80 years after the gas chambers: the “vilest Nazi” who created them and the first victims to arrive from Ukraine

The German surrender had occurred almost a month earlier. Nazi soldiers and officers escaped like rats all over Europe. But, despite the immensity of the continent, there weren't too many places to go. It was all hunger and destruction. A British patrol discovered Nazi soldiers at the foot of the Alps. They tried to impersonate peasants but did not deceive anyone. Already at the barracks, when questioned, they confessed that they were members of the defeated army but denied having occupied relevant places. So that they would believe them, the youngest gave a tip to his captors. In the place where they had found them, but at higher altitudes, deeper into the mountains, in a well-stocked cabin, they could find some eminent Nazis. They did not know their identity but they did know that they were important people because of how they dressed, because of the comforts they had despite the circumstances and because someone had sent them to bring them groceries. The British found the site without problems and arrested seven people. Six were dressed as officers; the remaining presented themselves as a major German merchant. He had a warm jacket, leather pants, expensive boots. Upon arriving at the detachment, the other six were placed in a dungeon while the merchant was allowed to move freely around the place. Until someone thought they recognized him. That wasn't a businessman. That man was a murderer. The British officer, once he passed in front of him, when he was already turning his back on him, he set a trap to determine his identity. With a slight German accent and a commanding voice, he shouted: “Globocnik!” The man, short and overweight, turned his head, as if responding to the call. As soon as he realized his almost reflex act he tried to continue as if nothing happened. The English commander ordered him to be placed in the safest cell they had: they had found the person responsible for the Nazi death camps. But while being taken to his confinement, Odilo Globocnik, in a quick movement, put something in his mouth and tightly closed his jaws, helping himself with his hands. It fell almost immediately and shook on the ground. His skin turned purple. He had bitten the cyanide pill.

Someone defined him as “the vilest person in the most vile organization that ever existed.” A despicable being, with a unique eagerness to kill. An inexhaustible killer appetite. Odilo Globocnik boasted that he was the Nazi who had eliminated the most Jews. He was the one who was responsible for the construction and operation of the death camps. Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.

Eighty years ago, on March 17, 1942, hundreds of Jews from Ukraine were first admitted to the gas chambers at the Belzec death camp, located on Polish territory. They were, of course, neither the first Jews killed by the Nazis, nor the first to be gassed. But there were those who inaugurated a new system, the one that perfected the killing machine, the one that turned it into an industry.

The Shoah had different stages. In each of them, the Nazis were giving greater complexity and effectiveness to their murderous vocation. It was not that they suddenly decided to build camps to eliminate all the members of an ethnic group. The annihilating decision existed before and only deepened and expanded over time. But the way in which this genocidal scheme was put into practice varied.

In the face of every great massacre, logistical and moral problems arose for the soldiers who committed the crimes. The authorities were devising schemes that would make these mechanisms of terror more effective.

The Holocaust process was not univocal; it was long and complex. It did not happen, as some believe, that one day Hitler woke up determined and gave the order to kill every member of various ethnic groups and the plan was put into effect. It had several stages. The great and systematized massacres of the last years of the Second War had begun much earlier, with policies that were becoming increasingly radicalized, with increasingly bloody, arbitrary and radical actions. When the death camps run by Globocnik were opened, more than 600,000 Jews from Eastern Europe had already been killed, according to Nikolaus Wachsmann slogan in KL. A history of Nazi concentration camps. Already in 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union, the huge number of deportees and those killed made them try different solutions.

The most daring, the most immoral and ambitious, came to the rescue, to put themselves in the front row. Himmler gave the order during the second half of 1941 to Globocnik. It was a secret plan they called Aktion Reinhardt, Operation Reinhard. They would no longer build concentration camps, slave labor camps. It was time for a further instance: death camps, places where people were taken only to be killed. They were almost unstaffed. Only between 25 and 30 officers to maintain order and ensure that the different stages of the journey were fulfilled. The rest, who did the dirty chores, were Sonderkommandos , prisoners forced to put people in the gas chambers, remove their bodies, cremate them, pile up their belongings. These too, in most cases, would die and be replaced by others.

People were taken on crowded trains; cattle carriages in which one could not breathe because of overcrowding and stench. Many didn't come down from them alive. When they arrived, when the doors of the formation opened and the diaphanous light and fresh air entered (or frozen depending on the time of year), the prisoners believed that the worst had happened. What they didn't know was that the selection had been made before they were put on the train. And they were already doomed. There were stations inside the camp for newcomers. That pantomime of normality and those simulated routines reassured them. A place to leave your belongings, lines to wait, places to undress for a bath. The station through posters and even fake watches wanted to appear hospitality. But a few minutes later everyone would be dead. None of those who got off those cars lasted more than a few hours alive there.

The Nazis had tried to shoot their victims. It was a slow and very morally costly procedure for soldiers who had to shoot at hundreds of necks of defenseless people, children, women and the elderly. They also created trucks in which they poisoned those who climbed with carbon dioxide. Then they buried them in mass graves but, because of the gases, the bodies emerged to the surface.

Globocnik was a corrupt man who had been cast as an official, but his boldness, lack of boundaries and closeness to Himmler had restored him power. And he was willing to do whatever it took to avoid losing it. When he was given the order to create these camps, he spoke to his men: “The Reichsfuhrer of the SS has just given us a new task. I am so grateful that you can be sure that your wishes will be fulfilled immediately.”

He was the one who coordinated and supervised the construction of the death camps. Belzec didn't have crematorium ovens. But gas chambers do. The method Globocnik chose was that of carbon dioxide. His men killed thousands of Polish and Russian Jews every hour. After a few months in operation, he gave the order to make new gas chambers in which 2000 people entered each. It is estimated that 600,000 Jews were murdered in Belzec alone.

The trains arrived crowded and if that traffic stopped, Globocnik would call asking for more. Deportations were never enough for him. He was complaining. He said they had even greater killing power. At some point he had a confrontation with Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz.

Auschwitz was a slave labor camp, a concentration camp that with the addition of Treblinka became one of extermination. But that mixed nature made its operation different. Höss and Globocnik fought publicly before their superiors to take credit for who killed the most people. They accused each other of being ineffective and untidy. Höss tried to get his rival to use Zyklon B, the gas with which they killed in the Auschwitz chambers. But Globocnik still preferred carbon monoxide.

Globocnik destroyed the Polish ghettos to have more people to kill. In 1943 Belzec was the first death camp to be dismantled. They took the remains out of the pits and made huge pyres. Then they tore down the facilities and built on it to erase the evidence.

Globocnik and his men continued to move together until the end of the war. Next to them they found him in the Alps. They had previously been in Italy in the last months of the contest.

A few decades after Globocnik's death, there was a rumor that he had not committed suicide, that everything had been a parody mounted by the United States that had concealed the genocidal. It is well known that the great powers recruited Nazis to use them for their own benefit in the post-war period. They were mainly important scientists (such as Von Braun) or intelligence agents with a large wealth of information. But Globocnik would have been unacceptable, he would not have had the slightest justification. Some investigators claimed that the former commander of Belzec and Sobibor had lived in the United States; they even wielded secret documents to prove it. At the beginning of the new millennium, the German journalist and writer Gitta Sereny proved that this was a baseless legend and that Odilo Globocnik had committed suicide with the cyanide pill in Austria.

Before we finish, let's return to May 31, 1945, the day of his death in the Parthenion Castle in Austria, where the British barracks were located. The English soldiers carried the body to the village church, which in the background had a small cemetery. The local parish priest, when he found out who the man they wanted to bury there had been, refused. He said that this cemetery was a sacred place and that the dead who dwelt did not deserve that company.

Odilo Globocnik was buried, without ceremony, in an open field, on the other side of the church walls.

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