EVIL BEYOND BELIEF
80 years since one man exposed the horror of the gas chambers
IT was the day Britain discovered the truth about mankind’s most heinous crime – the systematic industrial murder of six million Jews. Eighty years ago this week, the first eyewitness account of what would later be known as the Holocaust emerged from Hitler’s extermination camps.
But even after three years of brutal war, the idea that Germany might be killing tens of thousands of men, women and children in gas chambers seemed too unbelievable to accept without verification.
So instead of immediately screaming the news over their front pages, the world’s newspapers buried it inside.
Szlama Ber Winer, a Polish Jew, had escaped from the Nazi-run Chelmno camp in Poland where he had been forced to bury the bodies of thousands of victims as they were thrown out of gas vans.
His detailed testimony of the atrocities he had seen – including having to bury his entire family – was first published in an underground Polish newspaper on June 1, 1942. But it would be nearly a month before it began to be reported abroad.
On June 25, the Daily Telegraph described how the Nazis were using mobile gas chambers for industrialised murder and that “an average of 1,000 Jews were gassed daily”.
Yet the story, which referred to “the greatest massacre in the world’s history”, was published on the fifth page of a six-page issue and went largely ignored.
It was only in spring of 1945, after the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz death camp and as horrified British and American soldiers began to free camp survivors in Germany, that the true scale of Hitler’s Final Solution was finally revealed.
By mid-1945, most European Jews – two out of every three – had been either murdered, starved to death or died of disease.
In Auschwitz alone the SS killed a million Jews, mainly in specially built gas chambers.
Until 31-year-old Winer managed to flee Chelmno and tell of its horrors, most people – including the Jewish community itself – believed the camps were set up not for annihilation but to exploit slave labour.
But in fact, for a full year before Winer’s escape, the Nazis had already been implementing their plan to wipe out Europe’s Jewish population.
And just a month before the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, when officials met to devise the Final Solution, gas vans at Chelmno were being used to kill up to 1,000 victims a day.
Born in central Poland, Winer was among 1,600 rounded up in his village and transported to Chelmno on January 5, 1942. There, the SS had established one of the first facilities where poison gas was used for mass Prisoners were told to take off their clothes and were put into vans which were driven into the forest before exhaust fumes were redirected inside.
With no means of escape, they would be dead in 15 to 20 minutes.
Winer was among 15 “lucky” men chosen not for immediate killing but to work with the Sonderkommando – death handlers forced to dispose of gassed victims.
He later described the entire horrific process. “We didn’t have to wait long before the next lorry arrived,” he wrote.
“It looked like a normal large lorry, in grey paint, with two hermetically closed rear doors. The inner walls were of steel. There weren’t any seats. Under a wooden grating were two tubes which came out of the cab. They had small openings from which gas poured out. The driver pressed a button and got out.
“At the same moment frightful screaming, shouting and banging against the sides of the van could be heard. That lasted for about 15 minutes. Then the driver re-boarded, shone a torch in the back to see if the people were dead and drove to within five metres of a ditch.
“When the lorries approached we had to stand five metres from the ditch. The leader of the guard detail was a high-ranking SS man, an absolute sadist and murderer.
“He ordered us to open the doors of the lorry. The smell of gas that met us was over-murder. powering.” told how he Winer was made to remove the bodies from the vans and pack them into the ground.
“The corpses were thrown one on top of another like rubbish on a heap. We got hold of them by the feet and the hair. At the edge of the ditch stood two men who threw in the bodies. In the ditc them in head to feet, two men who packed facing downwards. If any space was left, a child was pushed in.
“What did the dead look like? They weren’t burnt or black; their faces were unchanged. Nearly all l were soiled.”
In the most harrowing part of his report,
Most people – including most Jews – thought concentration camps were for slave labour and not for annihilation