SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höß

But what then is the correct timeline? Specifically, I am curious to know the following:

1) When did Himmler receive orders to implement The Final Solution?
2) When did the Himmler-Hoess meeting in Berlin take place?
3) When did the Eichmann-Hoess meeting at Auschwitz take place?
4) When did Hoess visit Treblinka?

And then for context,

5) When were the initial plans launched for the construction of the four Birkenau crematoria?
6) When was Zyklon B first used for executions at Auschwitz?

On 12 December 1941 the 'destruction of the Jewish race in Europe' was announced by Hitler to his inner circle, Himmler was present. Himmler met with Hitler separately that month, on 18 December 1941 he wrote down for one meeting 'Jewish question/extirpate as partisans' (als Partisanen auszurotten). He also met with the euthanasia program leadership and they sent extra T4 personel to Globocnik in Lublin (i.e. for Belzec, which began operations in March 1942). Other Nazi leaders such as Hans Frank and Alfred Rosenberg came away from the meeting with Hitler talking about the liquidation of the Jews or a decision relating to the Jews.

One could keep to a conspiratorial interpretation whereby Hitler had discussed the Final Solution with Himmler earlier, Himmler then initiating Heydrich, who initiated Eichmann, and initiating Hoess personally, while Himmler and Heydrich then initiated the Einsatzgruppen and SS leadership in the occupied Soviet territories. The 12.12.41 meeting would then be a political announcement to the wider inner circle of the political leadership of the Third Reich.

But the only two sources claiming there was a back-channels initiation are Hoess and Eichmann, both Obersturmbannfuehrer and both so closely involved or identified with the FS that they have good reasons to backdate this.

Eichmann's statements also vary in their dating, with a tendency to talk of December 1941 being dragged back to September 1941. This was because he realised there was damning documentary evidence from autumn 1941 where he had 'suggested shooting' Serbian Jews. Hoess stuck to summer/June 1941 consistently, but his dating is clearly wrong.

SS planning in autumn 1941 was oriented further east, to prepare sites that were never used like Mogilev in eastern Belarus, and to build up camps near ghettos to which Jews from the Reich were deported in autumn/winter 1941, like Salaspils near Riga.

The two main initiatives in autumn 1941 for extermination through gas were in central Poland: Chelmno is prepared from October 1941 and begins operating in December 1941 as a local initiative within the Warthegau.

Globocnik, the SS leader in Lublin, had proposals for ethnic reordering for the Lublin district in October, and the construction of Belzec began at the start of November 1941. One can document Belzec as a site from Trawniki personnel files, there are some present in 1941, this was clearly a testing ground or pilot project compared to what Aktion Reinhard became.

That suggests that ideas were circulating in autumn 1941 but not yet a full plan, while there is simply no evidence connecting Auschwitz-Birkenau to the FS in 1941, other than Hoess's account.

Many other SS officers within the RSHA - Wisliceny, Novak, Mildner - identified December 1941 as the turning point, having picked up on Hitler's prophecy and correlated this with the start of the true world war plus the start of more serious actions. Others like Jeckeln and Heuser knew of Wannsee and saw this as the start of the Europe-wide FS. The consensus was for the turn of 1941/2 and not earlier like Hoess and Eichmann claimed, regarding non-Soviet Jews.



There is no meeting recorded in Himmler's Dienstkalender between Himmler and Hoess in Berlin at any time in 1941/2. However, the meeting record was maintained by Himmler's adjutant, and there are some other off the books meetings known. Hoess's account says he met Himmler without anyone else present.

There is no other source confirming this meeting, so Hoess could have made it up to make himself look like the recipient of serious orders, or conflated it with meetings at Himmler's visit to Auschwitz in July 1942.

The probable date for the inclusion of Auschwitz in the Final Solution in the sense it was understood at the time of Wannsee was the end of January 1942, after Wannsee, and after the order from Himmler to Gluecks of 26 January 1942 ordering him to prepare the KZs to accommodate 150,000 "Jews from the Reich". This didn't happen - Jews from the Reich were sent to 'transit ghettos' in the Lublin district in March 1942.

However, Jews from Slovakia and France were directed to Auschwitz from March 1942, the camp knew this would include women prisoners, so set up a women's section, with documents showing contacts with Ravensbrueck for this purpose at the start of March, weeks before the first arrivals. These Jews were used as forced labourers to build up Birkenau and the camp complex, and most were dead by the summer from overwork - fitting the Wannsee protocol prescription. None were unfit or selected.

The first selections took place outside the camp among Jews from the surrounding Upper East Silesia province, who are sent directly to be killed in May 1942 in the 'Bunkers' of Birkenau. One can see this as possibly a local initiative within Silesia.

Selections on arrival did not begin until July 1942, after it was firmly decided in June 1942 to deport west European Jews in larger numbers to Auschwitz.

The first half of 1942 was not a phase when more than 10s of 1000s of Jews were sent to Auschwitz for either labour or extermination. The second half of 1942 is when the deportations ramp up.

Coordinating the deportations together with working out what to do with deportees would take time to harmonise.

The same considerations incidentally also apply if one is to claim the unfit Jews deported to Auschwitz were resettled onwards rather than killed on arrival.



Eichmann's testimonies suggest he first visited Auschwitz in March 1942, which actually fits with Hoess being given a warning order in January 1942, as his account says this was some weeks after the meeting with Himmler.

Note that Hoess mentioned attending a meeting with RSHA officials in November 1941 that was misdated from August 1942 - his presence at the Aug 42 RSHA meeting is documented, there were no big meetings in Nov 1941 of Eichmann's representatives, they had met in Oct 1941 but no indication that the KZs, Auschwitz or Hoess were involved at that time.



Hoess twice elsewhere in his memoirs says March 1943, confirming this in his interview with Goldensohn at Nuremberg. Hoess also describes mass cremations taking place during his visit to Treblinka as well as the existence of 10 gas chambers, these two details, which were not widely reported in Germany in 1945-46, point to a visit date in spring 1943 and not earlier.

The 1941 visit was a fabrication by Hoess, likely in order to make him look like a follower and obeyer of orders rather than someone whose actions might have brought the whole mess down on his camp. Treblinka I the labour camp did not exist until November 1941, Treblinka II began being constructed in spring 1942 and was operational only from July 1942.



This is another case where Hoess's memoirs are unreliable. He recounts a documented visit by Himmler to Auschwitz in March 1941 and says Himmler ordered the construction of a POW camp - i.e. Birkenau. In fact this was ordered in September 1941, six months later.

Plans for Krematorium II were drawn up in October 1941 with 15 muffles scaled up to the 125-150,000 prisoner capacity projected. The original design meant it would be useful for executions but not for mass gassings, the blueprints notoriously changed in 1942 for this.

Kremas III-V were only planned in August 1942, following Himmler's inspection of July 17-18 1942, when the construction office and camp staff realised they needed much, much more cremation capacity. The size of the eventual projected prisoner population had not really changed drastically - there was some talk of 200,000 prisoners briefly, but the order of magnitude had definitely not changed or quadrupled. The urgency of installing extra crematoria was linked to the needs of the 'special actions' (Sonderaktionen) or 'special action (Sonderaktion) in several documents from August-October 1942.

One might add that if the urgency was due to the typhus epidemic, then finishing the construction of the central sauna and other hygienic facilities would have been the priority, not accelerating the construction of crematoria. The central sauna wasn't finished until about six months after the crematoria began to come online, in autumn 1943. By spring 1944 Birkenau was finally tidied up enough to reduce the death rate among the working prisoners considerably - Auschwitz main camp already managed to reduce the death rate in 1943.



September 1941, in the first gassing of Soviet prisoners of war condemned under RSHA Einsatzbefehl Nr 8 of 17 July 1941, to which the camp staff added sick KZ inmates, i.e. Poles, in Block 11.

There is btw no doubt about Einsatzbefehl Nr 8 or the involvement of Auschwitz in executions of Soviet POWs. A RSHA document from September 1941 talks about ensuring there were sufficient trucks to bring POWs to Auschwitz. Almost every single KZ for men in existence in 1941 was used as an execution site for this 'extended commissar order' (whose target groups included 'all Jews' found among the Soviet POWs being screened in the POW camps in the Reich and occupied territories) was involved.

Einsatzbefehl Nr 8 was followed by a separate order to hand over up to 150,000 Soviet POWs for labour to the SS and KZ system, Auschwitz received about 12,000 such prisoners and up to 3000 sent for execution so unregistered:
www.auschwitz.org/en/history/cat ... viet-pows/

The Polish camp underground reported on the use of gas on Soviet POWs in autumn 1941, well before there were any significant number of Jews in the camp or any intentions to deport Jews there; the reports followed numerous confirmations of gassings in a euthanasia context in Germany and Poland in 1939-41.

This is the part deniers don't want to face up to: the Nazis had gassed over 100,000 psychiatric patients in the main T4 program, in the 14 f 13 version for the KZ inmates which was evidently counted separately and continued past the 'stop' of T4 in August 1941, and in several drives in regions of annexed western Poland. By 1941 there were numerous leaks and a growing awareness within the bureaucracy, so it was in this context that any SS officer would hit on the idea of applying gassing techniques to the Jews. The transfers of euthanasia personnel and expertise to Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka make the connection indelible, but deniers always want to avoid discussing this to make things easier for themselves.

The overlap with the extended commissar order is also problematic for them. Einsatzbefehl Nr 8 was known as 14 f 14 in the WVHA-IKL codings for deaths and is documented as such. Mostly it involved shootings, but Auschwitz experimented with Zyklon B and used gassing as a technique, which was already known to the KZ system via the selections for 14 f 13.

All of this would have to be covered in the book Gibson wants someone to write for deniers. The euthanasia-FS connection was already covered in Poliakov, Reitlinger and Hilberg, but we obviously have much more knowledge of euthanasia and the murder of Soviet POWs in 2022 than they did.