Special offer 1005

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As a special action in 1005 , including Operation 1005 or exhumation action was exhuming the mass graves of the previously murdered Jewish population and prisoners of war as well as the burning of the exhumed bodies which have in the extermination camp at Chelmno , in Belzec , Sobibor and Treblinka as well as numerous mass graves of firing squads had been buried. The mortal remains of the Sinti and Roma , the disabled, psychiatric patients and everyone who had been shot, killed or gassed en masse as partisans or resistance members should not be able to be found later. The aim was to destroy as much evidence as possible that could provide information about the extent of the genocide and individual massacres .

The campaign was carried out between 1942 and 1944 under the direction of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, mainly in Ukraine and Poland . All units involved in the action were given the designation "Sonderkommando 1005" or "Leichenkommando". The "Sonderkommandos 1005" received support from units of the security service and the order police .

planning

The planning of special action 1005 probably began in January 1942, when Reinhard Heydrich summoned the SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, who had previously been the command leader of the Einsatzkommando 4a , to a meeting in Berlin. In March or April 1942, Blobel received more detailed instructions from Heinrich Müller in the Reich Security Main Office and was appointed head of a "Sonderkommando 1005". Müller had used the abbreviation “1005” as a reference in a letter dated February 28, 1942 to Martin Luther from the Foreign Office . Müller established the bureaucrat under construction under this abbreviation for camouflage reasons. Blobel did not have an independent headquarters in Berlin. Blobel had his file management done in the Eichmann department. Whenever he was in Berlin, the SD guest house at Am Großen Wannsee 56/58 , the house of the Wannsee Conference , served as his accommodation and organizational center. He took his first quarters in Litzmannstadt .

Paul Blobel organized a systematic removal of traces by instructing the local gendarmerie area leaders to send him lists of the places where the bodies had been buried. These documents were supposed to be destroyed, but some documents got into the hands of the Soviets and some were even read out on Soviet radio.

The removal of the traces was motivated several times. On the one hand, the National Socialists wanted to destroy evidence, as rumors of this kind were already circulating among the Allies and setbacks in the warfare could not be ruled out. The primary motive, however, was that in Kulmhof , in Treblinka and the mass graves at Bunkers I and II in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, decomposition gases and foul-smelling liquids came to the surface. Poisoning of the groundwater should be excluded. There were also isolated fears that future generations would not understand the mass murders and would not be able to approve them.

execution

Former forced laborers from Sonderaktion 1005 demonstrate the function of a bone mill in the Janowska camp (August 1944)

Paul Blobel spent the summer of 1942 in the Kulmhof extermination camp , the first German “death factory”, trying out ways to dispose of the masses of corpses. He had the bodies excavated - the term technicus was "earthening" - and used them for his experiments. First of all, they were counted and all valuables, especially dental gold , were properly taken to the Reichsbank . Jewish prisoners and later also convicts sentenced to death, referred to in the offender jargon as "characters" or "dead on vacation", had to set the bodies of the murdered on fire in various ways. First in the uncovered mortuary pits, later on open ground, flamethrowers and thermite bombs were used , among other things . Leftover bones had to be crushed with hand pestles or ground to ashes with mills . Inmates who resisted this work or collapsed under the load were shot dead in the neck by their guards - mostly ordinary police officers . In any case, for the sake of secrecy, none of them were allowed to survive. Blobel issued the order to "liquidate" each of these prisoner detachments after two weeks and to replace them with new "figures".

Attempts to dispose of them by means of explosives were unsuccessful, and several of the test ovens that were built, in which wood or gasoline was used, did not work very efficiently. Blobel completed his experiments in the summer of 1942. As an effective disposal method, he had developed an incineration process in which corpses and firewood were piled alternately over a grate made of railroad tracks and then doused with an accelerator (e.g. gasoline). From then on, gigantic pyres could be erected at any desired location. The combustion residues were ground in a bone mill and scattered in the surrounding woods.

In May 1943, the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the "cremation" of the entire Eastern Front, whereby the ashes had to be crushed in such a way that later no one could see how many bodies had been burned. The crimes of the German occupation, especially the extermination of people by the Einsatzgruppen of the SS and the police battalions, were to become unrecognizable. In June 1943 at the latest, Blobel formed Sonderkommando 1005 in the Lemberg-Janowska forced labor camp, which commanded Jewish work details that had to carry out the work.

The work details were divided into three groups: the first group lifted the corpses out of the mass graves with iron hooks, the second transported the corpses to the fire and the third group searched for the "gold reserves" hidden in the corpses (e.g. in teeth and hidden rings) . The bone remnants resulting from the incineration were crushed with road rollers or crushed with a ball mill and then scattered. In addition to Paul Blobel, operational SS members were squad leader Johann Rauch , Arthur Harder , Walter Schallock and Oberwachtmeister Kepick. The latter were members of the SD (Security Service of the SS) . The monitoring of the 129 forced laborers was carried out by 70 police officers from a police regiment . At the end of March 1944 the Red Army was approaching threateningly; the prisoners of the work details were murdered as unwelcome witnesses.

In order to "earth" the graves further east - where the Red Army began to push back the Wehrmacht - Blobel expanded his staff and had mobile 1005 commandos set up. These consisted of members of the Gestapo , detectives and police officers . Members of the Einsatzgruppen of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) were also used. These units were responsible for most of the mass murders in the Eastern campaign . In Lviv and near Mogilew separate training centers were set up, where prospective 1005 leaders practiced the "correct" procedure for burning corpses. In order to provide those with dead, executions were arranged on site.

The progress of the earthenings was disguised as harmless “weather reports”. The places of the mass graves were referred to as "precipitation areas", the number of corpses was quantified as "cloud height". The number of prisoners murdered after the work was completed was referred to as the “amount of rain”.

In July 1943, Blobel went to Kiev to have the mass graves in the operational area of ​​Einsatzgruppen C and D cleared. In Kiev he used a "Command 1005 A", which consisted of ten SD members and 60 police officers. In Dnepropetrovsk he set up a "Command 1005 B". Both were busy covering up Babyn Yar's tracks . In other locations, a shovel was also used to clear up mass graves . After the work was finished, the work details were shot; in some cases the perpetrators also used gas vans .

Max Thomas , the top RSHA representative in Ukraine, called the action a "fool's job". The number of firing pits to be emptied and their exact location were sometimes unknown. In addition, some 1005 prisoners managed to escape, so secrecy was no longer guaranteed. The track removers were running out of time. The military situation ultimately prevented the complete removal of mass graves in Ukraine.

In order to divert attention from Aktion 1005 and at the same time drive a wedge between the Allies , the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda announced the discovery of around 20,000 bodies from the massacre of Katyn committed by the Soviets in 1943 . At the same time, from the autumn of 1943 onwards, the hushing up of crimes in Ukraine became all the more intense. On the central section of the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht units received orders to defend their positions until the work of the 1005 behind the front line was finished. The horror took place behind screen walls, in seemingly endless repetition: opening graves, dragging out the dead, securing valuables, piling up corpses and burning them, smashing bones, scattering ashes. Freshly set tree saplings then camouflaged the grounds of the countless mass graves. Ultimately, the 1005s had to leave more and more funeral pits behind because the front was drawing closer and they couldn't keep up with their work.

In April 1944, the men of Sonderkommando 1005A were grouped together in Lemberg; they recovered in Zakopane and then resumed their activities in the General Government. The task force 1005B also arrived there a little later.

A special command "1005-Mitte" (also called Sonderkommando C) was mainly active in the Bialystok district , later in Maly Trostinez . He owned u. a. Adolf Rübe . Blobel deployed further disembarkation teams in Belarus, using men who had previously worked in task forces.

Since the late summer of 1943, the earthmaking command was active in the Baltic States, mainly near Ponary and in Fort IX of Kovno . The area-wide deployment by the sub-commandos D and E in Latvia began in March 1944. In the Generalgouvernement Blobel did not form any mobile commands. In autumn 1943 he summoned the commanders of the Security Police and the SD and instructed them to clear up the mass graves. In some cases, "training courses" were offered in Janowska for the newly appointed commando leaders . The sources for this complex are poor; the use of 17 disembarking commands is partially documented.

In Serbia - partly also on Croatian territory - the activity of Sonderkommando D began in autumn 1943, first in Semlin , then also in Jasenovac . They lasted until May 1944.

The prisoners who had been forced to clear up traces were liquidated as keepers of secrets immediately after the end of the local work. The number of murdered 1005 prisoners at all fire sites "must have clearly been in the five-digit range."

Extermination camp

Further digging operations, in which mass graves were opened and the corpses burned on pyre, took place in the extermination camps of Aktion Reinhardt . Blobel was not responsible here. The commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höß , had the cremation methods demonstrated to him on September 17, 1942 in Kulmhof and applied them between the end of September and the end of November 1942 and 1944 in Birkenau . There are also indications of contacts between Blobel and Christian Wirth . The thousands upon thousands of dead in the Belzec , Treblinka and Sobibor camps were also cremated using Blobel's pyre method.

After the war

Nuremberg Trials

Blobel testified in one of the Nuremberg trials , the Einsatzgruppen trial . He was indicted solely for his crimes as chief of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, sentenced to death by hanging and executed on June 7, 1951. Action 1005 was not the subject of the proceedings. In an affidavit he testified to the American military tribunal that according to the orders his task should extend over the entire area of ​​the Einsatzgruppen, but that because of the German withdrawal from the Soviet Union he had not been able to carry out his order as a whole. Some prisoners from the work details were able to escape and were later heard as witnesses at trials in Poland and Germany.

Hamburg trial

Between November 1967 and February 1968 there was a trial against Max Krahner , Otto Goldap and Otto Drews in Hamburg. These three SS officers from Sonderaktion 1005 were charged with the murder of 500 Polish and Soviet forced laborers from the corpse detachment. The forced laborers were recruited for the detachment with the false promise of release. In 1943 and 1944 they had to exhume and burn the bodies of tens of thousands of those murdered there in Belarus and in the vicinity of the Polish city of Białystok . After the end of the special action, the 500 forced laborers were murdered by gassing, shooting or using explosives. The trial ended on February 9, 1968, and the three SS officers were sentenced to life imprisonment.

literature

  • Andrej Angrick : “Aktion 1005” - Removal of traces of Nazi mass crimes 1942–1945: A “secret Reich matter” in the area of ​​conflict between the turn of the war and propaganda. Wallstein, 2018, two volumes, 1381 pages. ISBN 978-3-8353-3268-3 .
  • Alexander Brakel: The Holocaust. Persecution of the Jews and Genocide. In the collective work: German History in the 20th Century, 9th Bebra, Berlin 2008, ISBN 3-89809-409-X (also published as TB; the register of persons can be read online) pp. 157–159.
  • Jens Hoffmann (Ed.): This extraordinary German bestiality. How the Nazis removed the traces of their mass murders in Eastern Europe. Eyewitness accounts and conversations. KVV Konkret, Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-930786-67-1 .
  • Jens Hoffmann: “You can't tell that”. Action 1005. How the Nazis removed the traces of their mass murders in Eastern Europe. ISBN 978-3-930786-53-4 ( concrete - texts 46/47 determination ).
  • Leon W. Wells : A son of Job. Translated from H. Th. Asbeck. Hanser, Munich 1963; Heyne TB 1982 ISBN 3-453-01050-7 .
  • Central Jewish Historical Commission (ed.): In fire passed. Diaries from the ghetto. Translated from Polish by Viktor Mika. Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1958. (Several editions, also by other publishers; contains, inter alia. Die Todesbrigade , notes of Leon Weliczker-Wells, who from June 15, 1943 until the day of his escape on November 20, was part of an “emptying squad” of the “Sonderaktion 1005 "was assigned.)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jens Hoffmann: “You can't tell that” - “Aktion 1005” - How the Nazis removed the traces of their mass murders in Eastern Europe. Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-930786-53-4 , p. 81.
  2. ^ Andrej Angrick: "Aktion 1005" - removal of traces of Nazi mass crimes 1942-1945. A "secret Reich affair" in the area of ​​conflict between the turn of the war and propaganda. Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-3268-3 , vol. 1, p. 85.
  3. ^ Andrej Angrick: Heydrich's motives and strategy for the Wannsee Conference. In: Norbert Kampe, Peter Klein (ed.): The Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 - documents, research status, controversies . Cologne 2013, ISBN 978-3-412-21070-0 , p. 257.
  4. ↑ Document VEJ 8/282, p. 686f In: Bert Hoppe (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945. (Collection of sources) Volume 8: Soviet Union with annexed areas II. Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-486-78119-9 , and there pp. 42–43.
  5. ↑ Jens Hoffmann: “You can't tell that” , p. 82 with note 100 = reference to a corresponding remark by Herbert Linden from T4 to Odilo Globocnik .
  6. ^ Andrej Angrick : "Aktion 1005" - removal of traces of Nazi mass crimes 1942–1945. Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-3268-3 , Vol. 1, pp. 103-121.
  7. ↑ a b c d e f Andrej Angrick: The great cover-up in: Die Zeit from August 15, 2019, p. 16.
  8. ↑ Jens Hoffmann: “You can't tell that” , p. 12.
  9. ^ Andrej Angrick: "Aktion 1005" - removal of traces of Nazi mass crimes 1942–1945. Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-3268-3 , Vol. 1, pp. 365-367.
  10. ^ Andrej Angrick: "Aktion 1005" - removal of traces of Nazi mass crimes 1942–1945. Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-3268-3 , Vol. 1, pp. 469 and 483.
  11. ^ Andrej Angrick: "Aktion 1005" - removal of traces of Nazi mass crimes 1942–1945. Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-3268-3 , Vol. 2, pp. 695–717 and 721–732.
  12. ^ Andrej Angrick: "Aktion 1005" - removal of traces of Nazi mass crimes 1942–1945. Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-3268-3 , Vol. 2, p. 1213.
  13. ↑ Jens Hoffmann: “You can't tell that” , p. 11.
  14. ^ Andrej Angrick: "Aktion 1005" - removal of traces of Nazi mass crimes 1942–1945. Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-3268-3 , Vol. 1, pp. 225-275.
  15. ^ Richard Rhodes: The German Murderers. The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Holocaust , Bergisch Gladbach 2004, ISBN 3-7857-2183-8 , p. 388 ff.
  16. ↑ Associated Press (AP): Press release 3 SS Men guilty of killing 500 body-burners . New York, 1968, February 9.