In February 1943, Oswald Pohl communicated Himmler that the plans for 1944 were to increase production of rubber from kok-sagyz to 8,000 ton, corresponding to an area under cultivation of about 100,000 hectares.[71] This was far from the 400,000 hectares Hitler bragged about in 1941. Things would only tend to get worse, with the Third Reich shrinking at fast pace after the Soviet counterattack and the increasing difficulty of finding indigenous labor. This was apparent in one of the largest plantations directly managed by the Cultivation and Trials Department of Himmler’s Rubber Plant Group of the Four-Year Plan, the Jagielnica estate in the district of Czortkcow in Galicia. About 300 Jewish camp inmates were employed to cultivate its 1,570 hectares in 1942–43. But after repeated demands to increase the number of forced laborers to 1,500 by the SS estate managers trying to pressure the authorities of the General Government to dispense some of their Jewish inmates, this was refused by a clear lack of local manpower.[72] These rivalries and difficulties in coordinating among local government, the SS, and Sauckel’s labor roundups, are well known among historians of Nazi occupation of the east. In spite of constant mentioning of efficiency by the perpetrators of the Holocaust, colonial machines tend in fact to be messy. That was also the case of one of the central elements of the entire system of rubber production—Auschwitz.
The first large scale planning for Auschwitz in Himmler’s grand scheme of the settlement of the east was to convert the area into a large experimental estate providing German settlers with training and “house nurseries, for the production of seed corn, garden seeds, berries, fruits,… and livestock (horses, pigs, cattle, hens).”[73] Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commandant appointed in May 1940, couldn’t be more enthusiastic about the prospectus of fully transforming his modest camp, destined until then to be no more than a regional prison for recalcitrant Poles waiting to be sent west as slave laborers. This was also his opportunity to finally fulfill his dream of having his own manor. Here is how Höss described his visit to the Reichsführer SS in November 1940: “Himmler became very lively and began planning, issuing one directive after another, and made notes about all the things that needed to be done in the estates around Auschwitz…. Certainly there were enough workers available. Every necessary agricultural experiment was to be tried there. Huge laboratories and plant cultivation departments had to be built…. The marshlands were to be drained and developed…. He continued with his agricultural planning even down to the smallest detail.”[74] The projected 10,000 inmates of the camp were to serve first and foremost the works of establishing this gigantic agricultural experiment station.
Himmler’s pastoral dreams for Auschwitz would radically change when IG Farben expressed interest for building in the area a gigantic chemical plant for the manufacture of synthetic fuel and rubber (buna).[75] The town of Auschwitz would still be a model settlement, but now inhabited by German engineers, clerks, and specialized workers recruited to a factory built on the comparative advantages of the place: a railway intersection, with abundant water sources, and offering a cheap labor force provided by the mass of prisoners managed by Himmler’s SS. In subsequent years a continuous stream of non-Jewish and Jewish laborers would be sent to Auschwitz to work in the chemical factory under horrible conditions—the death toll was of about 35,000 workers—although the large majority of the Jews that arrived from 1942 on went directly to the gas chambers. By then, most of the killing by the Nazis of Soviet and Polish Jews had already occurred (through shooting or gassing on site across occupied eastern Europe), and Auschwitz would mainly receive Jews from France, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Greece, and Hungary, deported not as labor force but to be exterminated. Auschwitz had thus the double nature of labor and death camp, setting it apart from most other camps that were either dedicated to one or the other. Its total death figures are around 1.1 million, including about a million Jews.[76]
The scale of the mass killing at Auschwitz-Birkenau justifiably diverted historians’ attention from the agricultural dimensions of the place. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that the original plan for the conversion of the area into an exemplary rural area was not put aside when it also became an industrial site and an extermination camp. During the entire lifetime of the camp, inmates, mainly women, with total lack of machines and under the hardest imaginable conditions, secured riverbanks, dredged fishponds, dug drainage ditches, and cleared tree stumps in cultivation fields. The violence involved was unbearable. Rebellions were suppressed by means of mass executions. This book doesn’t have anything to add to the descriptions of forced labor and death at Auschwitz. But it does want to emphasize that the agricultural dimension is a crucial one to understand the nature of the place and its role in the Nazi empire. For Zygmunt Bauman, the Nazi modernist state assumed the role of the gardener, cutting here, trimming there, and cleansing the place of menacing pests, with people in place of plants.[77] But agriculture was more than just a metaphor; it embodied the Nazi empire, built on mass killing and over exploitation of “inferior races.” The ethnic cleansing of eastern Europe was a first step in the building of Nazi alternative modernity to which German rural settlements were central. Auschwitz not only made space for German settlers by eliminating Jewish populations in its gas chambers; it also provided the technological infrastructure for German expansion in its role as “Agricultural Experiment Station for the East.”[78]
As Mussolini, Hitler also insisted that his empire was different from previous ones due to its insistence on settlement and Lebensraum. But the main agriculture project undertaken at Auschwitz, the cultivation of kok-sagyz, wasn’t directed at German settlers. In addition, it relied on underpaid or forced indigenous labor, an arrangement common to all other European empires, fascist Italy included, as we just saw. After Himmler’s first visit to Auschwitz in March 1941, he ordered the further extension of the camp, emptying seven villages of Polish inhabitants, Rajsko among them. The 3,800 hectares of this sub-camp (Nebenlager) would include, besides the SS Hygiene Institute, a poultry farm, a facility for animal breeding for biomedical research, a pond for fish breeding, a vegetable garden, an orchard, and a plant-breeding unit. In the beginning, inmates would walk back and forth daily the 3 kilometers from Rajsko to Auschwitz main camp, but in June 1943 two new barracks were built to house the female workers of the gardening and plant-breeding commandos. Although these had no running water, the conditions were much better than in Birkenau, with easy access to fresh food and, decisively, without the physical punishments that reigned in the main camp. Discipline among the detainees was in fact enforced by menacing transfers to Birkenau.[79]
73
Robert Jan Van Pelt and Debórah Dwork,
75
On the creation and evolution of the Auschwitz concentration camp, see Pelt and Dwork,
78
To be more precise, much of the ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union was perpetrated in place. Auschwitz assumed a more important role in eliminating Jews from other parts of Europe (France, Belgium, Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Hungary). Nonetheless, Polish Jews, together with Hungarian Jews, accounted for the majority of Jewish victims in Auschwitz. According to Snyder (