On March 16, 1946, Rudolf Höss, the former commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, gave a statement while in British capture. In this confession, he stated that he “personally arranged on orders received from Himmler in May 1941 the gassing of two million persons”.
Copy of a letter dated October 27, 1943, from SS-Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik to SS-Gruppenführer von Herff of the SS Personnel Office on the personnel assigned to his office during his tenure as SS and Police Leader in Lublin. Globocnik reports a total staff of 405 men, including 92 personnel assigned “from the Führer’s Chancellery for the execution of Aktion Reinhard” – a reference to the Nazi operation responsible for the mass murder of Jews in occupied Poland through the extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The letter further notes that “Einsatz Reinhardt has been completely discontinued”.
On September 1, 1944, Swiss envoy Hans Frölicher sent a letter to Swiss Foreign Minister Marcel Pilet-Golaz reporting on news he had picked up in Berlin. According to information from the SD (Security Service), the fugitive head of the Reich Criminal Police Office and former chief of Einsatzgruppe B, Arthur Nebe, was “carrying a large amount of material with him – notably orders concerning the extermination of Jews, the shooting of hostages, and other punitive actions”. At the time, the SD feared he might hand this evidence over to the Allies. In reality, however, Nebe had not fled abroad – he was hiding near Berlin and was eventually captured by the Gestapo in January 1945. Footage of a mass gassing carried out by Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe B was discovered in his Berlin apartment after the war.
On July 5, 1944, Horst Wagner, head of Jewish affairs at the German Foreign Office, sent critical information in a letter to SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the Security Police and SD. Wagner shared an intercepted radio message between the British Embassy in Bern and the Foreign Office in London. According to the intercepted communication, a Hungarian official had reported that “nearly half of the total 800,000 Jews in Hungary have already been deported” and were “being sent to the death camp at Birkenau near Oswiecim in Upper Silesia.” The message urged immediate military action – “bombing of the railway lines from Hungary to Birkenau” and “strikes on the facilities of the death camps” to disrupt the extermination operations.
The Event Report USSR No. 101 was issued by the Secret State Police on December 19, 1941. According to the report, over 17,000 Jews were killed in a series of so-called “special actions” by Einsatzgruppe B in November – December 1941. For example, it reported that in Bobruisk “a total of 5,281 Jews of both sexes were shot.”
In late 1942, several thousand Poles were deported from Zamosc, Poland, following Nazi racial classifications that determined their fate. This process was part of Himmler’s directive on November 12, 1942, to make Zamosc the “first German settlement area in the Generalgouvernement”. Those deemed racially “inferior” were sent to Auschwitz, with a transport of 644 individuals departing Zamosc on December 10, 1942. On December 16, SS-Untersturmführer Heinrich Kinna from the migration central offic, wrote a report on the transport. He summarized his conversation with Auschwitz deputy commandant Hans Aumeier, who disclosed that “Imbeciles, idiots, cripples, and sick people must be removed from the camp promptly through liquidation to unburden the camp. This measure, however, encounters complications, as per RSHA orders, Poles, unlike Jews, must die a natural death.”
Radio message from the Gendarmerie District Ostrowo to the Gendarmerie post in Adelnau, dated May 16, 1942. The message reported that “six Jews escaped from a transport in Eichstätt”. Eichstätt, known in Polish as Dąbie, is the closest town to Kulmhof (Chełmno) extermination camp, approximately 6 km southeast of Chełmno nad Nerem.
Memo on a telephone call on 17 February 1943 between Topf engineers Karl Schultze and Fritz Sander, in which Sander noted that the “ventilation blower No. 450 for the gas cellar” (Gaskeller) of the crematorium 2 in Auschwitz- Birkenau could not be located. Schultze requested that the blower should be produced on an expedited basis and dispatched, as it “is urgently required” in Auschwitz.
On February 3, 1944, Eichmann’s office dispatched a letter, signed by the head of the RSHA, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The letter sought a decision regarding the handling of SS and police personnel implicated in the escape of Jewish prisoners from Sonderkommando 1005 at Fort Kauen (Kaunas in Lithuanian). Kaltenbrunner asked that “the matter be concluded within our jurisdiction”, keeping the the SS and police judiciary out of it to prevent “another group of persons gaining insight into the operation of the Sonderkommando”. Led by Paul Blobel, Sonderkommando 1005, was tasked with the responsibility of erasing evidence of Nazi atrocities in the East by exhuming and incinerating bodies from mass graves.
The memo dated April 5, 1943, from Adolf Windecker (Representative of the Foreign Office to the Reich Commissioner for the Eastern Territories) discusses the “treatment of Jews of foreign nationality in the Eastern Territories.” It specifies that all Jews confined to ghettos cannot be deported to other countries due to “significant security police concerns.” Windecker acknowledges the large-scale killings in Riga noting that “many thousands of the local and Reich German Jews in the Riga area have been shot over time.” As a result, he questions the feasibility of using any Jews for exchange purposes, as he fears that doing so would “be exploited abroad as evidence of the executions carried out here.”