KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (65 page)

At the same time, the Camp SS found much to like in the east. Dr. Kremer, for one, made the most of his inadvertent posting to Auschwitz. His grim
tasks in the camp did not spoil his love of the outdoors. In his spare time, he joined other SS men on sun loungers at his hotel and took a bicycle tour across the vast SS-controlled territory, marveling at the “absolutely beautiful autumn weather.” A man with a big appetite, Kremer devoured the generous helpings in the SS officer mess, dutifully recording all the delicacies in his diary, from
goose liver and roast rabbit to the “glorious vanilla ice cream.” And he liked the entertainment in the camp. One Sunday afternoon in September he listened to a concert by the prisoner orchestra, and he also enjoyed the regular variety shows for the Camp SS in the evenings, sometimes with free beer; Kremer was particularly smitten by a performance of dancing dogs and small hens who could crow on command.
Other times, Kremer made social calls on colleagues. After he spent the afternoon of November 8, 1942, at the Birkenau gas chambers—supervising the murder of some one thousand Jewish men, women, and children who had just arrived from ghettos around Bialystok—he relaxed in the evening with Dr. Eduard Wirths, the chief SS garrison physician, sampling Bulgarian red wine and Croatian plum schnapps.
In addition to fun and food, Kremer found time to boost his career. He was delighted to get his hands on “virtually alive material of human liver and spleen” for his studies of the effect of starvation on human organs. Kremer apparently later published a paper on the topic in a medical journal.
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But the biggest bonus of Dr. Kremer’s brief stay in Auschwitz was financial. The belongings of murdered
Jews filled the camp, and corrupt SS men like Kremer freely helped themselves. After he was initiated into the tricks of the trade, he took as much as he could from a storeroom near the ramp. The five bulging parcels he sent back home for safekeeping included soap and toothpaste, glasses and pens, perfume and handbags, and much else besides, to a total value of 1,400 Reichsmark. In just five
weeks, Untersturmführer Kremer stole goods worth more than half the annual salary of a full-time SS officer of his rank.
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Many other Camp SS officials were on the make, too, in Auschwitz and elsewhere. In the end, corruption became so endemic that a special police commission was sent to the KL. In Auschwitz, the investigation was triggered in 1943 by an unusually heavy package that an SS man had
sent to his wife; when suspicious customs officials opened it, they found a huge lump of gold, as big as two fists, melted down from the dental fillings of murdered prisoners.
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By this time, Auschwitz had become the center of the KL system, just as Dachau had dominated the first period of Nazi rule, and Sachsenhausen the early war years. Not that Auschwitz was entirely different; in other KL,
too, there was hunger and abuse, selection and mass murder. But everything was more extreme in Auschwitz. No other camp held more staff and prisoners. The mass deportations of Jews had quickly put Auschwitz into a league all its own. During September 1942, the average daily prisoner population across all the KL stood at one hundred and ten thousand. An estimated thirty-four thousand of these prisoners
were held in Auschwitz alone, of whom around sixty percent were Jews. They were ruled by up to two thousand Auschwitz SS staff, and many of these officials, as we shall see, felt similar ambivalence about their lives in the east as Dr. Kremer.
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The shadow of Auschwitz looms even larger when we turn to prisoner fatalities. According to secret SS figures, a total of 12,832 registered prisoners
died across the KL system in August 1942; almost two-thirds of them—6,829 men and 1,525 women—perished in Auschwitz (excluding an estimated 35,000 unregistered Jews who were gassed that month after SS selections on arrival).
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In total, around 150,000 registered prisoners died in Auschwitz during 1942–43 (again excluding Jews murdered on arrival).
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Their deaths were recorded on various official
papers, mostly giving fictitious causes, though rarely as blatant as in the case of the three-year-old Gerhard Pohl, who was recorded as having died in Auschwitz on May 10, 1943, of “old age.”
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Some of the forms ran to around twenty pages, with prisoner clerks typing day and night to keep up. Auschwitz SS doctors, meanwhile, complained about cramps in their hands from signing all the death certificates;
to make their lives easier, they eventually commissioned special stamps with their signature.
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Heinrich Himmler and Oswald Pohl showed great interest in Auschwitz, as their largest death camp and greatest hub for forced labor. Back in 1940, when it was first set up, Commandant Höss had had to hunt for scraps of barbed wire. Now his superiors poured funds into the camp, diverting precious resources to their flagship in the east. “I was probably the only SS leader in the entire SS,” Höss
later bragged, “who had such a comprehensive carte blanche for the procurement of all that was needed for Auschwitz.”
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Earlier KL had resembled small cities; Auschwitz turned into a metropolis. By August 1943, it held some seventy-four thousand prisoners, at a time when there were two hundred and twenty-four thousand registered KL prisoners across all the camps.
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In view of the size of the Auschwitz
complex, Pohl divided it in November 1943 into three main camps, each with its own commandant. Auschwitz I was the old main camp, led by the most senior local SS officer (who retained overall responsibility for the camp complex); Auschwitz II was the camp in Birkenau (with the gas chambers); and Auschwitz III contained the satellite camps dotted around eastern Silesia (fourteen by spring
1944), above all Monowitz.
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Conditions varied greatly across the vast Auschwitz complex, as we will see, just as they differed in the other KL in occupied eastern Europe during 1942–43. One Auschwitz prisoner likened his summer 1943 transfer from the main camp to Birkenau to a move from a major city to the countryside where everyone wore shabbier clothes. Another prisoner put it more starkly:
the Auschwitz main camp—with its brick buildings, washrooms, and drinking water—was like paradise compared to the hell of Birkenau.
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Despite all their differences, though, the ultimate aim of SS concentration camps in occupied eastern Europe was the same. None of their registered Jewish prisoners—those who had been selected for slave labor rather than immediate extermination—were supposed to
survive in the long run.

JEWISH PRISONERS IN THE EAST

More than a year after her liberation from the Nazi camps, Nechamah Epstein-Kozlowski lived with her new husband in a Jewish cooperative in a castle near Lake Como in Italy, where they waited impatiently to move to Palestine. It was here, on August 31, 1946, that the twenty-three-year-old Polish woman, pregnant with her first child, talked
to the American psychologist David Boder, who had recently arrived in Europe to interview displaced persons. Before their conversation, which was taped on a wire recorder, Boder noted that Epstein-Kozlowski seemed cheerful; but her story, which unfolded over the next ninety minutes, was one of unremitting horror.

Even before she was dragged to the concentration camps, Epstein-Kozlowski had cheated
death several times, escaping from a train bound for a death camp and surviving the ghettos of Warsaw and Meseritz (Mi
ę
dzyrzec). In spring 1943, by which time her whole family had been killed, she was taken to Majdanek and began a two-year odyssey through the KL system, which led her to Auschwitz, back to Majdanek, to Plaszow, back to Auschwitz, to Bergen-Belsen, to the Buchenwald satellite camp
of Aschersleben, and finally, following a two-week death march, to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where she was liberated on May 8, 1945.

When Epstein-Kozlowski had first arrived in Birkenau, on June 26, 1943, on a transport with 625 other women from Majdanek, they were forced into a road construction commando known as the Death Detail; within a month, she recalled, 150 of the women were dead. Many
of those who survived were later murdered. Epstein-Kozlowski herself lived through several selections, including three in the Birkenau infirmary, where, delirious with malaria, she hid in the bunks of non-Jewish prisoners. Jewish children were most vulnerable to such selections, but for several months during 1944, Epstein-Kozlowski helped to protect an eight-year-old orphan called Chaykele Wasserman:
“That child was very dear to me. I loved it very much. That child could not go anyplace without me.” Chaykele survived a selection in Plaszow by hiding in the latrine, and she also survived the later move to Auschwitz. But after Epstein-Kozlowski was chosen for a transport to Bergen-Belsen, they were finally separated: “And that child cried very much. When she saw that I was being taken, she
cried very much and screamed, ‘You are leaving me. Who will be my mother now?’ But, alas, I could not help any … I cried very much. And the child was crying. And I parted from the child and left.”
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Chaykele probably died before the war ended, just like most other children in Auschwitz. Similarly, Nechamah Epstein-Kozlowski’s experience was shared by most other Jewish adults registered as KL prisoners
in eastern Europe during the Holocaust, who faced destructive labor, violence, and constant selections. In one respect, though, her fate was unusual—she survived.

Slaves for IG Farben

Historians have long argued that the Holocaust highlights a sharp contradiction at the heart of Nazism: despite the desperate need for forced labor to feed the German war machine, the regime still went ahead with
the mass extermination of European Jewry.
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But for Nazi hard-liners there was no contradiction. Economics and extermination were two sides of the same coin; both were needed for victory. Winning the war required the ruthless destruction of all perceived threats
and
the mobilization of all remaining resources for the war effort. In the case of Jews judged capable of work, the authorities fused
both of these aims into the policy of “annihilation through labor.” Forced labor meant temporary survival for the selected Jews; but almost all of them were dead men and women walking, as far as the SS was concerned.
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KL labor in occupied eastern Europe varied enormously. At times, most notably in Majdanek, it was designed only for suffering.
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More often, the authorities pursued aims that included,
but also went beyond, the desire to inflict pain. Typically, Jewish prisoners were exploited during the deadly construction phase of new camps, as well as during their extension and maintenance; in Auschwitz, around half of all employed female prisoners worked in the service of the camp itself.
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Beyond that, prisoners worked for SS enterprises, private companies, and the Nazi state. The experience
of slave labor depended on many variables, such as the type, size, and supervision of the work details (few prisoners stayed for long in the same detail, moving frequently and often randomly elsewhere). Still, most Jewish KL laborers faced the same overall threat—labor and death.

This policy was pursued most consistently, perhaps, at the IG Farben site near Dwory. The only living things here,
Primo Levi wrote, “are machines and slaves—and the former are more alive than the latter.” Auschwitz prisoners had worked on the construction of the factory since spring 1941. Initially, they still slept in the main camp, so they had to march every day for several hours along muddy roads to and from the building site, around four miles away (later, trains were used, too). IG Farben managers blamed
these exhausting transports for the prisoners’ poor output and lobbied for a satellite camp right next to the factory grounds. SS officials agreed after some hesitation, swayed by the WVHA’s growing emphasis on productivity. Construction of the Monowitz concentration camp (or Buna camp) began in summer 1942, using the standard SS barrack model, and it opened in late October 1942. Built on the ruins
of Monowitz village, the new camp cost some five million Reichsmark to construct; the sum was paid by IG Farben, which agreed to provide supplies and medical care as well. The SS, meanwhile, was in charge of prisoners inside the camp and outside.

The new KL Monowitz belonged to a bigger complex on the grounds. It was one of eight compounds on the huge IG Farben construction site, which together
provided around twenty thousand workers by November 1942. Some of them, like German civilians, enjoyed comparatively good conditions, while others, like forced workers from the Soviet Union (both POWs and others), suffered deprivation. But the KL, the only compound around Dwory run by the Camp SS, was the worst. “We are the slaves of the slaves,” Primo Levi wrote, “whom all can give orders to.”
The new concentration camp quickly grew in size, following mass arrivals from the Auschwitz main camp. At the beginning of 1943, there were already 3,750 prisoners, increasing to around 7,000 a year later. The great majority of them—around nine out of ten—were Jews.
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