Sonderkommando 1005. The men who burned the bodies.

The word Holocaust comes from a Greek word meaning complete destruction by fire. This was the fate that the National Socialists had for their enemies during WW2 and it is fitting that this term should have been given to what happened to their victims. However initially the Nazis buried those that they killed, a change of policy occurred in 1942 which is the subject of this presentation. Three things occurred on 7 December 1941 which brought about this change. The first was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which following Hitler’s declaration of war against the Soviet Union on 11 December 1941 turned a European conflict into a world war. It is also when the Soviet offensive in front of Moscow gathered steam and began to push German forces away from Moscow resulting in capturing thousands of square kilometres of land formerly occupied by them. Finally, in a small town in Poland, Koło, the Jewish population was gathered together, locked up in the synagogue and transported in groups to the death camp at Chełmno nad Nerem where they were gassed in a lorry built for the purpose. This is Chełmno nad Nerem today, and this camp started to mass murder people only four days before Hitler gathered together his cronies in Berlin on 12 December 1941 to tell them of his plans to kill all the Jews in Europe. On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. In the tracks of the advancing armies followed Einsatzgruppen, murder squads who were mass killing what they termed Jews and communists. The future killers had come together here at Pretsch on the Elbe in the Spring of 1941. They were billeted on the Dueben Heath and housed Einsatzkommando 4a, part of Einsatzgruppe C, following behind the Sixth Army, part of Army Group South. It was commanded by Colonel Paul Blobel. Blobel was one of those responsible for the massacre which took place here at Babi Yar in Kiev on 29 and 30 September 1941 when 33,771 Jews from that city and the area around it were murdered by mass shooting. Some time in the autumn of 1941, Blobel passed Babi Yar and noted small movements in the ground, caused probably from the decomposition of the corpses and made a joke about it being from ‘his Jews’. If nothing else, this showed that burying the victims would not stop them from bearing testimony. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, evidence of mass killings by Stalin came to light. The Stalinist regime was responsible for the killing of huge numbers of Soviet citizens, not just the millions who had been deliberately left to starve, or died of starvation related illnesses but also hundreds of thousands who had been shot, some in mass killings. At times, the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, did not have the time to evacuate its prisoners so it killed them instead as happened in Soviet occupied Lwów. In other places the crimes discovered by the Germans went back to the 1930s. As the Germans discovered communist crime sites, they did not want their own criminal activity to come to light, particularly as with the Soviets advancing, the US now in the war and Hitler’s order of 12 December 1941 to murder all the Jews in Europe. On 13 January 1942, Paul Blobel was relieved as commanding office of Einsatzkommando 4a, possibly because of his alcoholism although some of the commanding officers of the killing squads were rotated as part of their duties. In Blobel’s case, he probably was not rotated as according to his account at his trial, he was initially unemployed but it seems as though he met the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) Reinhard Heydrich who then passed him onto Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo. It was Müller who told him that he was to destroy the corpses of the murder victims, not just Jews but all victims. This is the beginning of Sonderkommando 1005. Blobel and his driver Julius Bauer went to Łódź and from there to the death camp at Chełmno nad Nerem. Chełmno was the first death camp and was followed by others in occupied Poland, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz. The village of Chełmno has not changed a great deal since those times. Many of the houses were used by the SS and their staff but Blobel chose not to use one of them, instead travelling from Łódź. He brought two men from Einsatzkommando 4a, Franz Halle and Wilhelm Tempel, as assistants. The aim of this was to find ways of exhuming and then burning the remains of murder victims. Various methods were tried. During WW1, Blobel had seen flamethrowers in action and this was tried out. In this decrypted message of 11 July 1942 to the SS Cavalry Brigade we can see his shopping list, and first on that list is a flamethrower.