The Theory and Practice of Hell (52 page)

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL
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in person appeared at the prisoner Orderly Room—we had been instantly notified by out liaison man. He asked to see the file cards for all the Britons in camp. They included the cards for men who had died. He took out the card for Dodkin— which showed a variant spelling, by the way, namely
Dodkins
—and kept on searching until he found the card of a certain
Perkins
, a very popular British officer who had already been in Buchenwald for a year and a half and was not a member of the group of agents. The Roll Call Officer com pared the two cards and finally took them away. We thought the Gestapo must have got on the trail of the Dodkin(s) affair, perhaps suspecting that Dodkin(s) and Perkins might be iden tical, because of a certain similarity in names. We feared there would be an investigation. Perkins himself seemed to be in no danger whatever, for he knew nothing about the affair and was not, in fact, Dodkin.

What had actually happened was that an execution order for
both
men had been received, a fact we could not have an ticipated, since we had no idea that the report of Dodkin’s execution had never reached Berlin, or Prague, whither Gestapo headquarters had moved meanwhile. Because of these fateful complications no one thought of at once ad mitting Perkins to the hospital, where he might have “ sub merged,” a distinct possibility at this particular juncture. Perkins was executed that very day, a bare week before the camp was liberated by American troops.

For several months in 1944, 167 British Commonwealth pilots were in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Shortly before Christmas they were shipped out to an unknown destination.Their leader was Squadron Leader Lamason, an Australian who always maintained close liaison with Dodkin. No one knew why fliers should have been sent to a con centration camp, certainly not the fliers themselves. They lived the hard life of the Little Camp.

Chapter Seventeen

LIQUIDATION OF OTHER “ UNDESIRABLES"

As is by now well known, Hitler, at the conclusion of the Polish campaign issued a predated (September 1, 1939) secret decree authorizing “ mercy death” for patients designated as incurable by physicians. The program was put into effect by Hitler’s personal chancellery and a special department in the Reich Ministry of Interior. Apprehension and unrest among the people were, however, anticipated. (These fears proved well grounded, and as late as November 1942, Himmler, in a letter, casually disposed of them in the following words: “ It will take at least a decade to root out these narrow-minded prejudices from our people.”) To camouflage the killings, three innocent-sounding organizations were therefore created: The Reich Association, Hospital and Nursing Establishments, which located the victims; the Charitable Foundation for In stitutional Care, which financed the killings; and the Non-Profit Patient-Transport Corporation, which shipped the death candidates to the murder plants. The program, however, did not remain a secret. In 1940, when the wholesale extermination of inmates of mental institutions, purely by “ medical” selection from questionnaires, was under way, a tremendous underground turmoil arose in Germany. There

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EUGEN KOGON

was wild fear, entirely justified, that the plan was to include not merely the “ incurably sick” but also other categories of “ socially unfit life” in succession: persons unable to work, the sick, aged and feeble, serious war casualties, and finally every kind of Nazi opponent. The German nation, especially its Christian and humanitarian sections, proved to be “ narrow-minded” enough to offer a serious threat to the common war effort. As a result Hitler was constrained, in August 1941, to slow down the main aspects of his euthanasia program for the time being. It continued to be enforced to the end of the war against children, “ half-Jews” and eastern slave workers.

Naturally Herr Himmler could not forego letting his SS murder machine loose in this special field. In the con centration camps the operation was camouflaged under the code number “ 14 f 13,” so designated by the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. It was to winnow out prisoners who were mentally ill or unfit for work and, of course, Jews—in actual practice any prisoner who had run afoul of anyone with influence. A medical commission was entrusted with the task of selection. Some of its members were the very doctors who had previously been Hitler’s euthanasia emissaries, traveling over the countryside like avenging angels. It took them only a few hours on each occasion, early in 1942, to compile lists of prisoners at Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Flossenbiirg, Gross-Rosen, Neuengamme and Niederhagen, and to set their fatal medical seal on the lists. The lists con sisted simply of prisoners herded into the clutches of the medical commission by camp headquarters, and soon af terward the prisoners would be shipped out to an unknown destination. A short time later—six hours to three days, depending on the location of the camp—the personal possessions of the prisoners, including the contents of their pockets and their dentures, would be returned to the camp. We soon learned that new poison gases had been tried on the prisoners. The gases had been previously tested on cattle. Among the very first to be shipped out of Buchenwald to be gassed in this way were a whole series of political prisoners, such as the Austrian Security Director from Salzburg, Dr. Bechinie. According to reports, the mental institution at Bemburg, near Kothen, was the scene of these special gassings.

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A few surviving letters give a picture of how the operation was conducted:

Buchenwald Concentration Camp Office o f the Commandant

Weimar-Buchenwald, February 2, 1942

Subject: Jews unfitfor work in Buchenwald concentration camp.

Reference: Personal discussion. Enclosures.

2. To Mental Institution, Bernburg-on-Saale, P.O. Box No. 263.

With reference to personal discussion, enclosed herewith for further action two copies o f a list o f Jewish inmates of the Buchenwald concentration camp who are sick and unfit for work.

The Camp Medical Officer Buchenwald concentration camp

signed HOVEN,

SS First Lieutenant (Res.).

The reply:

Bernburg Mental Institution Bernburg, March 5, 1942 File reference: Be go-Pt

To: Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar

Attention: The Commandant Reference: Our letter o f March 3, 1942

Subject: Thirty-sixprisoners, twelfth list o f February 2,

Our letter o f March 3 requested you to make the remaining thirty-six prisoners available to us on the oc casion o f thefinal shipment on March 18, 1942. Because of the absence o f our Chief Medical Officer, who must issue medical certificates for those prisoners, we now request that you ship the prisoners on March 11, 1942, rather than on March 18, together with their records which will be returned on March 11, 1942.

Heil Hitler!

(signed)
G o d e n s c h w e i g .

226
EUGEN KOGON

• • •

The Gross-Rosen concentration camp had sent a list of 214 names of prisoners. The doctors of death at Bemburg replied:

March 24, 1942, seems to us the most suitable date o f arrival, since we are being supplied from other con centration camps in the meantime and we need an in termediate period for technical reasons. I f you can deliver the prisoners by bus, we suggest two shipments o f 107 prisoners each, on Tuesday, March 24, and Thursday, March 26. We request your reactions to our proposal and your final decision, so that we may make further disposition.

Dr. Eberl and his assistant Godenschweig had a long history of association with the SS and they continued to “ make further disposition” on its behalf. As shown by a let ter of March 19, 1943, from Dr. Hoven, dealingwith the Buchenwald subsidiary camp at the Junkers Works, Schonebeck-on-Elbe, they had a little sideline of cremating the bodies of prisoners without death certificate: