Army of Evil: A History of the SS (54 page)

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This rule had been introduced after several members of the guard company had fled from the camp (with their weapons and ammunition) to join the partisans.

*
Globocnik was rewarded for his efforts in Lublin with promotion to the role of Senior SS and Police Leader for the Adriatic Coastal Zone. There he had responsibility for combating partisan activity and liquidating the local Jewish population. Many of his staff from Operation Reinhard, including Wirth and Stangl, accompanied him. Globocnik killed himself after being captured by British soldiers in May 1945. Wirth was killed in action against partisans. Stangl was extradited to West Germany from Brazil in the late 1960s. He died of heart failure in prison in 1971, just eight months after being found guilty of war crimes by a West German court.

*
At Auschwitz, the ashes of cremated victims were ground up before disposal so that no identifiable bones, teeth or other fragments would ever be found.

*
The actual figure given in the telegram was 71,355, but this was clearly a typing error.

T
he town of Os´wie˛cim first appears in the historical record in the twelfth century. Originally, it was a Polish settlement, established at the confluence of the Vistula and Soła rivers, some forty-five kilometres to the west of Cracow. The following century, German settlers moved to the area, bringing with them their language and their law system. Then, in the 1300s, the Duchy of Os´wie˛cim, centred on the little town, was incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire. However, by the end of the century, the duchy was under Bohemian rule, with Czech as its official language. In 1457, it was sold to the Polish monarchy, and it remained part of Poland until the state was carved up by Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1772. At that point, it came under the auspices of the Habsburg Empire, was renamed Auschwitz, and once again adopted the German language.
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Thereafter, it remained under Habsburg control until the fall of the monarchy in 1918. Three years later, it was included in the region of eastern Upper Silesia that the League of Nations allocated to the re-created independent Polish state. Auschwitz once again became Os´wie˛cim, but this time for just eighteen years, until the fall of Poland in September 1939.

Despite all of these changes of ownership and name, the population of Os´wie˛cim remained largely Slavic until the mid-fifteenth century, when the first Jews arrived. Unlike many towns in Silesia, no anti-Semitic laws were enacted against O
wi
cim’s Jewish population, so they enjoyed a relatively stable, peaceful coexistence with their Catholic neighbours. Their numbers flourished up to 1939, by which time 50 per cent or more of the town’s population of 14,000 were Jewish. Every mayor of Os´wie˛cim was a Catholic, but his deputy was always a Jew.

The camp at Os´wie˛cim began life at the end of the nineteenth century as a barracks for seasonal workers who passed through the frontier region on their way to find work in Prussia. At the end of the First World War, it became a refugee centre for people fleeing the border conflicts precipitated by the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires; but by the 1930s, it was being used primarily by the Polish Army.

Os´wie˛cim fell to the German Army on 4 September 1939, and it was renamed Auschwitz a few days later. On 26 October, it became part of the new region of Upper Silesia. Thus, the town was now officially within Germany proper, rather than, as many assume, in the occupied territories of the East.

The SS first began to take an interest in the area around this time after Himmler had been appointed Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of “Germandom.” As we have seen, much of the eastern region of the newly incorporated areas of Upper Silesia were originally designated to be used for the resettlement of ethnic Germans, but these plans were put on hold as soon as the logistical difficulties of ousting the existing population became apparent. As a short-term alternative, SS-General von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was in command of SS-Region South-East, suggested that the area could accommodate a new concentration camp.

During the winter and spring of 1939–40, the old camp in Auschwitz was visited by several teams of inspectors, who itemised the site’s
pros and cons. On the one hand, the buildings were dilapidated, the whole camp was in a low-lying, swampy area with poor drainage and there was a malaria problem. On the other, it had excellent communications and the main camp—once refurbished—could easily be converted into a prison compound. In the end, supporters of the site won out, and responsibility for the conversion of the barracks and establishment of the new camp was given to a long-standing National Socialist “old fighter,” SS-Captain Rudolf Höss.
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Höss was born in a farming district near Baden-Baden in the Rhineland-Palatinate in November 1900. His family was middle-class and strongly Catholic. Höss was a solitary child, preferring the company of animals, and particularly his pony, rather than humans. This extended even to his family: by his own account, while he respected his parents and his sisters, he was unable to love them as other children seemed to love their families. He also began to lose his religious faith at the age of thirteen, after his confessor reported one of Höss’s indiscretions to his father, who punished him for it. (He had accidentally hurt another child at school.) The following year, before the outbreak of the First World War, his father died.

Höss was fascinated by the conflict. He persuaded his mother to let him become a Red Cross volunteer, and he spent much of his free time helping wounded soldiers at hospitals, railway stations and barracks. In 1916, after several failed attempts, he was accepted into the cavalry regiment in which both his father and his grandfather had served. After basic training, he was sent to Turkey and from there to the Iraqi front. At the age of just seventeen he became the youngest NCO in the German Army, and the following year he was a senior sergeant commanding an independent cavalry reconnaissance troop composed entirely of men in their thirties.

He was in Damascus with his troop when the armistice came. Rather than surrender and face internment, he chose to fight his way home; his soldiers volunteered to join him. They rode across Turkey, took a tramp steamer across the Black Sea, then rode through the
mountains of South-East Europe in the middle of winter before arriving in Germany after three months of travelling.

Höss’s mother had died while he had been away at war, leaving his two young sisters in the care of relations. On arriving home, he discovered that these relations had divided his parents’ belongings among themselves, put his sisters in a convent, and were now demanding that he should enter the priesthood (this had been his father’s wish, too). Höss had no intention of becoming a priest, having found his vocation in the army. However, there was no place for him in the much-reduced regular armed forces, so he joined the
Rossbach
Free Corps.

He fought as a Free Corps soldier for the next few years in various trouble-spots within Germany and on its borders. In November 1922, he joined the NSDAP during a visit to Munich, but by then he had already committed the crime that would ensure he was not around to participate in its rebuilding process in the late 1920s. On the night of 31 May–1 June 1922, he had been one of a group of drunken Free Corps members who had abducted, brutally beaten, stabbed, shot and killed a schoolteacher whom they had wrongly believed to be an informer for the French occupation forces.
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Höss was finally arrested on 28 June 1923, and on 15 March 1924 he was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour in Brandenburg Prison.

He was a model prisoner, which amply demonstrated his compulsive obedience to authority—a trait he had already displayed in the army and the Free Corps. He achieved the highest level of trusty status and gave the prison authorities no problems whatsoever prior to his sudden release after six years as part of a political prisoner amnesty.

Höss spent much of the next five years as a member of the Artamanen Society, the Nordic-racist agricultural “pioneer” group that Himmler had joined in the early 1920s. He met his wife in the society,
and they quickly started a family. But in 1934, Himmler—whom Höss had known slightly since the early 1920s—asked him to join the SS. After some thought, he accepted and joined Eicke’s
Oberbayern
Guard Battalion. His reasons for doing so are easy to understand: he would be joining an organisation in which his favourite traits of obedience and duty were paramount; and he saw this as an opportunity to advance himself under a new regime whose goals he shared. After a brief period of training, he was promoted to corporal and posted to the concentration camp at Dachau as a block leader.

In his autobiography—with nauseating self-pity—Höss describes his “reluctance” to act as a concentration camp gaoler. But he was evidently very good at his job, fitted in well with Eicke’s severe and brutal regime, and rose steadily through the ranks. By July 1935, he was a sergeant and the following year he had become a sergeant major and the
Rapportführer
(in effect, executive officer) for Dachau’s protective custody camp. In September 1936, he became an officer and was put in charge of administering the prisoners’ property. In August 1938, he was transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp as its adjutant.

This was a key appointment. Sachsenhausen adjoined the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, which meant that Höss “got more closely acquainted with Eicke and with the effects of his influence upon the camp and the troops…[and also] learned to understand the relationships within the higher reaches of the SS. In short acquired a broader view.”
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Höss’s familiarity with the system, as well as his zeal, efficiency and absolute obedience, made him the ideal choice as commandant of Auschwitz when the decision was made to establish it. He received his posting order to the new camp on 2 May 1940.

Work had begun on the renovation of the camp and construction of new facilities the previous month. Among the first workers were some three hundred Jews, provided by the local Jewish Council, but in all more than five hundred companies from throughout Germany were eventually involved in building work and the supply of equipment to Auschwitz. On 20 May, a group of specially selected German prisoners
from Sachsenhausen was brought to Auschwitz and installed in the barracks to act as the nucleus of the trusties who would liaise between the SS and the rest of the prisoner population. Nine days later, forty more prisoners arrived with a truckload of barbed wire and started to enclose the compound by winding the wire around wooden poles.

The first political prisoners arrived at the camp on 14 June 1940. This was a group of 728 Poles—mostly soldiers, students and schoolchildren, including a few Jews—who had been transferred from the prison at Tarnów, near Cracow. At this time, it was intended that Auschwitz would be a similar institution to the concentration camps in Germany: a place where potential opponents of the National Socialists could be isolated, brutalised and “reeducated.” The only difference was its capacity: the new camp was designed to hold some 11,000 prisoners whereas, at the start of the war, the six German concentration camps held around 25,000 in total.
⁴
More prisoners soon followed those from Tarnów, travelling from other prisons throughout Germany and the incorporated territories. They were all set to work as forced labour, building the camp.