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experience-he had been commandant at Belzec before. He saw what was
going on-that horror-and he immediately gave orders to stop the transports
so they could catch up with the work.
"The bodies were piled up-like that-and we couldn't get rid of them.
There was maybe three feet of blood and excrement. Nobody was willing to
clean up the filth. Even the Jews preferred to be shot. They felt bad about
having to bury their people like that. Finally they brought some kind oflong
belts and cleaned up the filth. The Jews did it together with the SS. Those
were orders. In this instance, the SS men gave a hand, too.
"Treblinka," Suchomel says modestly, "was just a primitive production
line, but it was efficient. Remember what I said: primitive but efficient. You
can't compare it to Auschwitz. Auschwitz was a factory. But Treblinka also
worked well."
The "dirty work" was done by Jews. Filip Muller, a Czech Jew, a
member of the Sonderkommando who survived five "selections" in
Auschwitz, describes how a "production fuilure" could hold up the whole pro–
cess for some time: In one instance, inexperienced workers allowed the
ventilation pump of the crematoria to get overheated, and it was necessary
to revert to improvised burial in the ground for a while. "Every malfunction
could have saved many people. But there were not many malfunctions.
They taught us to work very quickly and expertly."
The historian Raul Hilberg says in the ftIm that the Germans made
very few innovations. They did invent the gas chambers. That was some–
thing new. But almost all the rest was copied from historical precedents: The
exclusion ofJews from certain jobs, the ban on intermarriage, the ban on
Christian women under the age offorty-five working in Jewish households,
the yellow patch with the Star of David, the isolation of the Jews in ghettos.
All these had been tried before, by religious and secular authorities during the
nearly two thousand years of Christianity. There was a large pool of accu–
mulated knowledge, which the Nazis merely applied with precision and on a
large scale. Most of the laws and regulations enacted by the Third Reich, at
least until 1939, but even after that, were not original. The image of the Jew
in Nazi propaganda was copied from the image of the Jew at the time of
Martin Luther. The Nazis became original and creative only at the stage of
the "final solution." Here they had to invent, because they had no appropri–
ate precedents.
Since the fourth century, continues Hilberg, Jew-hatred has progressed
in stages:
1.
You are forbidden to live in our midst as Jews (result: ghettos).
2. You are forbidden to live among us (result: expulsion). 3. You are forbid–
den to live altogether (result: total annihilation).
Stage Three represented the Nazi innovation. The bureaucracy was
