The Theory and Practice of Hell (45 page)

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Nazi Germany and in 1938 had returned to Vienna as
Gauleiter
. A year later he was involved in a huge foreign-exchange scandal. Public prosecution, however, was quashed and Globocnig was shifted to the SS. Among countless others, 1,150 Viennese Jews fell into his clutches in 1942. Only three or four of them survived “ resettlement0 ! I hope that some day there will be an exhaustive documentation of the awful fate the Nazis prepared for the Jews of eastern Europe. It is likely to be one of the ghastliest records in the history of the world. To spare the sensibilities of those who need suffer nothing worse than the reading, I confine myself to two final reports.

A young German Jew, Hans Baermann of Cologne, was forced out of school at the age of fourteen and on December 7,1941, was carried off to the east with his parents.

We were notified o f our evacuation three weeks beforehand by the Cologne Gestapo
.
We were enjoined from selling any o f our personal property, all o f which ex cept for the furniture, was to be packed. Every family af fected by the evacuation also had to prepare a washtubfull o f foodstuffs. With six trunks and three knapsacks, grips and briefcases, my family arrived at the Cologne fairgrounds at the appointed time
.
There were about 1,000 persons in the shipment
.
Our luggage was examined for valuables, and jewelry, watches, wedding rings and all identification papers were confiscated. Another physical examination left each person with but ten marks. We were then herded into the main hall on the fairgrounds, which had been enclosed with barbed wire, and we were left on the wet wood shavingsfor twenty-four hours.

On December 8, at four o'clock in the morning, only a single trunk having been left to us, we were taken to the Deutz railroad station. The trip lasted eighty hours and ended at Riga. There was no food on the way, and water on but one occasion. At the Skirotava freight yards we were driven from the cars by Latvian SS men armed with whips and iron rods. There was no question any longer of taking anything along. At 11° F. below zero we started out on the painful march to the Riga ghetto. Two days before we arrived there had been 34,500 people there. We saw

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only corpses and pools o f blood and frightful devastation in all the homes.

Together with 177people
,
my parents and I were herded

into a room about 150 square feet in area. Here we had to live. That night some 4,500 Latvian Jews came looking for their families but found no one. This was the surviving remnant o f the ghetto. The other 30,000 had been escorted to a valley where they were mowed down by machine-guns. After the massacre the hills on either side had been blasted, burying the bodies under mountains o f rock.

We livedfor two days on thefood wefound in the room. Another shipment o f 1,000 Jews from Cassel had mean while arrived. Two days after our arrival 200 Jews, aged eighteen to forty, were taken to Salaspils camp, twelve miles from Riga. I was among them. Frozen and starved, we reached a snow-covered clearing that held but a single, large, roofless barracks o f wood. Some 4,000 Jews from southern Germany already lived in it, and they attacked us like wolvesfor food and drink. Our hair was shorn and we were then assigned, three men to a bunk eighteen inches high, sixfeet long and less than five feet wide. It was bitter cold and the slats were covered with ice. On the third day after our arrival we saw ourfirst bread and a horse-drawn sleigh loaded with potato peelings from the SS kitchen at Riga. An SS sergeant named Nickel introduced himself as the Commandant, and immediately assigned us to work
,
to be performed without overcoats and without fires. The construction program embraced forty-five barracks in which Latvians and Russians were later quartered. This program was fulfilled, all but five barracks. Watch towers also had to be constructed and the entire area enclosed with barbed wire.

I spent seven months starving in this death camp. In the end I weighed only eighty pounds and was infested with lice. Reduced virtually to a skeleton, I was photographed for the
Sturmer.1

Of 15,000 men who passed through this camp in time
,
virtually all wasted away. Only 192 survived. I was among

1
A violently anti-Semitic and semi-pornographic magazine published by Julius Streicher, who was convicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and hanged.—
Tr.

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them. On August 2, 1942, camp construction having been completed, I was taken back to the Riga ghetto.

Food and shelter in the Riga ghetto were not quite as bad as at Salaspits. The atrocities, however, were not far behind the abuse and arbitrary terror practiced in the camp. Details o f young men werepromptly assembled who had to dig mass graves in the Bickernick Forest. These pits were fifty feet long, thirteen feet wide and six and a half feet deep, and they were intended for shipments from Bielefeld, Dusseldorf, Hanover, Berlin, Vienna, Dresden, Leipzig, Cassel, Dortmund, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Munich, as well as from Czechoslovakia and Austria. Im mediately on their arrival, the victims were taken to the woods in trucks o f the air force, the army, the SS and the Security Service. These operations were all in the hands o f Major Arreis o f the Latvian SS. A t the pits, twenty men were picked out for each pit, then another two hundred were brought and stripped without regard to age or sex and shot down with machine-guns. The twenty who had been previously selected had to see to it that the bodies landed in the pits; then they shared the same fate. These atrocities were quite generally known. Air force personnel who wit nessed them often talked about them.

After November 1942, a simpler method was chosen to get rid o f the people. This was a closed truck with trailers, into which a total o f two hundred persons could be crowded. En route a gas valve would be opened. The trucks always headed into the Bickernick Forest and came back an hour later with only the clothes.

Mail communication with the outside world and the possession o f money were punished by death. Occasionally starving Jews tried to trade a garment for a sandwich. Ghetto inmates caught in such an attempt first received twenty-five lashes and then were hanged.

A t a later date the Commandant, SS Firqt Lieutenant

Krause o f Leipzig, had all persons over fifty segregated in the ghetto. There were 2,200 men and women. My parents escaped only by falsifying their birth dates. This selection process also affected children under thirteen. Mothers who refused to part from their children were permitted to ac company them. The destination o f the shipment was given

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Dunamunde. That was deliberate deception. The goal o f the shipment was never reached.

A week later, in November 1943, the ghetto was dissolved. Russian refugees were quartered in it. The remaining 1,500 inmates were transferred to the Kaiser
-
wald concentration camp near Riga. They included my parents. The Commandant there was SS Lieutenant-Colonel Sauer. Some o f the inmates were parceled out to special army installations—the commissary depot, the motor pool, the clothing office,
etc.
I was among the latter. On ordersfrom Berlin all women and girls had their

hair shorn.

As luck would have it, I managed to get news o f my parents two months later. They were tortured by hunger. My assignment permitted me to save up some o f my food, and I found a way o f getting small quantities to my parents. Both my father and my mother worked on the banks o f the Diina River. They had to drag logs out o f the water and up to a sawmill. This transport had to be accomplished entirely by human labor. The Senior Camp Inmate at Kaiserwald was Xaver Apel, a convict under sentence of life who had been a member o f the Sass gang in Berlin. He was called Mr. X in camp. He was assisted by another in mate who wore the green triangle, Hannes Dressier of Hamburg. Both o f them were on an excellent footing with SS Lieutenant-Colonel Sauer, who supported and ap proved their every act. Mr. X was in the habit o f throwing inmates no longer able to do a full day's work into the Diina and preventing any attempt at rescue. They were then scratched from the rolls with the notation “heart failure." One inmate, who hadfallen ill o f dysentery, gave away his food. Mr. X got wind o f it and had the man thrown in a large kettle o f boiling water, intended for preparing coffee for the camp. The sick man was scalded to death, but the coffee waspreparedfrom the water all the same.

SS Major Krebsbach o f Cologne was always picking on the sick andfeeble. In May 1944, myfather too waspurged for this reason, because o f a slight leg injury. The destination o f the shipment was again given as Diinamiinde. My father managed to get afarewell message

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to me. It said that the gas truck was parked in his immediate vicinity. He appealed to me to continue assisting my mother as much as I could. In less than an hour, he said, his own torments would be over.

Early in July 1944, I was taken to the Stutthof con centration camp, with 1,350 men and the same number o f women. There again the sick and feeble were picked out and taken to the crematory, after first having been killed by means unknown to me. My mother is supposed to have come to Stutthof, two months later. I never heard anything more o f her. I myself, together with others, was shortly af terward transferred to Buchenwald.

And now for a picture of the heroic struggle of the Jews in Warsaw, as reported by Vladimir Blumenfeld, who reached Buchenwald on April 5, 1945, after an adventurous pilgrimage.

The entire Jewish population o f Warsaw was registered immediately after the occupation by the German armed forces. Those who refused to register were liable to capital punishment. Resettlement resulted in the creation o f a great ghetto in which initially some half a million Jews lived. Additions from the countryside swelled the number to three-quarters o f a million. The situation continued essentially unchanged until July 22, 1942, the day the ex termination o f the Jews began.