1944

Documents dated 1944

Situation report dated January 13, 1944
Contemporary Source

1944-01-13 / Security Police Kovno Situation Report: “64 Laborers Deployed At Fort IX As Part Of Operation 1005 B Broke Out”

Situation report dated 13 January 1944 from the Commander of the Security Police and SD in Kovno. According to the report, on 25 December 1943, “64 laborers deployed at Fort IX as part of Operation 1005 B broke out”. Subsequent search operations resulted in the recapture of “37 of the escapees” of whom “5 were shot while fleeing”. The escape involved Jewish prisoners assigned to the Sonderkommando 1005 body-disposal site at Fort IX. The incident was later reported up the chain of command to Himmler, including discussion of how to deal with the guards held responsible.

Contemporary Source

1944-01-21 / Secrets at Kaunas Fort IX: “Told Me About Your Kommando 1005 B, Even Giving Me Concrete Figures”

A series of wartime letters from early 1944 shows how knowledge of Sonderkommando 1005 circulated within German military and SS circles. In this correspondence, Oberleutnant Willy Schell threatens SS-Obersturmführer Radif – who was at the time in custody in connection with the escape of Jewish prisoners from the Sonderkommando 1005 site at Fort IX in Kaunas- “to report to your superiors the careless manner in which you told me about your Kommando 1005 B, even giving me concrete figures.” Schell sought to pressure Radif into retracting his testimony that Schell had disclosed an unspecified incident involving homosexual conduct. In his reply, the Commander of the Security Police in Kaunas stated that “I will in any case hold SS-Obersturmführer Radif accountable in this matter, although I would note that the confidential matter you refer to has long been generally known and has even been described in detail in illegal Lithuanian propaganda leaflets”. The defensive tone of the response – the Security Police refrained from reporting Schell to the legal authorities as this “could have unforeseeable consequences” – underscores the sensitivity of the information. So what makes these documents particularly interesting is the tension they reveal: on the one hand, Sonderkommando 1005 was an operation surrounded by extreme secrecy; on the other, fragments of its purpose – exhumation and destruction of bodies – were clearly leaking beyond strictly controlled channels.

Report dated Februay 9, 1944
Contemporary Source

1944-02-09 Report About Nazi Extermination Methods: Insights From an SD Defector

In February 1944, Swiss intelligence received one 106-page report by a defector (agent code D 143) from Nazi Germany’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS’s intelligence branch. Dated 9 February 1944, this report offers an insider’s view of the internal disintegration, moral collapse, and infighting that plagued the Nazi foreign intelligence service, known as Amt VI. The SD defector described various Nazis’ extermination methods, experiments, and plans. He reveals that the commandos in the East adopted “the GPU method of a shot to the back of the neck” which was “widely used” with “in total, up to 100,000” victims. He also described the use of homicidal gas vans, known as “Nebe gas vans” after Arthur Nebe, the former head of Einsatzgruppe B and chief of the Criminal Technical Institute. According to the report: “rear compartment was sealed; 20 cm thick oak walls lined with sheet metal. Engine in front, from where exhaust gases are directed into the interior of the truck through a pipe.” The SD man noted that within Einsatzkommandos, most personnel were “completely drunk,” with as many as 40% suffering nervous breakdowns. He recalled that in in Summer 1943, Einsatzgruppe C chief Max Thomas informed him that “that approximately 6,000,000 people (Russians and Jews) had been disposed of”.

Letter dated September 5,1944 on the Nazi's Jewish skeleton collection
Contemporary Source

1944-09-05 / The Nazi’s Jewish Skeleton Collection: Dissolution

In correspondence dated September 5, 1944 SS-Standartenführer Wolfram Sievers discusses the fate of Nazi’s “Jewish skeleton collection” housed in Strasbourg’s anatomy institute. As Allied forces advanced, Sievers requested a decision from the Personal Staff of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on whether to preserve or “dissolve” the collection. He noted to Rudolf Brandt that one “can proceed with defleshing the bodies, thereby rendering them unrecognizable, but this would make much of the overall work pointless and result in a major scientific loss for this unique collection”. By October 1944, SS-Hauptsturmführer Bruno Beger claimed to Brandt that the collection had been “completely dissolved”.

1944 Swiss Report: Arthur Nebe Fled with Orders for Extermination and Hostage Shootings
Contemporary Source

1944-09-01 Swiss Report: SD Sources Claim Former Chief of Einsatzgruppe B Arthur Nebe Fled with “orders concerning the extermination of Jews”

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.

intercepted British messages on Hungarian Jews deportations of Letter of July 5, 1944
Contemporary Source

1944-07-05 Intercepted Warnings: Nazi Letter Forwards Report on the Extermination of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau

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.

Letter dated February 3, 1944
Contemporary Source

1944-02-03 Eichmann’s Letter to Himmler on Sonderkommando 1005 at Fort Kauen: “Avoid Insight into the Sonderkommando’s Operation”

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.

Greiser to Pohl of February 14, 1944 on liqidation of Ghetto Lodz by means of Sonderkommando Bothmann
Contemporary Source

1944-02-14 Greiser Informs Pohl That Reduction of the Getto Łódź “Will Be Carried Out by the Sonderkommando of SS-Hauptsturmführer Bothmann”

Letter dated February 14, 1944, regarding the Nazi administration’s plans for the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt (Łódź) ghetto, one of the largest Jewish ghettos in occupied Poland. In this document, Reich Governor of the Warthegau, Arthur Greiser, informs Oswald Pohl, head of the SS Administrative Main Office (SS-WVHA), that the ghetto’s population “will be reduced to a minimum”. Greiser specifies that the “reduction will be carried out by the Sonderkommando of SS-Hauptsturmführer Bothmann,” who will be “withdrawn from his mission in Croatia and made available to the Gau Wartheland again”.

D5 - Letter of 30 December 1944 on Kaltenbrunner's proposal to Himmler to kill with carbon monoxide
Contemporary Source

1944-12-30 Kaltenbrunner’s Execution Proposal to Himmler: “Carbon Monoxide Introduced Via an Apparatus Operated From the Driver’s Seat”

After the shooting of Generalleutnant Fritz von Brodowski while in Allied captivity on 28 October 1944, the Nazis retaliated by executing French Major General Gustave Mesny “while attempting to escape” on 19 January 1945. In a letter dated 30 December 1944, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the Security Police, officially proposed to Himmler also the option that “carbon monoxide be introduced into the sealed rear compartment of the vehicle via an apparatus operated from the driver’s seat”.

Record of May 5, 1944
Contemporary Source

1944-05-05 The Feldscher Aktion Reveals the Decimation of Jewish Children in the Nazi-occupied East

The Feldscher Aktion, named after Swiss diplomat Peter Anton Feldscher, represented a significant diplomatic effort by the British government during World War II to secure the emigration of 5,000 Jewish individuals, primarily children, from Nazi-controlled territories. In a memo dated May 5, 1944, Eberhard von Thadden, the Jewish Affairs Referent of the German Foreign Office, noted that “the Reich Security Main Office confidentially communicated that the 5,000 Jewish children eligible for emigration were now only available in the Litzmannstadt ghetto. However, this ghetto would soon be dissolved by order of the Reichsführer-SS.”

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