Programme three -
Factories of Death
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"When the vehicle with the mounted machine-gun arrived, there was
a silence, a terrible silence."
"My mother was in the first row of the women and she signalled
to us with her eyes. Michel was crying. That's the last image I have
of my mother." Annette and Michel Muller on the separation
of children from parents at Beaune-la-Rolande camp, France
The year 1942 is to be the most significant of the 'Final Solution'
as the Nazis now begin to comb western Europe, even taking Jews from
as far afield as the British Channel Islands.
France is the first western country to deport resident Jews: the Vichy
Government makes a deal with the SS to round up 'foreign' Jews living
in France, but not those with French citizenship.
More than 4,000 Jewish children are separated from their parents, deported
from France and sent to Auschwitz, where they are gassed on arrival.
Even parts of the United Kingdom that were occupied become involved
in the deportation of Jews.
In Guernsey, the police hand over three Jewish women living on the
island for deportation. When they finally arrive in Auschwitz, 900 miles
away, they are murdered.
Neither the French nor the Channel Island authorities knew for certain
what would be the fate of the Jews they helped to deport - but they
most certainly did know how much the Nazis hated the Jews.
Himmler now orders that all Jews in the General Government, an area
that had been central Poland until September 1939, are to be killed.
He selects newly constructed death camps like Treblinka for the task.
Treblinka, unlike Auschwitz, is a pure extermination camp, but its
small gas chambers cannot keep up with demand and, despite burial in
makeshift pits, bodies lie rotting in the summer heat.
At Auschwitz, the corpses of those murdered in gas chambers in the
converted farmhouses are also rotting.
The Nazi leadership knows that solutions must be found quickly.
Changes are introduced to the running of the Treblinka camp. In order
to lull new arrivals into a false sense of security, a fake railway
station with flowers, timetables and signs to other towns is constructed.
Bigger gas chambers are also built, capable of killing more than 3,000
people at a time.
Ninety-nine per cent of those arriving at Treblinka are dead within
two hours.
Höss is also making 'improvements' at Auschwitz. In order to make the
camp a more efficient killing factory, he seeks advice from the SS expert
in body disposal, SS-Colonel Paul Blobel, and examines his new field
cremation units at first hand.
Not every German soldier is prepared to facilitate the extermination
process.
Lieutenant Albert Battel refuses to allow all the Jewish workers in
the ghetto of the Polish town of Przemysl to be deported. He even shelters
some of them in the army headquarters.
He is posthumously awarded the title Righteous Among The Nations by
Yad Vashem in Israel.
But nothing can stop the forward momentum of the 'Final Solution' and
by March 1943 the new crematoria at Auschwitz are fully operational.
Two months later the camp gets a new physician - SS-Captain Dr Josef
Mengele. He will become known as the Angel of Death.
Those interviewed in Factories of Death include two
Jewish children who were separated from their mother by the French authorities
and would have followed her to their deaths in Auschwitz, with 4,000
other children, had she not arranged for their rescue.
People who remember one of the Jewish girls deported from Guernsey,
with the co-operation of the British police, speak fondly of her, and
a prisoner at Auschwitz recalls digging up the rotting corpses of those
gassed in the camp.
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