The Theory and Practice of Hell (55 page)

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the SS Medical Officers, but Sommer could not keep his fingers off this specialized medical field. Air, chloral hydrate and evipan were his favorite agents and he used them to kill many prisoners.

An illustration of Sommer’s collaboration with the SS physicians and the abysmal hypocrisy which the system com bined with its barbarities, is the martyrdom of the Con fessional Minister Schneider.

Pastor Schneider was brought to Buchenwald in September 1937. At the time there was a daily flag-raising ceremony, and when Schnieder refused to take off his cap before the Nazi emblem, he at once received twenty-five lashes and was thrown into the bunker. He remained there for more than eighteen months, until he was finally murdered, having suf fered indescribable agonies. Fritz Mannchen, a Communist who spent some time in the same cell with Schneider, reports that the minister was beaten by Sommer each time the door was opened. Later on, Schneider’s cell was kept perpetually dark. Water stood two inches deep on the floor and the walls were forever wet. During his entire period of incarceration, the minister was not permitted once to wash, was never escorted to the shower, as was customary with other prisoners. As a result his clothing became infested with lice. His body was covered with festering sores, inches across, the result of beatings. Of course he never received dressings or treatment. It is almost beyond comprehension that a man could survive such treatment for so long a period of time. It was this very endurance that seems to have provoked Sommer to fury. He could not bring himself to kill his victim outright. He had to torture the man to death slowly. Schneider was fed only at irregular intervals and faded away to skin and bones. In the end even Sommer grew impatient and one day he fed Schneider poison. As always when he received food, the minister ate only very little, and the poison failed of its effect. During the final period Schneider had actually been taken to the hospital on several occasions to receive heart stimulants. On the pretext of obtaining treatment for him, Sominer had the Camp Medical Officer apply ice-cold compresses until the minister died of heart failure. The very day before his death he received a beating at Sommer’s hands.

Schneider’s wife and children requested permission of the

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Commandant to see their husband and father once more. For propaganda reasons, Koch assented. To conceal the frightful mutilations that disfigured the body, an SS barber applied make-up to the face and covered the head with a wig. The minister then lay in state in the troop garage, decorated with flowers for the occasion. The family took a tearful farewell of its head and was escorted out by Koch himself. “ Your husband was my best prisoner,” he told Frau Schneider. “ I was about to tell him of his discharge, when he died of heart failure!”

Apart from the places of execution already spoken of, the Buchenwald SS also used at times the dog kennels, where a portable, collapsible gallows made quick work possible. Buchenwald also had a liquidation plant of its own beyond the barbed wire, beside the riding academy. This was strictly a shooting affair. Buchenwald headquarters had a code number for this detail—“ 99.” The SS noncoms were assigned to it in rotation, unless they volunteered.

The unsuspecting victims were almost invariably Russian prisoners of war. They were herded into the stable, where the SS officer in charge of the murder detail delivered a brief ad dress that was translated: “ You are now in a collecting camp. To avoid the danger of contagion, you are to be examined, disinfected and bathed. Take off your jacket first, then fold your trousers neatly and place your shoes at the side. Put your dogtags inside your shoes, to avoid confusion.”

The SS noncoms went about in white smocks, pretending to be physicians. Then came the command: “ The first six men, ready for bathing!” One loudspeaker blared out music at full volume, while through another names and numbers were called. The bloody tragedy itself took place at the other end of the building. The victims selected for “ bathing” were taken to a small room with soundproof doors and walls. It was tiled and otherwise equipped like a shower room. An embrasure about a foot wide and an inch high was cut into one door. Through this an SS man shot down the victims with a machine pistol.

Sometimes the men were not all mortally hit; but when all were down they were thrown into a truck that was lined with galvanized iron. The showers were turned on to wash away the blood—and the next contingent lined up. Sometimes this

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went on from nine o’clock in the evening to five o ’clock in the morning, with some five hundred men being “ bathed.”

Initially the SS had used a killing machine, but this was superseded when it did not work fast enough. It operated as follows: there was a raised wooden platform, with a vertical beam, ostensibly for measuring body height. The beam, however, concealed a truncheon suspended at shoulder height. When the victim stepped on the platform the truncheon was tripped, smashing the skull or breaking the neck.

This machine did not always kill. Those who were merely injured were nevertheless carted off to the crematory, where the coup de grace was administered with a big oaken club. Zbigniev Fuks, an assistant in the crematory, had the harrowing experience o f having a Russian prisoner of war, brought in with a batch o f bodies, actually address him: “ Give me your hand, friend!” He had been lying, naked and bloody, atop a whole heap o f corpses. SS Technical Sergeant Warnstedt, chief of the Buchenwald Crematory, instantly leaped up and killed the man with a shot from his gun.

When the execution shipments grew too large, the prisoners had to strip in the open air outside the stable. They were then lined up in big batches in the riding hall and mowed down with a machine-gun. Sawdust was sprinkled over the blood and the next batch admitted. Unlimited quantities of liquor were available for the killers.

The victims were not always ignorant of the fate awaiting them. On occasion one of the naked men would try to escape and run through the guard line drawn up around the area. In one such case the Ukrainian SS man refused to shoot. Henceforth only German SS men were employed as guards.

Civilians too were liquidated in the stable. One day a bus from the Apolda Transportation Company arrived, bearing a number of well-dressed Germans and a few officers. This was about four o ’clock in the afternoon. The arrivals entered the stable, engaged in animated conversation. As soon as they were inside, a guard line drew up. Two hours later the crematory received a new batch of bodies.

The entire SS crew of “ Detail 99” was decorated with the

War Merit Cross.

Only a very few camps had gas chambers of their own. But

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there were mobile gas chambers, vans that somewhat re sembled the closed “ Black Marias” of the police, for emergency use in exterminating prisoners. Gassing in these cars seems to have been slow, since they usually drove about a good deal before they stopped to discharge the corpses.

At Auschwitz, however, there was a huge gas plant—ac tually at Birkenau, a part of Auschwitz—which embraced five crematories together with four gas bunkers built into the ground. Each of these had an average capacity of twelve to fifteen hundred persons. The fifth crematory had no fur naces. It was only a huge fire pit.

In all the eastern camps and ghettos, designation for death in the gas chamber was known as “ selection” —under standably a term that came to spread panic. In Auschwitz proper the “ selectees” were assigned to special barracks, where they were kept under sharp guard. They often remained in isolation for two or three days, generally without food, for they were already considered “ scratched.” At the Auschwitz hospital patients of all kinds were never permitted to exceed ten per cent of the camp strength. Any excess numbers were automatically sent to the gas chambers. The personnel servicing this plant numbered about one thousand prisoners, all of them Jews. The victims were lined up before the pit naked and shot down by the SS, the bodies—or the wounded!

—toppling directly into fire. The Camp Commandant, SS Captain Kramer, never missed these mass executions. He generally stood by beaming, slapping his thighs with glee when the scene grew especially exciting. Not all the prisoners were what came to be known as “ Moslems,” men who were physically and mentally broken, who allowed anything to be done to them. There were prisoners who went on their death march with militant songs on their lips, shouting to the SS, “ We today, you tomorrow!” As for those who were neither apathetic nor militant, no one will ever know what went on in their minds.

The gas chambers were simplicity itself, yet they were planned with diabolical ingenuity. Each chamber had the ap pearance of a public bath, and was so represented to the vic tims. In the dressing-rooms there were signs, in all the prin cipal languages of Europe, instructing the prisoners to tie their shoes together and fold their clothes neatly to avoid loss.

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Hot coffee was promised after the bath. From the dressing rooms the way led directly to the “ bath,” where hydrocyanic acid gas was admitted through the shower heads and ven tilator outlets as soon as the doors had been closed. Death took as long as four or five minutes, depending on the amount of gas available. During this time the most dreadful screams could be heard from the men, women and children inside, as their lungs slowly ruptured. Any bodies that showed signs of life when the doors had been opened were clubbed into quiescence. The prisoners of the service squad then dragged out the bodies, stripped off any rings, and cut off the hair, which was bundled into sacks and shipped to plants for processing. (In 1944 a young Jew from Brno, Yanda Weiss, was a member of this squad. He is the source of the details here presented, which have been confirmed from other sources.)

The bodies were then stacked in piles of ten each. SS Technical Sergeant Moll, in charge of the Auschwitz crematories, made his tour of inspection, after which the bodies were thrown into the furnaces or the fire pit. Moll was fond of placing naked women against the edge of the fire pit and watching them fall into the flames when they were shot in the abdomen. On one occasion he found a prisoner from the service squad in possession of a ring. He had the man drenched with gasoline and then set afire. Another man he suspended by the hands, shooting at him until the arm parted. He then repeated the process with the man’s feet.