The German state ran an industrial-scale recovery operation on the bodies of the people the SS killed. The hair was shorn from the women’s heads on arrival at the death camps. The gold and silver teeth were extracted from the corpses by Sonderkommando dental workers in the gas chamber undressing rooms or, where time permitted, after the bodies had been removed from the chambers. The wedding rings, watches and any concealed valuables were collected separately. The wedding clothes were sorted at the Kanada warehouses. The eyeglasses, the prosthetic limbs, the dentures, the prayer shawls, the children’s shoes, were all sorted, packed and shipped. None of this was incidental. It was administered by named SS officers reporting to named offices in Berlin, with separate trains, separate accounting and separate Reichsbank deposit accounts.
The hair was sheared from the women’s heads in the changing rooms of the gas chambers in the moments before the doors were closed. The German firm Alex Zink AG in Roth in Bavaria contracted with the SS Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt, the SS economic and administrative office in Berlin, to receive the hair, process it through the firm’s degreasing and felt-making operations, and turn it into industrial felt for thermal insulation, ship matting, slipper soles and as a substitute for animal hair in upholstery. The contracts and the railway shipping records survive. The Soviet army found around seven tons of human hair, packaged and labelled, in the Kanada warehouses at Auschwitz at liberation in January 1945. The hair was sent to the State Forensic Institute in Kraków, where postwar testing confirmed traces of Zyklon B residue. A portion of the hair is now displayed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Some descendants of the murdered have asked for the displays to be discontinued and the hair buried; the museum has held the line on display, on the argument that the visitors need to see what was done.
The dental gold was extracted from the corpses by Sonderkommando workers in the gas chambers. The corpses were laid out on the floor of the chamber after the doors were opened and the gas vented. Dental workers, equipped with pliers, opened the mouths and extracted teeth that contained gold, silver, platinum or other valuable fillings or crowns. The teeth were dropped into buckets, washed with hydrochloric acid in the dental block to remove the soft tissue, and the metal was melted into ingots in the camp dental laboratory. The ingots were stamped with the camp identifier and shipped, by registered post and special train, to the Reichsbank in Berlin. The Reichsbank credited the value to a special account in the name of Max Heiliger, an SS-administered cover name. The Heiliger account, opened in 1942, received deposits from all the death camps and from the Aktion Reinhard offices in occupied Poland. The total value across the war is estimated at around six billion present-day United States dollars at gold prices. The gold ingots were re-smelted by the Reichsbank into standard kilo bars, which were then traded in the international market through the Bank for International Settlements in Basel and through the central banks of the neutral countries, in particular Sweden and Switzerland.
The wedding rings, watches and other valuables collected at the camps were sent through the Aktion Reinhard finance office, run by SS-Sturmbannführer Bruno Melmer at Globocnik’s Lublin headquarters until autumn 1943, and from there to the Reichsbank. The Melmer shipments were the most carefully recorded part of the looting. The SS receipts, the Reichsbank counter-receipts, and the smelting tickets all survive in the captured German records, and have been the basis of the postwar Swiss banks settlement and the various other gold restitution arrangements.
The Tripartite Gold Commission, established by the United States, Britain and France in 1946, set out to identify the looted gold in the postwar central bank holdings of the neutral countries and to redistribute it to the countries from which it had been stolen. The Commission’s work continued until 1998, when the last claims were settled. The Bergier Commission of the Swiss government, which reported in 2002, established that the Swiss National Bank had received around three hundred and forty million dollars in looted gold from the Reichsbank during the war, including the Melmer shipments, and that Swiss commercial banks had handled hundreds of millions of dollars in dormant Jewish accounts whose owners had been murdered. The Swiss banks paid one and a quarter billion dollars in settlement of class action lawsuits in 1998. The work has not closed every account. It has closed enough of them to put the broad outlines of the gold and valuables operation beyond serious dispute.
The eyeglasses, the prosthetic limbs and the dentures were sent to German hospitals and military medical depots. The clothes from the camp warehouses were redistributed to the Volksdeutsche resettlers in occupied Poland, to bombed-out German civilians, and to Wehrmacht units. The Reich Ministry of Economics ran the redistribution. The recipients in most cases knew or suspected the source. Postwar West German civilians who had received the clothes in the bomb-aid distributions of 1942, 1944 testified after the war that the items had often arrived with names sewn in the linings, with photographs in the pockets, and on a small number of occasions with letters. The state had not removed every trace.
See also
- The Kanada Warehouses at Auschwitz
- The Sonderkommando
- Switzerland
- Sweden
- Hidden Valuables and Body Searches
- Fuhrermuseum Project
- The Numbers, How Six Million is Calculated
Sources
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, permanent exhibits and inventory of the Kanada find of January 1945
- Sidney Zabludoff, Movements of Nazi Gold, Yad Vashem Studies, 1997
- Independent Commission of Experts: Switzerland, Second World War, Bergier Commission, final report, 2002
- Tripartite Gold Commission archives, United Kingdom, Public Record Office
- Reichsbank Heiliger and Melmer account records, captured German documents, Bundesarchiv Berlin
- Stuart Eizenstat, Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II, PublicAffairs, 2003