National Post (National Edition)
Nazis operated a training run a year before concentration camp exterminations, book says.
Dutch Jews killed at Austrian castle in 1941
The Nazis operated what was essentially a training camp for gassing people as much as a year before they began the large-scale expulsions of Jews to gas chambers, historian Wally de Lang says in a new book.
It began, de Lang told the BBC, when hundreds of Dutchmen were rounded up, in what is known as a razzia, from the streets of Amsterdam in early 1941 — the first Nazi raids on Jews in Western Europe. Germany had overtaken the Netherlands the previous spring and the razzia was revenge for the killing of a Dutch Nazi collaborator.
“We always thought the first deportation train departed in July 1942. These razziamen were already deported on 27 February 1941, so that's much earlier,” De Lang said.
The last stop for the Dutchmen was the 17th century Hartheim Castle in Upper Austria. In 1940, it had been turned into a killing centre, with a gas chamber retrofitted to a specially adapted room.
De Lang said Nazis were using gas on prisoners of war at Hartheim in 1941, months before Hitler created the Final Solution in January 1942.
“It was a kind of laboratory (for the Nazis) to improve their knowledge of everything that we see at Auschwitz on a much, much bigger scale.”
De Lang learned that of the group of 340 Jews transported from Amsterdam, 108 were murdered at Hartheim between Aug. 11 and 14, 1941. False causes of death were sent to their families.
The castle had been donated decades earlier to the local welfare society for the care of mentally and physically afflicted people. By 1940, some 30,000 of them were actually euthanized at this “hospital” under the German eugenics program. This program was stopped in 1940 after a public outcry, but 12,000 prisoners of war died there from 1941 to 1944 under Action 14f13, the Nazi program to eliminate concentration camp prisoners unable to work. The gassing technology had been adapted and applied in wartime to many national and ethnic groups, including Poles and Spaniards but Jews were the primary target.
During the war, Hartheim was used only for executions, while the staff at the concentration camps associated with it — Mauthausen, Dachau and Gusen — handled its logistics and administration. Mauthausen, housing mainly the intelligentsia, was one of the most brutal of the Nazi concentration camps. Its complex included about 100 sub-camps throughout Austria and by 1945, it held 85,000 people.
In her book, The Raids of 22 and 23 February 1941 in Amsterdam (published in Dutch), de Lang said those in command at Mauthausen, where the Dutchmen were temporarily incarcerated, could choose whether to gas people “during the bus ride, halfway to the castle — and then at Hartheim there was a kind of place where no one could see what was going on.”
De Long researched the names and fates of the Dutch killed at Hartheim and detailed a series of relocations in which members of the group were murdered at each stop.
She found the Dutch Jews were first taken from Amsterdam to Camp Schoorl, a prison camp in the Dutch dunes. Of the 425 seized, 388 were sent to Buchenwald, where dozens died. From there, 340 were sent on to Mauthausen on May 22, where many subsequently perished, and then, three months later, the 108 Dutchmen were killed at Hartheim.
AT HARTHEIM THERE WAS A KIND OF PLACE WHERE NO ONE COULD SEE WHAT WAS
GOING ON.