence from Austrian and Habsburg experiences, but
not using the Habsburg method of strangulation from behind - the classic Anglo-American gallows scaffold is photographed repeatedly. Lynchings galore in the Deep South and countless suicides show how easy it is to hang other people or indeed, yourself.
Ditto with firing squads and shootings, the only issues arising were how to scale up to mass executions, but that did not prove too difficult, and different units learned the hard way how 'best' to carry out serial and mass executions by firearms.
