The Theory and Practice of Hell (14 page)

The animals enjoyed an excellent diet. As late as 1944,

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when there was a serious food shortage in camp, the bears, monkeys and birds got a daily ration of meat abstracted from the prisoners* mess. The bears also received honey and jam, the monkeys mashed potatoes with milk, oat flakes, zwieback and white bread. The whole installation had to be carefully maintained by trained gardeners. The permanent falconry detail consisted of six to ten men. Goring, Reich Huntsman in Chief, never even set eyes on this park. But the SS had special pamphlets printed, advertising the attraction in Weimar and vicinity, and extracted an admission price of one mark a head. The riding hall for Frau Koch was about 120 by 300 feet in size and at least 60 feet high. It held a tanbark ring and the walls were surfaced with mirrors. Construction took place at such a mad pace that some thirty prisoners died of accidents or exhaustion. Construction costs ran to about 250,000 marks. When the hall had been finished, Frau Koch used it several times a week for morning rides, each time for a quarter or half hour, the SS band being required to furnish music from a special platform. After the trial of her husband,

Frau Koch was admitted to the police jail in Weimar and the riding hall was used as storage depot.

In the area outside the prisoner compound there were, at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, special barracks or small plain houses in which certain prominent personages were in terned. These prisoners were kept from all contact with the others. The SS seems to have been anxious to counter rumors that these well-known figures were
in
concentration camps. In Sachsenhausen several years were spent in this fashion by the former Austrian Chancellor, Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, and his second wife who voluntarily shared his detention, as well as by several German general officers who had fallen into disfavor with Hitler.

In Buchenwald the isolation barracks for celebrities were hidden deep in the woods, opposite the SS officers’ resi dences. It was protected by a solid ten-foot stockade and by a crew of twelve SS guards. In the final stage, just before the residents were evacuated to Bavaria on orders from Himmler, they numbered fifty-four, including the former leader of the German Social Democratic party, Rudolf Breitscheid, and his wife; the Italian Princess Mafalda of Hesse with her servant; Maria Ruhnar, a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect;

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Fritz Thyssen, German industrialist and one of the chief financiers of the Nazi party in the early days—he had already been in custody for four and a half years, according to his own statement, first in a mental institution, then in Sachsenhausen; Rochling, another industrialist; six members of the family of Count von Stauffenberg1; General von Falkenhausen; five cabinet members of the Hungarian provisional government; the wife of the German ambassador von Hassel; Frau Goerdeler2 with her children; the wife of General Lindemann, executed after July 20, 1944; at one time the former French Premier, Lfcon Blum; and the wives of several German labor leaders with their children.

Besides this building there was at Buchenwald the so-called Pine Grove, a group of several wooden barracks where 140 to 200 Rumanians of the Iron Guard were sheltered. Originally they had lived in an isolation block of the compound proper. In the Pine Grove they were kept busy as precision mechanics. After a number of them had been killed in the air raid on Buchenwald, they were transferred to Hohenlychen on orders from Himmler.

The SS residential settlements were generally placed around the outskirts of the headquarters area, two or three miles away, at most pleasant locations. They were, of course, con structed by prisoner labor. These handsome one-and two-family houses, each with its own garden, were occupied by lower ranking SS officers, not deemed important enough to live in the headquarters area, and by the permanently assigned SS noncoms.

At Buchenwald the south slope of the Ettersberg was

somewhat less exposed to the weather than was the rest of the camp. There the prisoners had to build an asphalt road named Eicke Street. The residences of leading SS officers were built along this road. In the end ten luxurious villas equipped with every comfort stood there. These tasteful wooden houses had massive basements, garages of their own and wide terraces with a magnificent view of the Thuringian countryside. Long columns of prisoners dragged up the stone blocks for the terraces from the quarry.

1 Count von Stauffenberg planted the bomb that almost killed Hitler on July 20, 1944.—
Tr.

2
Goerdeler was a leader in the plot of July 20, 1944.—
Tr.

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These homes were inhabited by the Commandant, the Officers-in-Charge, the Commander of Troops and certain other SS officers with their families and servants. Each house, in addition, had its prisoner orderlies, chiefly Jehovah’s Wit nesses of both sexes. Central hot-water and heating plants in the houses were likewise serviced by prisoners.

A sharp contrast to headquarters and homes was offered by the barbed-wire enclosure. The predominant impression was one of desolation. It was a bare area—a clearing when the site lay in the woods—surrounded by an electrically charged barbed wire fence many feet high. Every 250 feet there was a guard tower of wood or masonry, with a roofed-over plat form from which a machine-gun was trained on the com pound. The guard on it was relieved every three hours. Beyond barbed wire and towers the camp was surrounded by an area several yards wide called the “ neutral zone,” on which the machine-guns were zeroed in. Entrance to the camp was gained by a gatehouse, a narrow structure, generally of two stories extending a considerable distance from either side of the actual gateway, which was surmounted by another tower affording a view of the entire camp. In addition to a large clock, this tower carried the floodlights that illuminated the entire area at night. One wing of the gatehouse held the of fices of the Officer-in-Charge on duty, the other, special camp prison cells. A public-address system connected the building to all important points in camp.

Inside the gate a large bare space extended into the com pound. This was the so-called roll-call area. It was unrelieved by a single blade of grass, a quagmire in poor weather, a desert of dust when it was dry.

Here the “ Little Camps” were established, either tem porarily or permanently, in order not only to accommodate an excess of inmates when the camps grew overcrowded but to effect special liquidation programs. A section of the com pound was marked off, once again surrounded with barbed wire, and filled with emergency barracks. Tent camps too were created for this purpose.

At Buchenwald, for example, a Little Camp stood on part of the roll-call area, between the gatehouse and the first row of barracks from October 1939, to the spring of 1940. Four tents and a board shack were surrounded by a high barbed-

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wire fence. Part of the fenced-in area served as a separate roll-call area, while another spot served as a dump for dead bodies. One corner held a cage of barbed wire, called the “ Rose Garden.” It consisted of nothing but barbed wire. It served as a receptacle for special victims, who were there starved to death, at 5°F. by day, and down to 22° below zero at night, watched by their comrades, who never knew when their turn might come. Not far away was the latrine. The Little Camp at the time had neither stoves nor straw pallets nor lockers nor blankets. The fate of its inmates will be described when the story of the Poles in Buchenwald is discussed.

In July 1943, 2,000 French prisoners came to Buchenwald from Compiegne. All the barracks were already overcrowded and the newcomers were placed in a fenced-in area beside the truck garden, below the last row of barracks. Two days later the SS provided five tents, each with a capacity of 200 men, and regarded the matter as closed. There were no cots, blankets, benches, no water for drinking or washing, not even the most necessary clothing, no mess gear, spoons, laundry, drugs, drainage, latrines—in short, not even the most primitive necessities of life. From the first day the entire camp was haunted by the specter of an epidemic. The prisoner ad ministration tried feverishly to improve conditions in the tent camp. With material pilfered from SS depots, a water and sewerage line, latrines and a storeroom for bread were illegally constructed. Blankets, mess gear and spoons were scraped together. Dispensaries began to function, drainage ditches were dug, the roll-call area within the tent camp was paved, calcium chloride was frequently sprinkled throughout the area. Late in August the five tents were supplemented by a barracks constructed from salvaged lumber, and in the fall they were replaced by three barracks built to one side of the tents. The tents themselves were gradually torn down—the last one did not disappear until January 1945. The SS paid little further attention to the matter.

Construction of this new Little Camp had actually begun as early as 1942, when the influx of non-Germans into the con centration camps began to reach staggering proportions. Together with the buildings just mentioned it ultimately num bered seventeen barracks. There were 1,500 and even 2,000