Army of Evil: A History of the SS (55 page)

Organisationally, Auschwitz followed the model for concentration camps established by Eicke at Dachau. Department 1 was the commandant’s staff, run by the adjutant,
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with the role of managing the camp’s SS personnel; Department 2 was the “political department,” staffed by members of the Gestapo, Kripo and SD, subordinated to the RSHA, and responsible for surveillance and interrogation of prisoners; Department 3 was responsible for the protective custody camp and was, in effect, the camp operations staff; Department 4 dealt with operations and logistics; Department 5 was the medical staff; Department 6 was responsible for the training and welfare of the Waffen-SS guards. The latter were originally supplied by a Waffen-SS mounted
unit based in Cracow, but these were soon replaced by specialists seconded from other concentration camps, supplemented by reservists called up for duty within the SS-Death’s Head Auschwitz Battalion.
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As in the other concentration camps, much responsibility was also given to the prisoner trusties who were employed as supervisors and clerks on labour details and within the camp. They were distinguished by being allowed to wear civilian clothes, grow their hair and carry whips and clubs to beat their fellow prisoners. At first, as we have seen, these were exclusively German, but as time went by and the camp expanded, the net was spread more widely, with prisoners from elsewhere being employed in these roles. By late 1943, even Jews served as block seniors and Kapos.

Conditions for the prisoners during the early period at Auschwitz were probably worse than in the rest of the concentration camp system. On arrival, they were registered, stripped of their clothing, shorn of their hair and issued with a number that was also tattooed on their forearm. Thereafter, their names were meaningless within the camp system. They were given prison clothing, consisting of a shirt, a jacket, trousers and a cap, all made from a distinctive striped, coarse canvas, together with a pair of wooden clogs. Then they were issued with triangular patches to indicate their status: green for criminals; red for political prisoners; black for “asocials,” including Gypsies; purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses; blue for emigrants. At this stage, Jews were not being sent to Auschwitz simply for being Jewish, so any Jewish prisoner wore an additional yellow triangle underneath their primary patch, to form a crude “Star of David.” This arrival and registration process was deliberately designed to terrorise and subdue the prisoners: it was accompanied throughout by shouting and blows from the Kapos and the SS guards, as well as the barking of aggressive guard dogs. Any prisoner showing signs of resistance or poor attitude could expect to be beaten to a pulp or even shot.

There was little improvement once the prisoners had been received into the camp. After a few days of quarantine and physical assessment
by SS personnel and trusties, they were allocated to work details either within the camp or, as the Auschwitz “complex” grew in size and scope, in one of the many industrial concerns that were established to exploit this pool of slave labour. The working day for the prisoners began around 4:30 a.m. in the summer and 5:30 in the winter. After being ordered from their bunks, they were hustled to a communal washroom and lavatory where they were given a few minutes to evacuate their bowels and wash themselves in water that could be icy cold or scalding hot. Thereafter, they were given breakfast, which normally consisted of a mug of unsweetened artificial coffee, a slice of bread, a thin slice of salami and a small knob of margarine.
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They were not fed again until their return to the camp in the evening. Following breakfast, roll-call was taken: the prisoners would be forced to stand outside in all weathers as they were counted and re-counted. Any prisoners who had died during the night were laid out next to the living to make the figures tally. With the roll-call complete—and it could take several hours—the prisoners were marched to their work details.

The best jobs were skilled tasks in the factories and on building sites, which could be performed with relatively little harassment from the guards and overseers. Also highly prized were those tasks that allowed access to newly arrived prisoners’ belongings and therefore extra food, valuables and money that could be used to bribe Kapos and corrupt SS guards, of whom there were many. The worst jobs involved hard physical work: labouring on construction sites, in stone quarries and the timber yard. The prisoner diet was inadequate for all, but those who were forced into hard labour without any means to acquire extra food were effectively given an extended death sentence. As they became increasingly malnourished, these prisoners were labelled
Musselmänner
(Muslims) in the camp vernacular. They effectively lost the battle for survival: unable to get anywhere near the front of the queue for food, they sank into lassitude. Ultimately, if they didn’t die from illness or starvation, they were killed for being unable to work. The SS
and the long-term inmates were skilled at spotting potential
Musselmänner
—for instance, their buttocks became soft and flabby. When Auschwitz became a death camp, this was enough to have a prisoner sent to the gas chambers.
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The end of the prisoners’ day came in the early evening. They returned from their work details to face another extended roll-call; once again, any prisoners who had died during the day were counted alongside the living. Then the surviving prisoners received their evening meal, which usually consisted of a bowl of watery vegetable soup, thickened with potato peel and sometimes barley. Sometimes lumps of animal skin and fat would be included to give the soup slightly more nutritional value, but this happened so rarely that it had almost no impact on the prisoners’ health. Food distribution was handled by the trusties, which gave them enormous scope for corruption. Routinely, when a trusty was given a loaf of bread intended for four prisoners, he would cut it into five pieces, give the four prisoners short rations, and exchange the remainder for more food, alcohol, tobacco, jewellery or some other prized commodity. These items were then used in barter with the SS guards. Moreover, a favoured prisoner would receive a ladle of soup taken from the bottom of the cauldron, where the more nourishing material could be found, while another would be given watery, nutritionally worthless slop from the top.

Homosexual relationships were commonplace, with many trusties using their control of food distribution to obtain sexual favours from younger male prisoners. If these bribes were refused, the prisoner might simply be raped.

Punishments for infractions of the numerous rules were invariably harsh and brutal. Block 11 in the main camp was designated as the punishment area. Once there, prisoners might be flogged or beaten; placed overnight in “standing cells,” where they could not lie down or rest, and then forced to do their designated work the next day; placed in “starvation cells,” where they were given neither food nor water; or hung up by their hands so that their shoulders dislocated. Those who
were executed for violating the rules were either shot or hanged in a yard next to Block 11.

In February 1941, Himmler ordered that all Jews were to be expelled from the town of Auschwitz and its immediate environs, and that all indigenous Poles and all available camp inmates were to begin work on a new project. This was the construction, under the auspices of the giant IG Farben chemical company, of a huge plant to manufacture Buna—synthetic rubber and oil made out of coal—for the German war effort. The project had been presented to Himmler as a way of bringing German settlers to Auschwitz. It would also fully exploit the economic potential of the prisoners by employing them in a viable commercial operation, as opposed to one of the SS’s own embarrassingly incompetent business enterprises. Himmler made his first visit to Auschwitz the following month and issued orders for how the project should proceed. First, the capacity of the Auschwitz main camp was to be expanded to thirty thousand prisoners; then, in April, these prisoners would begin construction of the IG Farben site, which was approximately six kilometres from the main camp, at the village of Dwory. Höss claimed that it was also during this visit that Himmler ordered the construction of a second camp, with a capacity of a hundred thousand prisoners, at nearby Birkenau (Auschwitz II).
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According to Höss’s autobiography, during the summer of 1941, he was summoned to Berlin by Himmler, who gave the camp commandant “the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place, and personally to carry out these exterminations.”
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Höss then says that he discussed the details of the extermination programme with Eichmann, who told him that the operation should start with the Jews of Upper Silesia, then those who remained in Germany and the Protectorate, and finally those of Western Europe. The two men did not agree on the method of extermination,
but Eichmann told Höss that he was investigating various poison gases that might prove suitable.
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SS-Captain Karl Bischoff, an engineer who had been put in charge of the Auschwitz Central Building Administration, arrived to oversee the start of work on Birkenau in October 1941. By then, the first experiments in mass killing with gas had already taken place. It had been policy since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa that Soviet political commissars captured by the
Wehrmacht
and Waffen-SS combat units were to be isolated from other prisoners of war, taken to the nearest concentration camp and killed. Generally, they had been shot. But in September 1941, SS-Captain Karl Fritzsch, who commanded the protective custody camp at Auschwitz, decided to try to kill a group of Russian POWs by a different method—gassing them with the Zyklon B delousing agent. The experiment was successful, and Fritzsch arranged another so that Höss could see the results for himself. However, the two men now decided that their location—the cellar of Building 11—was unsuitable for this operation; so, for the next experiment, they moved to the mortuary of the old camp crematorium. This was easily adapted for its new role: holes simply had to be pierced in the ceiling so that the gas could be introduced. The next experiment was conducted on a transport of nine hundred Russian POWS. According to Höss:

Soon, a second gas chamber was constructed by converting a peasant cottage within the Birkenau perimeter. This was modified by having its interior walls removed, its windows filled in and special airtight doors fitted. With the conversion done, it had five gassing rooms and a capacity of approximately eight hundred victims. It became known as the “Bunker” and later as “Bunker I” or the “Red House” because of its unpainted brickwork. It was here that the first transports of Jews from Upper Silesia were brought when mass extermination began in earnest at Auschwitz–Birkenau in the early spring of 1942.

The process of killing at Birkenau was similar in some ways to the genocide at the Operation Reinhard camps. Transports of Jewish prisoners would arrive and disembark at the railhead and were then marched past the medical staff, who made cursory, superficial visual inspections. Those who appeared to be fit to work—on average 20–35 per cent of each transport—were registered in the main camp, with their prisoner numbers being crudely tattooed on their forearms. Those deemed unfit to work might be genuinely sick or disabled, but equally they might simply be elderly, small children, pregnant women, or mothers with their children. These prisoners were not registered. Instead, they were taken to the Bunker, where they were stripped of their clothing and led into the gas chambers on the pretext of delousing. When they were dead, the chambers were ventilated for a while and the bodies were removed by “special units” of prisoners for burial.

Within a few months of the first extermination transports arriving, it became clear that more capacity was required, so a second cottage—known as “Bunker II” or the “White House”—was converted for gassing. Undressing huts were also erected near the two gas chambers. At this stage, all of the gassed victims, as well as prisoners who died for
other reasons in Auschwitz and Birkenau, were buried in mass graves within the camps. But in the late summer of 1942, the corpses began to pollute the water table, and the decision was made to disinter and incinerate them.

Around this time, Höss was visited by SS-Colonel Paul Blobel, the former special task group officer who had commanded Special Unit 4a. Heinrich Müller had ordered Blobel to locate and eliminate all evidence of genocide in the East, primarily by digging up the mass graves that had been created by the special task groups and then burning the bodies.
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The same process had already begun at the static killing centres, although this was against the wishes of Globocnik: in August 1942, he commented that, rather than concealing the killings, the SS should bury bronze plaques in the mass graves so that the world would know who to thank!

By this stage, plans were already in place to step up Birkenau’s killing capacity through purpose-built gas chambers and crematoria. A conference at the end of February 1942 had settled on a basic design for underground gas chambers, from which the murdered victims could be hauled up in electric hoists to a crematorium equipped with five furnaces, each with three retorts and theoretically capable of handling up to two thousand corpses every twenty-four hours. However, it took more than a year to construct these substantial installations and bring them into operation, so, as a short-term measure, a pair of smaller extermination units were built on the surface, each with only two furnaces.