Auschwitz (30 page)

The policy of the Auschwitz authorities—indeed, that of the SS throughout the Nazi state—was clear: All valuables taken from the new arrivals were the property of the Reich. But while the theory may have been clear, the practice was very different. The temptations of “Canada” were irresistible—both for the prisoners working there and for the SS. As a result, stealing from “Canada” was commonplace. “We always managed to smuggle some clothes,” says Linda Breder. “We smuggled shoes, panties, underwear—we gave away all those clothes because we didn't need them.” And since Breder and the others who worked in “Canada” also found food hidden among the belongings, they had a better diet than almost any other group of Jewish inmates at Auschwitz.

Not surprisingly, however, it was individual members of the SS who personally benefited far more from “Canada.” “The Germans kept accumulating wealth,” says Linda Breder. “Death was the only thing that was left for us. ... All of them [the SS men] used to steal. They came there because there was no other place like that, where they got everything.”

Rudolf Höss admitted that “the treasures brought in by the Jews gave rise to unavoidable difficulties for the camp itself ” because the SS men who worked for him “were not always strong enough to resist the temptation provided by these valuables which lay within such easy reach.”
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Oskar
Groening confirms his commandant's view, “There was a danger [of theft] because if a lot of stuff is heaped together you can easily steal something and profit from it—which was absolutely common in Auschwitz.” Because he worked in the Economic Agency, Groening was aware that “many people touched” the valuables in the chain that led from the luggage deposited on the arrival “ramp” via the sorting barracks of “Canada” to the placing of the wooden boxes filled with valuables in his office, “And it's surely been the case that a whole lot of this stuff was carried into channels that it wasn't meant to go.”

Surprisingly, as Groening confirms, the supervision of the SS members in Auschwitz was “actually very loose.” He admits that he himself was an active participant in the corruption and theft that were rife among the SS members in the camp, stealing from the cash that surrounded him in order to buy goods on the flourishing Auschwitz black market. When, for example, he grew tired of having to draw a revolver from the camp armory and then return it at the end of his shift, he approached “people who had connections” and said, “Dear friend, I need a gun with ammunition.” And, because Groening was known as the “King of the Dollars” because of his job counting and sorting the stolen money, a fee of thirty U.S. dollars was agreed. It was a simple matter for Groening to steal this amount from the money that passed by him every day, so he handed over the thirty dollars and received his revolver.

Groening's transaction was mirrored by thousands of other similar illegal deals every week at Auschwitz. So much wealth was flooding into the camp with so little supervision and so many casual opportunities to steal that it is hard to imagine that any of the SS members were free from involvement in this crime. From the SS private who wanted a new radio to the SS officer who dealt in stolen jewelry, corruption at the camp was endemic.

Himmler referred to the ultra-sensitive question of corruption in the SS during his infamous Posen speech of October 1943, delivered to an audience that included fifty senior SS figures.

Himmler thus attempted to draw a clear line between the murders, which were justified and necessary for the good of the Reich, and individual profit, which remained a crime. He did so in an attempt to preserve the image of the SS members as both “hard” and “incorruptible.” It is easy to understand why he tried to make this distinction. He had observed first-hand, two years before, the psychological damage that shooting Jews at close range had caused his teams of killers, and so he had overseen the development of a system of murder via the gas chambers that to an extent distanced them from emotional trauma. Now he sought to provide intellectual comfort to his men by distinguishing between the moral but hard defender of the Reich and the louche opportunist out for personal profit. For them to be able to live with themselves, perhaps even to enable them to “forgive” themselves for their parts in the “Final Solution,” Himmler recognized that he had to paint a picture of the SS members as killers of women and children, yes, but murderers who had still retained their honor. His method of doing that was to remind them that they had not profited personally from the killings.

It was all a lie, of course, and not just at the most obvious level—that the SS was massively implicated in corruption and theft at Auschwitz. It was a fundamental lie through and through, because no distinction was ever possible during the Nazis' “Final Solution” between the “honorable”
murder of helpless civilians and pure bestiality. This truth is illustrated most obviously by the actions of the SS doctors at Auschwitz. These medical professionals were involved at every level of the killing process, from the initial selection at the ramp to the placing of Zyklon B into the gas chambers. Their involvement was symbolized by the fact that the Zyklon B was transported to the gas chambers in a pseudo-ambulance marked with a red cross.

As a result of their total complicity, the Auschwitz doctors faced a dilemma more stark than any of the other Nazi perpetrators, best expressed in the question: How can you take part in mass murder and yet still retain a sense that what you are doing is morally compatible with the Hippocratic oath that compels doctors to try and heal the sick?

Crucial in any attempt to understand how the Nazi doctors felt able to answer that question is the realization that, for them, Auschwitz was not a sudden introduction to the idea that trained medical staff should be involved in murder. From the moment of their accession to power in 1933, the Nazi leadership had been committed to the concept that certain “races,” and indeed certain individuals, were more “worthy” of life than others. The first indication of the practical implication of this vision was the introduction during the 1930s of compulsory sterilization for those with severe mental disease. Altogether, around 300,000 Germans were forcibly subjected to such sterilization.

The close links between the Nazis' adult euthanasia program—which originated in the autumn of 1939—and the staff of the Operation Reinhard death camps were described earlier. Those pioneers of the death camps, Wirth and Stangl, both began their careers in killing by helping to murder the disabled. But what is important to note here is the fact that the selection process for the adult euthanasia program was controlled by doctors, not by police—a practice that was perpetuated in Auschwitz. This intimate link was the necessary consequence of a pre-history of killing that elevated the removal of what the Nazis called “life unworthy of life” (“lebensunwertes Leben”) to the highest duty of medicine. It was this perverse logic that made it unsurprising to the killers that a medical practitioner, Dr. Eberl, could become the commandant of the death camp of Treblinka.

By the time Eberl took up his job at Treblinka this concept of “life unworthy of life” had, of course, been extended from the mentally and physically disabled to the Jews. In attempting to justify the killing of the Jews, the SS doctors fell back on the early Nazi propaganda lie of the Jews as a corrupting influence on the body politic. “Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life,” said Fritz Klein, one Nazi doctor. “Out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.”
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From the purist Nazi point of view, therefore, Auschwitz and the other death camps were an exercise in health management—facilitating the removal of people who were a burden or threat to the well-being of the state. Thus, some of the earliest killings at Auschwitz of those found unfit to work were carried out at Block 10—the hospital block—by means of injections with phenol. It was an exact inversion of normal medical ethics—a visit to the hospital not to be cured, but to be killed.

Once the system of selection on arrival was introduced in 1942, Nazi doctors played a vital part in the process of mass murder. It was doctors who made the decision that was fundamental to the operation of Auschwitz—who from the arriving transports should live and who should die. The active participation of doctors in this selection was essential to the Nazis for two reasons—one practical and the other philosophical. The practical reason was clear—doctors were thought to be best capable of sizing up at a glance a human being's capability to work (each selection took only a matter of seconds). But the philosophical reason is both less obvious and more significant. By involving doctors so intimately in the selection, a sense was created that the killing was not an arbitrary act of prejudice, but a scientific necessity. Auschwitz was not a place of indiscriminate slaughter, but a measured and calm contribution to the health of the state.

It was in the area of medical experiments , however, that the doctors of Auschwitz were to become especially infamous. That prisoners were used for this purpose fitted into the Nazi ideal that enemies of the state ought to provide a “service” to the Reich–if not by working as forced labor, then by dying in the pursuit of “medical knowledge.”

For the doctor who was ambitious in pursuing a career in research and unencumbered by humanity or compassion, Auschwitz was a laboratory
without parallel. At least two doctors, Clauberg and Schumann, conducted “medical research” into sterilization at Auschwitz. Significantly, Schumann had previous experience of murder—he had been one of the doctors involved in the adult euthanasia program, working at the killing center at Sonnenstein where Auschwitz prisoners had been sent in July 1941.

Silvia Veselá,
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one of the first Slovakian women to arrive at Auschwitz, was forced to assist Clauberg and Schumann, working as a nurse in Block 10 in the main camp where many of the experiments took place.

Himmler took a particular interest in the sterilization experiments conducted at Auschwitz. Sterilization had, of course, been one of the “solutions” considered by the Nazis to their self-created “Jewish problem” that pre-dated the development of the gas chambers—it had even been raised at Wannsee as a possible alternative to deportation for some German Jews of mixed ancestry. But, despite promises from leading medical figures like Professor Clauberg, Himmler had yet to be delivered the cheap, efficient sterilization technique he wanted.

As she cared for the women who were the subject of these painful experiments, Silvia Veselá “tried not to get involved too much—the best thing you could have done was not to think. The impact of X-ray intensity on the small intestine was tested on them. It was more than awful. These women were throwing up all the time. It was really terrible.” X-rays were used either as an attempt to sterilize on their own or to check the progress of chemicals injected into the womb: