Scheisshaus Luck (39 page)

With respect to Dora, Mr. Berg’s account complements Yves Beón’s
Planet Dora
. As Michael Neufeld observes, French memoirs have dominated the testimonies of this camp, despite the fact that the French were listed as the third most numerous nationality, behind the Soviets and Poles, in a 1 November 1944 SS report. What sets Mr. Berg’s testimony apart is the timing of his arrival, during 282

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the winter of 1945, almost one year after the completion of the barracks and more than six months after the underground factory achieved full operational capacity. The barracks relieved the early prisoners, like Beón, of sleeping inside the tunnel. While many French prisoners were transferred to Dora after brief confinement in Buchenwald, Mr. Berg’s Monowitz experience sets ‘‘Planet Dora’’ in a different perspective, as he arrived after the production passed its peak but before the evacuations began. Unlike many French prisoners, Mr. Berg had already experienced the shock of entering a concentration camp, after surviving one year at Auschwitz and a terrifying evacuation.
7

As a recent immigrant to the United States, Pierre Berg wrote down his memories of wartime captivity in his native French. He started this memoir in 1947 with no immediate thoughts of eventual publication and remained somewhat reluctant, after its rejection in 1954 by the
Saturday Evening Post
, to publish it fifty years later. In the early 1950s, a University of California, Los Angeles, graduate student translated the French original into English under the title, ‘‘The Odyssey of a Pajama,’’ but Mr. Berg did not believe that the translator did justice to the nuances of his testimony. In preparing this testimony for publication, Mr. Brock combined

‘‘Odyssey’’ with extensive interviews conducted over three years. I have compared both versions and can attest that this memoir is faithful in most respects to the original, except that this version helpfully elicits detail that was glossed over in the original. Regret-tably, Mr. Berg misplaced the French original manuscript, but the
Saturday Evening Post’s
rejection letter of 16 April 1954 helps to date Mr. Berg’s original English account
.8

Although as literature or history his memoir cannot be compared with Primo Levi’s and Elie Wiesel’s canonical Holocaust texts,
Survival in Auschwitz
and
Night
, Mr. Berg’s Auschwitz experience reinforces these famous testimonies. Like Wiesel and Levi, Mr. Berg toiled at I.G. Auschwitz under unspeakable conditions in 1944. Like Wiesel, he was a teenager, but three years older and already well traveled. Like Levi, he drafted his original account AFTERWORD

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shortly after the war, when his memory of events was most vivid.

An atheist like Levi, he therefore did not situate his traumatic experience in terms of theodicy, as did Wiesel. Like Levi’s
The Reawakening
, Mr. Berg recounts his odyssey back to civilization and his not-altogether-pleasant encounters with Soviet troops. One strik-ing feature of this account absent in Levi’s and Wiesel’s writings is Mr. Berg’s unmistakable cynicism.
9

In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess one reservation about this account. Mr. Berg insists that he saw
Reichsfu¨hrer
SS Heinrich Himmler at I.G. Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. No known primary source verifies this claim. Himmler’s recorded visits took place on 1 March 1941 and 17 July 1942. Himmler’s first visit concerned the expansion of Auschwitz, in order to meet the labor needs of the I.G. Farben plant, which had yet to break ground. The second combined an inspection of the I.G. construction site with a tour of the Birkenau killing center, then not yet the center of industrial mass murder it was to become in 1943 and 1944. It is likely that in 1944 Mr. Berg saw one of Himmler’s many
doppelga¨ngers
.10

The following comments are intended to set Mr. Berg’s memoirs in the context of the Nazi concentration camp system and the I.G. Farben project at Auschwitz.

♦ ♦ ♦

When Pierre Berg entered Auschwitz-Monowitz in January 1944, the Nazi concentration camps had been operational for almost eleven years. The history of the concentration camps can be divided into six phases, each tied to the Nazi regime’s changing political or military fortunes. Mr. Berg entered the camps during their fifth phase (1942–1944). In the first (1933–1934), the concentration and

‘‘protective custody’’ (
Schutzhaft
) camps contributed to the Nazi Seizure of Power, and to the subsequent ‘‘synchronization’’ (
Gleich-schaltung
) of German society. The Nazi
Schutzstaffel
(SS or Protective Corps) established one of the first concentration camps at Dachau in March 1933 and the Storm Troopers (
Sturmabteilungen
, 284

SCHIESSHAUS LUCK

or SA) created ad hoc camps in many localities. After 1933 the total camp population declined drastically because of amnesties. It consisted mainly of political prisoners, especially communists and socialists. Career criminals newly released from prison also appeared in the early camps. During the first phase, Dachau became the model camp when its second commandant, Theodor Eicke, established severe regulations for the permanent SS camps. In July 1934, Eicke became the first Inspector of Concentration Camps (IKL), after playing a key role in the purge of leading SA members during the ‘‘Night of the Long Knives.’’ The IKL’s establishment ushered in the camps’ second phase, 1934 to 1936, when most remaining early camps were closed and Eicke practiced what historian Michael Thad Allen terms ‘‘the primacy of policing’’: camp labor was supposed to be torture that served no rational end
.11

The third phase of Nazi concentration camps took place from 1936 to 1939. This period saw first the limited and then mass expansion of the camps, with the establishment of Sachsenhausen (1936), near the site of the former early camp of Oranienburg, Buchenwald (1937), Mauthausen (1938), Flossenbu¨rg (1938), and finally Ravensbru¨ck women’s camp (1939). The last early camps, including Esterwegen and Sachsenburg, closed at this time. ‘‘Asocials,’’ who allegedly avoided work, engaged in prostitution, or whose behavior otherwise fell short of the ideal ‘‘national comrade,’’ were targeted for mass arrest in 1937. Also in 1937, the camp authorities established a standardized triangle system for the entire camp system, which indicated the reason for arrest on the prisoner’s striped uniform. As described by Buchenwalder and sociologist Eugen Kogon, this system fueled bitter prisoner rivalries and thus served the SS objective of
divide et impera
. A red triangle symbolized political detainees; green, career criminals; purple, Jehovah’s Witnesses; black, ‘‘asocials’’; blue, Jewish emigrants; and pink, homosexuals. Jewish detainees were identified by combining a yellow triangle with an above-listed arrest category in the form of a Star of David. The first mass influx of Jews into the camps occurred in the second phase, with the temporary arrests of tens of thousands of AFTERWORD

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Jewish men following the November 1938 pogrom, misleadingly known as ‘‘The Night of Broken Glass’’ (
Kristallnacht
)
.12

During the fourth phase, 1939 to 1941, the SS extended the camp system and the accompanying terror to the conquered territories. The new camps included Auschwitz (1940), Neuengamme (1940), Gross Rosen (inside Germany, 1941), and Natzweiler (1941). With Eicke’s appointment to command the SS Death’s Head Division (
Totenkopfsdivision
) in wartime, SS-Brigadefu¨hrer Richard Glu¨cks became the new Inspector. An ineffectual, colorless individual, Glu¨cks did little to stamp an imprint upon IKL. With war’s outbreak, the Gestapo immediately dispatched political oppo-nents to the camps, like Sachsenhausen, for execution, without a judicial sentence. At this time, tensions began to surface between administrators who saw the camps as intended exclusively for breaking the regime’s enemies and those who desired to exploit captive labor for the economy. In this period, Eicke’s prote´geś held the upper hand: SS overseers employed what was euphemistically termed ‘‘sport’’ for the purpose of killing or demoralizing prisoners, including purposeless labor conducted at breakneck pace as a form of torture. In the mid-1930s, at a time of high unemployment, Reichsfu¨hrer-SS Himmler led German industrialists on a tour of Dachau, with the aim of both justifying the necessity of unlimited detention and eliciting interest in his captive labor supply. Only the civilian worker shortages produced by Nazi rearmament (1936–

1939) altered the situation, however, when the SS created an enterprise to prepare building stone for Adolf Hitler’s numerous monumental projects and then developed other businesses connected to the its far-flung missions. As Allen convincingly shows, the SS were disastrous managers, which when combined with

‘‘sport’’ meant that these new enterprises foundered
.13

Among the fourth-phase camps, Auschwitz was originally intended to hold Polish political enemies. Founded in June 1940, over a thousand Poles were detained there less than six months later.

The first Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Ho¨ss, transferred a small 286

SCHIESSHAUS LUCK

number of hardened German criminals from his previous assignment at Sachsenhausen to serve as camp trusties. An ‘‘Eicke School’’ commandant, Ho¨ss oversaw Auschwitz’s transformation from political prison to industrial complex and, most infamously, killing cente
r.14

The camp’s fifth phase took place when the war that Hitler unleashed turned decisively against him, with Allied counteroffen-sives in the Soviet Union, North Africa, Italy, and, ultimately, northwestern France. The German war economy thereupon entered the so-called total war phase, with the rationalization of war production under Armaments Minister Albert Speer, the mass mo-bilization of foreign workers under Fritz Sauckel, and the deploy-ment of camp labor in private German industry under the SS

Business Administration Main Office (SS-
Wirtschafts Verwaltungs-hauptamt
, or WVHA). In connection with the latter, I.G. Farben’s erection of the Monowitz camp, discussed in detail below, furnished a model for other subcamps, with the location adjacent to, or inside, factory grounds. By late 1944, camp labor was the principal un-tapped workforce remaining to the German war economy, with hundreds of thousands of prisoners dispatched to work in construction, bomb disposal, and manufacturing. In the name of economic efficiency, the SS-WVHA attempted to militate against the effects of SS ‘‘sport’’ as practiced by Eicke commandants. The results were mixed and the WVHA did nothing about the annihilation of physically exhausted prisoners or the mass murder of able-bodied Jews during Operation Reinhard. In order to exploit their labor more extensively, private industry modestly improved detainee treatment.

The camps’ last phase, 1944 to 1945, witnessed the disastrous evacuations or ‘‘death marches’’ of malnourished and weakened prisoners from territories adjacent to front-line areas. As Mr. Berg’s account demonstrates, these marches often assumed an inertia of their own, as the SS marched their exhausted victims with little sense of direction, except to get away from the Allies. Lest the proximity of Allied planes and troops raise morale, the SS warned more than once that their last bullets were reserved for the prisoners.
15

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♦ ♦ ♦

The
Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft
(Community of Interests, Dye Industry, Public Corporation, or I.G. Farben) inaugurated its Auschwitz project during the camp system’s fourth phase. Preparations for the chemical plant began during the critical nine months between Germany’s frustration in the Battle of Britain in September 1940 and Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which started on 22 June 1941. It is easy to lose sight of these two strategic facts, which are significant for understanding how rapidly the conditions for planning this complicated project changed in wartime Germany. With the Luftwaffe’
s
defeat in the Battle of Britain, the Reich demanded that I.G.

Farben expand synthetic rubber (Buna) and oil production in the expectation of a prolonged war, despite the firm’s well-known concern about the construction of excessive production capacity. Royal Air Force Bomber Command’s raid on the second I.G. Buna plant at Hu¨ls in the fall of 1940 reinforced government fears of an aerial threat against Germany’s small but strategically vital synthetic rubber supply, which led to more insistent calls for the construction of an eastern Buna plant, at relatively safe remove from Allied bombe
rs.16

Careful surveys by Buna expert and I.G.
Vorstand
(managing board) member Dr. Otto Ambros in December 1940 revealed a huge stretch of land in the village of Dwoŕy, at the nexus of the Vistula, Sola, and Przemsza Rivers as the optimal site. Its location five kilometers from the new Auschwitz concentration camp nursed unproven allegations, at Nuremberg and later, that the firm selected the site exclusively or partly because of its proximity to

‘‘slave’’ labor. The executives did not discuss the labor issue, however, until convinced of the site’s long-term viability, which included access to essential raw materials, electrical power, excellent rail communications, and space for future growth. An oil firm’s previous bid for the same property led Farben to graft oil production 288

SCHIESSHAUS LUCK

onto the synthetic rubber project. For the German chemical industry, this decision amounted to an unprecedented amalgamation of low-temperature polymerization with high-temperature/high-pressure hydrogenation. The Nazi Four-Year Plan (VJP) chief, Reichsmarschall Hermann Go¨ring, ordered the firm to utilize Auschwitz prisoners in the construction of the war plant. Go¨ring’s assistant, Dr. Carl Krauch, VJP’s authority on chemical questions and titular head of the I.G. Farben Supervisory Board (
Aufsichtsrat
), later boasted that
he
had secured camp labor on the firm’s behalf.