During preparations for Barbarossa, Hitler had secretly ordered Heinrich Himmler to exterminate the Jews of the Soviet Union. As the Wehrmacht rolled across Soviet territory, four Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units followed closely behind. Jews were rounded up and transported to isolated sites-usually located near antitank ditches, abandoned quarries, or deep ravines-where they were murdered by machine-gun fire and hastily buried in mass graves.
“Erich Radek was well aware of the activities of the Einsatzgruppen units in the Reichskommissariat,” Rivlin said. “It was, after all, his turf. And he was no bureaucratic desk murderer. By all accounts, Radek actually enjoyed watching Jews being murdered by the thousands. But his most significant contribution to the Shoah still lay ahead.”
“What was that?”
“You have the answer to that question in your pocket. It’s engraved on the inside of that ring you took from the house in Upper Austria.”
Gabriel dug the ring from his pocket and read the inscription:1005, well done, Heinrich.
“I suspect that Heinrich is none other than Heinrich Müller, the chief of the Gestapo. But for our purposes, the most important information contained in the inscription are those four numbers at the beginning: one, zero, zero, five.”
“What do they mean?”
Rivlin opened the second file. It was labeled: AKTION1005.
IT BEGAN, oddly enough, with a complaint from the neighbors.
Early in 1942, spring runoff exposed a series of mass graves in the Warthegau district of western Poland along the Ner River. Thousands of corpses floated to the surface, and a horrible stench spread for miles around the site. A German living nearby sent an anonymous letter to the Foreign Office in Berlin complaining about the situation. Alarm bells sounded. The graves contained the remains of thousands of Jews murdered by the mobile gas vans then being used at the Chelmno extermination camp. The Final Solution, Nazi Germany’s most closely guarded secret, was in danger of being exposed by snowmelt.
The first reports of the mass killings of Jews had already begun reaching the outside world, thanks to a Soviet diplomatic cable that alerted the Allies to the horrors being carried out by German forces on Polish and Soviet soil. Martin Luther, who handled “Jewish affairs” on behalf of the German Foreign Office, knew that the exposed graves near Chelmno represented a serious threat to the secrecy of the Final Solution. He forwarded a copy of the anonymous letter to Heinrich Müller of the Gestapo and requested immediate action.
Rivlin had a copy of Müller’s response to Martin Luther. He laid it on the table, turned it so Gabriel could see, and pointed at the relevant passage:
The anonymous letter sent to the Foreign Office concerning the apparent solution of the Jewish question in the Warthegau district, which was submitted by you to me on 6 February 1942, I immediately transmitted for proper treatment. The results will be forthcoming in due course. In a place where wood is chopped, splinters must fall, and there is no avoiding this.
Rivlin pointed to the citations in the upper left-hand corner of the memo:IV B4 43/42 gRs [1005].
“Adolf Eichmann almost certainly received a copy of Müller’s response to Martin Luther. You see, Eichmann’s department of the Reich Security Main Office appears in the address line. The numbers ‘43/42’ represent the date: the forty-third day of 1942, or February twenty-eighth. The initialsg-R-s signify that the matter is Geheime Reichssache, a top-secret Reich matter. And here, in brackets at the end of the line, are the four numbers that would eventually be used as the code name for the top-secret Aktion, one, zero, zero, five.”
Rivlin returned the memo to the file.
“Shortly after Müller sent that letter to Martin Luther, Erich Radek was relieved of his command in the Ukraine and transferred back to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin. He was assigned to Eichmann’s department and embarked on a period of intense study and planning. You see, concealing the greatest case of mass murder in history was no small undertaking. In June, he returned to the east, operating under Müller’s direct authority, and went to work.”
Radek established the headquarters of his Sonderkommando 1005 in the Polish city of Lodz, about fifty miles southeast of the Chelmno death camp. The exact address was Geheime Reichssache and unknown except to a few senior SS figures. All correspondence was routed through Eichmann’s department in Berlin.
Radek settled on cremation as the most effective method of disposing of the bodies. Burning had been attempted before, usually with flamethrowers, but with unsatisfactory results. Radek put his engineering training to good use, devising a method of burning corpses two thousand at a time in towering aerodynamic pyres. Thick wooden beams, twenty-three to twenty-seven feet in length, were soaked in petrol and placed atop cement blocks. The corpses were layered between the beams-bodies, beams, bodies, beams, bodies… Petrol-soaked kindling was placed at the base of the structure and set ablaze. When the fire died down, the charred bones would be crushed by heavy machinery and dispersed.
The dirty work was done by Jewish slave laborers. Radek organized the Jews into three teams, one team to open the burial pits, a second to carry the corpses from the pits to the pyre, and a third to sift the ashes for bones and valuables. At the conclusion of each operation, the terrain was leveled and replanted to conceal what had taken place there. Then the slaves were murdered and disposed of. In that way the secrecy of Aktion 1005 was preserved.
When work was completed at Chelmno, Radek and his Sonderkommando 1005 headed to Auschwitz to clean out the rapidly filling burial pits there. By the end of the summer of 1942, serious contamination and health problems had arisen at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Wells near the camps, which supplied drinking water to guards and nearby Wehrmacht units, had been contaminated by the proximity of the mass graves. In some cases, the thin layer of covering soil had burst open, and noxious odors were spewing into the air. At Treblinka, the SS and Ukrainian murderers hadn’t even bothered to bury all the bodies. On the day camp commandant Franz Stangl arrived to take up his post, it was possible to smell Treblinka from twenty miles away. Bodies littered the road to the camp, and piles of putrefying bodies greeted him on the rail platform. Stangl complained that he couldn’t start work at Treblinka until someone cleaned up the mess. Radek ordered the burial pits to be opened and the bodies burned.
In the spring of 1943, the advance of the Red Army compelled Radek to turn his attention from the extermination camps of Poland to the killing sites farther east, in occupied Soviet territory. Soon he was back on his home turf in the Ukraine. Radek knew where the bodies were buried, quite literally, because two years earlier he had coordinated the operations of the Einsatzgruppen killing squads. In late summer, the Sonderkommando 1005 moved from the Ukraine to Byelorussia, and by September, it was active in the Baltic states of Lithuania and Latvia, where entire Jewish populations had been wiped out.
Rivlin closed the file and pushed it away in disgust.
“We’ll never know how many bodies Radek and his men disposed of. The crime was far too enormous to conceal completely, but Aktion 1005 managed to efface much of the evidence and make it virtually impossible after the war to arrive at an accurate estimate of the dead. So thorough was Radek’s work that, in some cases, the Polish and Soviet commissions investigating the Shoah could findno traces of the mass graves. At Babi Yar, Radek’s cleanup was so complete that, after the war, the Soviets were able to turn it into a park. And now, unfortunately, the lack of physical remains of the dead has given inspiration to the lunatic fringe who claim the Holocaust never happened. Radek’s actions haunt us to this day.”