IN JUNE 1941, as the German armies pushed into the Soviet Union, a tall, lean man in the black uniform of the SS climbed the steps of a large building in the Knesebeckstrasse in Charlottenburg.
Kurt Gerstein had been in uniform for a year now, but he had never learned to be comfortable in it. The tunic sagged at his thin shoulders, his belt hung a little loose at his narrow waist, and the cap sat awkwardly on his head. But his dedication to his work and his knowledge of engineering and medicine had got him noticed by his superiors.
When he reported for duty, an orderly told him to wait, and he looked around him and wondered what his new posting had in store. This was the Institute of Hygiene, whose long corridors housed laboratories and rooms where scientists and their assistants worked in strict secrecy. There were research departments in chemistry, parasitology, bacteriology, and meteorology. Gerstein had been told he would be working in the department of water hygiene under Dr. Fritz Krantz, a mineralogist.
As he waited, Gerstein reflected on the past twelve months. He had done his basic training at Langenhorn in Hamburg, where he had befriended his instructor—a professional soldier named Sergeant Robert Weigelt—despite being a poor recruit who often reported sick and could not even march in time. Weigelt saw Gerstein as an “ultra-Christian,” but he was also good-natured and loyal, and he did what was asked. Weigelt noted that his recruit’s main foible was a habit of disappearing alone, but when he headed off into the town, he always brought back Weigelt a bottle of schnapps. Once the first bottle had been accepted, Gerstein realized he had an unknowing ally in the kindly sergeant from Hesse.
When the group of recruits, which included university graduates and doctors, reflecting the Nazis’ desire to bring “professional talent” into the ranks of the SS, was transferred to Arnhem in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, Gerstein’s trips off base continued. He had discovered that an old friend from the mining industry, a Dutch engineer named J. H. Ubbink, lived nearby.
One day Ubbink opened the door of his house to find Gerstein standing there in uniform. The Dutchman hurried his friend inside, not wanting his neighbors to see. “This doesn’t mean a thing,” Gerstein said, gesturing to the uniform. “The man inside it hasn’t changed.”
Gerstein explained his reasons for volunteering, and the two men prayed together. Ubbink was concerned about the huge risk his friend was taking.
“We Germans have got to lose this war,” Gerstein told him. The effect of the words on Ubbink, a citizen of a conquered nation, were electric. “Better a hundred Versailles treaties than that the present gang of criminals should remain in power. What does it profit a nation to gain the whole world if it lose its own soul?”1
Ubbink went to a drawer and brought out a copy of Hermann Rauschning’s book Hitler Speaks, which contained early interviews with the Führer revealing the hatreds that consumed him. Banned in Germany, the book was an underground hit in Holland. Gerstein sat and flicked through its pages. He read Hitler’s words: “This revolution of ours is the exact counterpart of the great French revolution. And no Jewish God will save the democracies from it. There is a stern time coming, I shall see to that. Only the tough and manly will endure. And the world will assume a new aspect.”2
When he had finished, Gerstein looked at Ubbink. “It is only too true,” he said.
Gerstein took a copy of the book and later posted it anonymously through the door of his friend Pastor Rehling—who for some time was too afraid to read it as he feared its delivery had been a Gestapo trick.
Back on base, Gerstein continued to appear the loyal soldier. He threw himself into his training, and reports to SS headquarters highlighted his talent for inventing new procedures for solving technical problems and noted his qualifications in medicine. Here was a man who, while perhaps not the greatest at drill, could still be a real asset to the SS.
Gerstein knew that his status in Hitler’s most elite and loyal unit set him apart. It was even marked on his body: As with all members of the SS, his blood group had been tattooed under his left armpit so that he would be guaranteed preferential treatment in any hospital in the Reich.
But all the while his mind was elsewhere. When Gerstein met up with another friend, he told him that it was unpleasant to be “misread” as a Nazi by others, but that he was “obliged to congratulate himself” on his “camouflage.”3 He still only hinted at his double life in letters to his wife, Elfriede—who remained in Tübingen throughout his service—telling her that he often thought of “Nietzsche’s well-known phrase that I’ve so frequently quoted to you.”
Elfriede remembered the phrase, of course, but she wondered what on earth her husband meant. The words from Nietzsche were “Live dangerously!”
THE SS REPORTS on Gerstein’s skills had eventually reached Berlin, and he was sent to take a course at the School of Decontamination at Oranienburg, just north of the capital. Then had come the posting to the Institute of Hygiene.
His new boss, Dr. Krantz, was no more impressed with Gerstein’s unsoldierly appearance than the NCOs at SS training school had been. “Do for God’s sake try and smarten yourself up,” was one of the first things he said to him, and it would become an order he would often repeat. But he was impressed with Gerstein’s knowledge and work ethic.
Over the next few months they worked on tests on the chemical and bacterial content of various water supplies, and traveled extensively to test the drinking water at army bases and prisons. In one police prison Gerstein dropped his cigarettes near some prisoners and left them. Krantz was convinced it was a deliberate act but did not challenge his assistant. He told colleagues the man was being of enormous help to him.
The institute’s chief was a tall, thin man with tight lips and a voracious appetite for work. Professor Joachim Mrugowsky was thirty-six, devoted to Himmler, and a man always on the lookout for any scheme that would tackle the problems presented to the Third Reich. In the halls of the institute he appeared the ultimate capable civil servant—open to ideas, keeping an eye out for talented colleagues—but he was in fact a ruthless Nazi who had already played a role in some of the regime’s atrocities. Back in the spring of 1939 he had been called to Buchenwald concentration camp to advise on a typhus epidemic. His order was swift and ruthless: Kill off the most hopeless cases and preserve medical supplies for those who could be treated.4
Now, though, as the German army moved through Russia and Ukraine, putting captured Red Army soldiers and the civilian population into work camps, typhus had again become a problem. Mrugowsky was told there were ten thousand cases in the Wehrmacht, and he had to deal with it as a “frontline priority.”
Mrugowsky put the reports from the Eastern Front on Gerstein’s desk and asked for his thoughts. Reading through, Gerstein saw immediately that disease was being spread not just through dirty water but through clothes and cooking utensils as well. The solution would be to find a way of decontaminating these items in battlefield conditions, he told the chief. Mrugowsky—under pressure from Himmler—asked if he could do it, and Gerstein said he could but would need to put together a small team. Mrugowsky had his secretary draw up all the necessary paperwork and, in addition, give Gerstein special travel documents, safe-conduct passes, and access to official cars. Gerstein brought in his old training sergeant, Weigelt, to support him, together with a Luftwaffe meteorologist named Armin Peters and a pharmacist, Friedrich Geissert. Soon after he joined, Geissert, who spoke French, was dispatched to Paris to talk to people at the Pasteur Institute on Gerstein’s behalf about typhus vaccines.
Working day and night, Gerstein developed a high-pressure steam device for delousing uniforms, blankets, and underclothes that destroyed not only the lice but also their excrement. He then invented a mobile filter unit to kill bugs in drinking water. The two devices were demonstrated for the army, which approved both and rushed them into mass production in factories in Munich and Celle.
Mrugowsky took the credit from the high command, but also knew he needed Gerstein to continue with the work he was doing. When, in November 1941, one of the judges who had excluded Gerstein from the Nazi Party saw him in SS uniform and reported him to SS high command, urgent inquiries were made at the institute, but the complaint was quickly dismissed by Mrugowsky.
Gerstein and his team now found themselves traveling to all corners of France and Germany. They built and delivered disinfection trucks for troops and a pump to repel mosquitoes in army hospitals. They advised on sanitation when sewer and water pipes were destroyed during heavy raids by the RAF on Bremen and Hamburg. They traveled at will on the passes supplied by Mrugowsky.
But Gerstein was already seeing and hearing evidence of the crimes that he had gone into the SS to identify. He had visited the concentration camps to inspect water supplies and seen the conditions in which prisoners were working, and very early in January 1942 he was consulted on experiments being carried out by a colleague, Major Dr. Erwin Ding—who both distrusted and loathed Gerstein because of his closeness to Mrugowsky—to test the effectiveness and safety of various typhus vaccines. A report on the tests stated that people at Buchenwald had been given the various treatments and that five had died. Tests were continuing in block 46.5
A few days later Gerstein visited a soldier friend who had been wounded at the front. The friend said that once he let down his guard, Gerstein seemed to have “stretched his nerves to the limit” and appeared to be a “bundle . . . of hate, fear, and despair.” Gerstein told the friend that what he had seen in the SS was draining the life out of him. “He was so appalled by the satanic practices of the Nazis that their eventual victory did not seem to him impossible,” said the friend later.6
Gerstein was staring into abyss. He was about to disappear into it.
THE SNOW WAS falling in Berlin on the morning of January 20, 1942, when a series of black cars swept through the gates of the SD villa at Am Grossen Wannsee 56–58, in a suburb southwest of Berlin. Some fifteen senior officials of the Reich had been invited to the villa that morning, and they greeted each other warmly as they flapped the snow off their uniforms with their gloves.
The villa offered a most relaxed atmosphere in which to do business, and as they took their places around the large table, army orderlies inquired after their orders for drinks.
Two out of three attending had a university degree, and over half had the title doctor, mainly in law. Only two were over fifty.7 The man who had arranged the meeting, Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the SD and the Security Police and Himmler’s right-hand man, was thirty-seven.
The previous summer Heydrich had been tasked by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring to “make all the necessary preparations to organize the complete solution of the Jewish question within the German sphere of influence in Europe.” The task had fallen to Heydrich as it had been he who had formed the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Berlin soon after Kristallnacht.8
While Jews were already being summarily executed in the East, Heydrich calmly provided tables and reports to establish clarity on the policy.9 Jews who were fit to work should be made to “work their way eastwards constructing roads,” the conference agreed, and “doubtless the large majority will be eliminated by natural causes.” Those who remained alive would be those most likely to resist, the administrators of death agreed, and they “will have to be dealt with appropriately, because otherwise, by natural selection, they would form the germ cell of a new Jewish revival.”
Germany and the Czech protectorate must be “cleared” first and then occupied Europe would be swept from west to east. All Jewish people should be brought to transit ghettos before being transported onwards by train.
The minutes recorded much discussion of “evacuation to the east,” although Adolf Eichmann, of the RSHA, the Reich Security Main Office, later stated the real language in the room was far more open about killing.10
With the logistics broadly agreed upon, the meeting drew to a close. The men stood, stretched their legs, and, sipping cognac, asked after each other’s families and looked through the villa’s large windows at the snow settling on the icy water of the lake outside.
HORST DICKTEN KNOCKED on the door and entered Kurt Gerstein’s office in the Institute of Hygiene.
Dickten was a former frontline soldier who had been wounded and was now marked unfit for active service. He had joined Gerstein’s staff as an assistant, and while he enjoyed working for him, he had to admit Gerstein was an eccentric boss: He would combine work trips with walks around antique shops in Brussels and art galleries in Paris and would bring back gifts for work colleagues. Sometimes he raised eyebrows with his practical jokes, too: A favorite was wearing a clothes brush in his revolver holster.
But Dickten was also aware that Gerstein was covering up a distaste for the regime that bordered on something far stronger. The two men would never speak about it at work, but they had talked when they were on the road and realized it was a distaste that they both shared. Gerstein made Dickten both smile and worry when he told him that every evening when he got home to his apartment on Bülowstrasse, he would unbutton his SS officer’s tunic and tune his radio to the BBC.
On that morning early in 1942, though, Dickten found his boss sitting at his desk with his face as white as a sheet. Waving his friend to take a seat, Gerstein pushed across the piece of paper that he had been reading. The subject heading was the first thing Dickten saw: “Solution of the Jewish Problem.” He scanned through. It was about the installation of “necessary” buildings and appliances in an occupied territory in the East. The same words that had caught Gerstein’s eye and made his blood run cold now did the same to Dickten: “for the gassing of the Jews.”
The regime’s rabid hatred of Jewish people was not a shock—it was deeply engrained in German society—but what this document was describing in Gerstein’s eyes was an extension to the euthanasia program, and this time not for the criminally insane or chronically ill but for fit and healthy people just because they were Jewish.
Gerstein and Dickten wondered what it all could mean and went across to the Unter den Linden to see friends in the SS Office of Economy and Administration, from where the concentration camps were run. Gerstein’s department was funded from this office, and he brought back from Paris presents for some people there, but if any of them knew about extermination camps, they said little and looked back strangely when questioned. “We were in the heart of hell,” Dickten said later. “Any curiosity was suspect.”11
ON JUNE 8, 1942, a man in civilian clothes presented himself at Kurt Gerstein’s office and introduced himself as Major Rolf Günther, of the Reich Security Main Office. Gerstein knew instantly that he worked for Eichmann.
He explained that Gerstein was being given a top secret mission that he could not even discuss with his colleagues. He was to procure 572 pounds of liquid prussic acid and take it to an undisclosed location by truck. Only the driver would know the location.
When Gerstein asked politely why he had been chosen, he was told it was because he was the SS’s leading decontamination expert. More detailed written instructions would be given within twenty-four hours.
These arrived as Günther had said, and Gerstein reread the sheet of paper a number of times. It was marked “Top Secret” and had a red border all around its outside edge. Gerstein’s instructions were plain: He was to order the quantity of Zyklon B, a variant of hydrocyanic or prussic acid that released deadly fumes on contact with the air. Only one firm, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung (German Corporation for Pest Control), which was known in the trade as Degesch, or one of its subsidiaries could supply this chemical.12 When he had made the arrangements, transport would be laid out for him. Again, no location was given.
On receiving the letter Gerstein left his office and traveled out to Dahlem, near the Grunewald, to St. Anne’s Church, Pastor Niemöller’s old parish. It was a terrible risk as the church and its new pastor, Herbert Mochalsky, were under suspicion by the Gestapo for holding services in the tradition of the now-banned Confessing Church.
St. Anne’s held a daily service, and Gerstein sat at the back; all the same Mochalsky saw the new man and feared he was the Gestapo. As Gerstein listened, he became more and more convinced that he had been right to come. The sermon that day was constructed around the Fifth Commandment— “Thou shalt not kill.”
When the fifty or so parishioners had left, the stranger approached Mochalsky and grabbed his arm. “Providence must have guided my footsteps,” he said. “Something terrible has happened to me.”
Gerstein then showed the terrified pastor the written order. Mochalsky saw the words “Top Secret” and looked away, but Gerstein read it out.
“This consignment is intended to kill thousands of people. You know what I mean? The sort of people who are labelled sub-human.”
Gerstein was distraught. He talked about a relative having been murdered in the euthanasia program, about why he joined the SS, and about suicide. If he killed himself, two people who had supported him in the SS would die, too, he claimed.
And he kept looking at the order. “A consignment of prussic acid.”
“Herr Pastor,” Gerstein pleaded, “what am I to do? What am I to do?”
AT THE BEGINNING of August 1942 an army truck and a gleaming black staff car arrived in Kolin, a town a little over thirty miles from Prague that since medieval times had been home to German settlers, Slavs, and a large Jewish population. Set in a region of hilly forests, the town was overshadowed by the chimneys of the potash plant. Owned by a subsidiary of the Degesch company, it had become dedicated to the production of the Zyklon B gas.
While the containers of gas were being loaded onto the truck, Kurt Gerstein walked among some of the employees of the factory. Most, it seemed, believed the gas was being used to kill vermin and parasites. Without saying so directly, Gerstein asked questions of the gas’s effectiveness, which gave them enough information to understand that it was now being used on human beings. Gerstein hoped that word would get out.
Very quickly the small, deadly convoy was on the road again. Seated with Gerstein in the back of the car was SS Lieutenant-Colonel Dr. Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, an urbane and highly intelligent professor of hygiene from the University of Marburg who was carrying out an inspection of the camps. While the professor talked about his large family and the driver took them onwards into Poland, Kurt Gerstein’s inner turmoil ate at his conscious. Did the professor know what was going on? He had to. How could he sit and talk happily, as if on a family outing to the countryside? And was he—Gerstein—any better? Everyone in the car had their hands dirty. They were all playing a part in a terrible crime.
At the next stop, Gerstein had an idea. Going to the back of the truck, he inspected the cargo and pretended to become alarmed. “One of the containers is leaking,” he told the others, none of whom could smell or detect anything wrong. But they knew that he was the expert and no one wanted to risk being too close to this deadly chemical. Gerstein “identified” the ruptured canister, and it was taken to the side of the road and buried.
It was a small victory, but in the context of what Gerstein feared was happening, did it mean anything? He was soon to get an idea of the scale and horror of what the Nazis had unleashed in the East.
KURT GERSTEIN’S ZYKLON B party arrived at the SS barracks in Lublin on August 17, 1942. The barracks, named after the SS’s first leader, Julius Schreck, who had died of meningitis in 1936, were occupied by only a small group of men, and it was from here that Operation Reinhard was being organized.
The local SS police chief, Brigadier-General Odilo Globocnik, welcomed the party and proceeded to introduce them to the details of Reinhard. The operation was named in honor of Reinhard Heydrich, who, less than five months after presiding over the orders for the murder of the Jews at Wannsee, had himself been killed in Prague by Czech resisters trained by the British Special Operations Executive.
Everything they were being told, said Globocnik—a tall man with swept-back hair and a slightly bulbous nose—was in the strictest secrecy. Two men had already been shot for talking about the project outside the barracks. Official documents on Reinhard described the “transfer” of Jews, but here in Poland, Globocnik was developing the phenomenon of the death camp, the creation of an industry based on the mass extermination of a race of people.
Gerstein knew that gas vans, in which the exhausts had been directed into the rear cabin to asphyxiate those carried inside, had been used in East Prussia during 1940 to kill “euthanasia” victims, but Globocnik said that stationary killing centers had been installed at Auschwitz, at first to kill Russian prisoners of war.
In this region, Globocnik boasted, he was creating a network of death camps. He had begun by forcing Polish laborers to build a camp at Belzec, which he thought might be used to gas all the Jews from the Lublin area. Belzec had now been joined by camps at Sobibor and Treblinka. Gradually, Globocnik’s goal had developed into the liquidation of all Polish Jews.13 Mass-killing operations had started at Belzec that spring and in Auschwitz during the summer.
At Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka—and a fourth Polish camp, Chelmno—the plan was to kill every Jew within a few hours of arrival.14
Globocnik announced he was taking Gerstein and Pfannenstiel on a tour, and they drove ninety miles to the southwest into the birch woods and sparsely populated countryside of Galicia. They came to the small village of Belzec, a cluster of wooden houses and a tall church tower, and drove on as hens and chickens scattered from the roadside. A short distance on to the south, nestled against the side of a wooded slope, was a group of huts and a gate marked “Belzec. Special Establishment of the Waffen SS.” To one side of the camp, a branch of the Lublin-Lvov railway came to an end behind a line of thick conifers, which concealed it from the outside world. A single lookout tower with a machine gun and searchlight watched over all.
Gerstein took in the series of buildings. A small railway station. A large shed labeled “Cloakroom” in which there was a collecting office with the sign “Objects of value.” A “hairdressing salon” with seats for a hundred people. Then an alleyway between thick rolls of barbed wire leading to the Bade und Inhalationsräume, the “bathing and inhalation rooms.”
Globocnik explained that the commandant, Christian Wirth—the policeman who had put Hitler’s T4 euthanasia program into such deadly practice—would not be available until tomorrow. A sergeant-major who had worked with Wirth on T4 would show them around.15 They walked to the Bade und Inhalationsräume and saw that on each side of the steps to the entrance were two large flowerpots filled with geraniums. Over the door was the inscription “Hackenholt Foundation,” and above it a Star of David. Inside was a long, unlit concrete corridor. Off the corridor were the windowless gas chambers.16
On the journey there, Globocnik had been clear with Gerstein as to what was expected of him. “We need you to improve the service of our gas chambers,” he told him, explaining they functioned off an engine exhaust.17 “What is wanted is a more toxic gas that works faster.”
It was hot and sunny that first day in Belzec, and to Gerstein the smell around the buildings was “pestilential.” There were flies everywhere.
There were no prisoners at the camp that day and no train arrived. But the air was heavy with murder. Gerstein was found a billet in the village that night and promised a demonstration of Operation Reinhard the following day.