KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (66 page)

Initiated by IG Farben, the KL Monowitz aimed to feed the industrial giant’s appetite for labor. Work inside the compound itself
was reduced to the bare minimum, so around four out of five prisoners toiled on the factory’s building site outside, a “huge entanglement of iron, concrete, mud and smoke,” as Levi described it. The great majority of prisoners ended up in large construction gangs. These commandos were all about unrelenting labor, largely performed without gloves, coats, or any other protection, even in winter.
Prisoners erected huge concrete slabs and carried bricks, trees, and iron pipes across the site. Among the worst details was the cement commando—“a veritable murder commando,” one survivor called it—where prisoners had to run from trains to warehouses with bulging cement sacks on their backs; weighing 110 pounds, the load was heavier than many of the prisoners. In the eyes of the authorities, the
men in these labor details were easily replaceable and counted for almost nothing. Only a few trained prisoners in sought-after positions fared better: Bully Schott, for example, survived until his escape in August 1944, because of his abilities as a mechanic. But even skilled inmates like him often faced ruinous labor in Monowitz. After Primo Levi joined a small commando of trained chemists, he had
to carry heavy phenylbeta sacks: “our strength,” he feared at the time, “will not last out.” Only in the final weeks of Auschwitz did he actually work inside the sheltered laboratory.
23

General disdain for the prisoners shaped conditions inside Monowitz. Overcrowding was endemic—around 250 men were crammed into barracks originally designed for fifty-five civilian workers—as was dirt and disease.
The SS aggravated the suffering at almost any opportunity. For example, Jewish prisoners—and only Jewish prisoners—had to exchange their leather shoes for ill-fitting wooden clogs, which soon cut gaping wounds into their feet. Worst of all was the slow starvation, “that chronic hunger unknown to free men,” Levi wrote, “which makes one dream at night, and settles in all the limbs of one’s body.”
The daily rations from the SS were pitiful and the additional Buna soup, which prisoners received courtesy of IG Farben, contained dirt and “plants which I have never seen growing before,” according to another inmate. Starvation and strenuous work led to extreme weight loss, on average between four and nine pounds per week. After three or four months at the IG Farben site, the former prisoner doctor
Berthold Epstein testified in April 1945, “most people died as a result of exhaustion and overexertion.” Overall, around twenty-five thousand of all the thirty-five thousand prisoners sent to Monowitz lost their lives.
24

Violent excesses hastened their deaths. One of the leading guards in Monowitz was report leader Bernhard Rakers, a brutal Camp SS veteran (he had signed up back in 1934). His
violent record was long and he added to it every day, even though inmates tried hard to stay clear of the man they called the “Buna lion.”
25
Then there were the Monowitz Kapos. Among the most notorious was the camp elder Josef (“Jupp”) Windeck, a German petty criminal in his early forties. On the day Monowitz was first opened, he gave a speech to the assembled prisoners. According to one survivor,
he said: “You’re not here for fun, you’ll all get wrecked anyway, and you’ll all go through the chimney.” True to his word, Windeck—who used to parade around in riding boots, brandishing a dog whip—frequently beat other prisoners to a pulp.
26

SS guards and Kapos were the usual suspects when it came to tormenting prisoners at work. But in Monowitz, the IG Farben paymasters had their say, too.
Keen to wring as much labor power from prisoners as they could, company officials demanded strenuous efforts and strict discipline from the frail prisoners. While chief engineer Max Faust opposed some SS excesses—such as “shooting prisoners on the building site or pounding them half-dead,” as he put it in 1943—he still insisted on “punishment of a moderate kind,” which in practice often meant more
violence, either beatings by Kapos and company officials or official whippings by the SS.
27

IG Farben was an active partner in the policy of “annihilation through labor.” Instead of improving prisoner provisions and the treatment of the sick, the company received an assurance from the WVHA that “all weak prisoners can be deported” to be replaced by others fit for work. This was the basis for
constant selections in Monowitz. They were most frequent in the camp’s infirmary, where an SS doctor came about once a week to “empty the beds,” as the SS called it. Walking briskly through the rooms—individual decisions often took no more than a few seconds—the physician picked out those who had already spent two or three weeks inside and others who were not expected to return to work anytime soon.
In this way, thousands of prisoners—almost all of them Jews—were selected in the Monowitz infirmary and transported to Birkenau.
28
Here, most were driven straight to the crematoria complex; as a former Birkenau block leader put it after the war, the doomed prisoners were “practically no longer alive” even before they were gassed.
29

The Selection

“
To relieve the camp, it is necessary to remove
simpletons, idiots, cripples, and sick people as quickly as possible through liquidation.”
30
This is how an SS officer summed up, in late 1942, the purpose of selections in a concentration camp like Auschwitz. By then, such prisoner selections had become routine. But things were about to change. As economic imperatives became more pressing, the SS made half-hearted efforts to curb the enormous
death rates in the KL system (chapter 8). This included restrictions on selections, at least in some camps.
31
As early as December 1942, the Auschwitz camp compound leader Hans Aumeier complained to a colleague about a ban on gassing Polish invalids, who were supposed to die a “natural death” (as he put it) instead.
32
This did not apply to registered Jewish prisoners, however. Murderous selections
remained a hallmark of the KL for Jews in occupied eastern Europe. In mixed camps like Auschwitz and Majdanek, which held both Jewish and non-Jewish inmates, the SS now introduced a two-tier system. Whereas most registered prisoners were spared the lethal injections and the gas chambers, countless ill, injured, and emaciated Jews were still murdered after selections.
33

There was no set pattern,
as the Camp SS conducted routine selections and impromptu ones, mass selections and individual ones. In general, the period immediately after arrival was particularly perilous. In Auschwitz, some Jewish prisoners had only just survived the initial selection at the ramp when they, too, were condemned: as they stripped naked inside the camp baths, their clothes no longer concealed injuries and illnesses.
34
Many more Jews followed over the coming days, picked out from the quarantine sectors that awaited most new inmates. Murders of selected new arrivals had slowly spread across the whole KL system during the early war years, as part of the wider SS assault on invalids. In summer 1942, the WVHA coordinated matters, ordering that new prisoners should be isolated in special blocks for four weeks
after arrival; anyone who was sick would be removed and “treated separately.”
35
Camp SS officials in eastern Europe understood this as an open invitation to mass murder in the quarantine sectors.
36

Mass selections of Jews continued inside the main camp compounds. In the second half of 1943, for example, selections took place at least once a week during roll call in the Riga main camp. One survivor
later described the SS man in charge: “He pulled women out of the ranks whose faces he somehow did not like, who wore glasses, had a spot on the face, even an injured finger, and gave orders for their extermination.” There were further actions during baths and before or after labor.
37
Such SS selections often turned into grotesque spectacles. The Polish political prisoner Danuta Medryk, who witnessed
several selections in Majdanek, described how the Jewish women had to hold up their skirts to expose their legs, as SS doctors picked out those with swollen and bleeding limbs; emaciated buttocks were also regarded as a sure sign of starvation. Those prisoners selected to die ripped off bandages and held their heads up as high as possible, even appearing to smile at their executioners, in
the vain hope of a final reprieve.
38

The conditions in eastern European KL often made it impossible to escape selection and death. Jewish prisoners everywhere were slowly starving to death; in Klooga, for example, the daily ration was thin soup with a piece of bread, partly baked with sand. Add maddening thirst, crippling labor, extreme violence, and the sanitary catastrophe, and it is clear
why tens of thousands became
Muselmänner
within weeks of their arrival, and thus prime targets for the selections.
39

Normally, the SS reflex was to blame prisoners for squalor and disease. But the state of the camps in the east was so appalling that even local officers called for improvements. In a meeting with SS construction boss Kammler, Auschwitz commandant Höss and his chief physician Wirths
complained in May 1943 that the situation in Birkenau (still without central water supply) was woeful, lacking the most basic hygienic and medical standards. Höss had not suddenly turned into a humanitarian; he had more pragmatic concerns. From his point of view, too many prisoners died in the wrong way—that is, from illness, not economic exploitation—resulting in a “huge wastage of manpower.”
40
Until conditions improved, local Camp SS leaders promoted murderous selections as the most effective defense against the danger of epidemics to themselves and their families. The gassing of sick and weak Jews, Höss assured his men, was necessary to prevent the spread of illness. In this way, local SS officials rationalized the slaughter of prisoners as an act of disease control and self-preservation,
and contributed to the escalation of Nazi terror from below.
41

In reality, SS selections actually helped to spread epidemics, by making the sick even warier of reporting to doctors. Most Jewish prisoners knew about the selections among patients. In Auschwitz, the initial selection came right after a prisoner was admitted to the infirmary; those judged too weak or sick to recover soon were isolated
and killed.
42
As for the others, the infernal conditions in most infirmaries offered little hope for recovery. The French prisoner doctor Sima Vaisman later described her first impression of the infirmary at the Birkenau women’s camp in early 1944: “A smell of corpses, of excrement … And the sick, skeletal beings, covered almost entirely in scabies, in boils, bitten to pieces by lice, all completely
naked, shivering with cold under their disgusting blankets.”
43
The infirmaries meant death for most Jewish prisoners; reporting for admission was a last resort, an enormous risk, like a game of Russian roulette with an almost fully loaded gun.

Among the infirmary personnel, lower-ranking officials, so-called SS orderlies (
Sanitätsdienstgrade
), played a key role in selections and were often decorated
for their murderous deeds.
44
One of these men was Oberscharführer Heinz Wisner. An eager SS activist, born in Danzig in 1916, Wisner worked for several years as a shipping clerk before joining the SS full-time during the war as a medic. In summer 1943, he was transferred from Flossenbürg to the Riga main camp, where he dominated the small infirmaries for women and men.
45
Unlike the elderly SS
camp doctor Eduard Krebsbach, who only appeared occasionally, the pompous Wisner made his rounds more than once a week. Wearing a white coat over his uniform, the would-be doctor pushed military discipline to perverse extremes; even the dying had to lie straight on their backs as Wisner moved from bed to bed, inspecting each inmate. After he had made his decision, he frequently marked the bed frames
of the doomed with a large “X.” These inmates were then either shot in nearby woods or murdered in their beds by lethal injection (there were no gas chambers in Riga). Although he often left these injections to prisoner doctors, it was Wisner who became known in the camp as “the man with the syringe.”
46

Of course, death could come anywhere and anytime, not just after selections; it was the ever-present
shadow of Jewish prisoners. One of the first things he was told as he entered Birkenau in late 1942, a Polish Jew wrote not long after, was that no one survived the camp for more than three weeks.
47
The sight of dead bodies—in beds and latrines, on trucks and building sites—was familiar to all, as was the smoke from the crematoria; Renate Lasker-Allais, a young German Jew deported to Birkenau
in late 1943, threw up constantly because of the nauseating stench of burning bodies.
48
Even though most Jewish prisoners clung to faint hopes of survival, they knew that few, if any, would get out alive. They even speculated about the relative merits of the different deaths the SS had in store for them: How long before one suffocated in a gas chamber? How painful was death by injection? Better
a swift blow to the head, or to waste away in the infirmary?
49

The Auschwitz Special Squad

In the eyes of Primo Levi, the creation of the Auschwitz Special Squad—the prisoner detail that led the doomed to the gas chambers, burned their bodies, and scattered their remains—was “National Socialism’s most demonic crime.”
50
Forcing prisoners to assist SS terror was nothing new, and the more strenuous
and disgusting the work, the keener the Camp SS usually was to leave it to prisoners. This rule applied, above all, to work in the crematoria. In Dachau, for example, the small cremation commando was made up of German, Russian, and Jewish prisoners. Some of them were expected to do more than burn bodies. Soon after the German prisoner Emil Mahl joined the Dachau commando in early 1944, he was
forced to participate in executions. “As a walking corpse,” Mahl later testified, “I had to do horrible things here.”
51