The Theory and Practice of Hell (56 page)

On another occasion Roll Call Officer Schillinger made an Italian dancer perform naked before the crematory. Taking advantage of a favorable moment, the woman approached him, siezed his gun, and shot him down. In the ensuing struggle she herself was killed, at least escaping death by gas.

Early in 1945 Auschwitz was evacuated and the gas chambers blown up. Some of the SS fiends who had done this work were transferred to Buchenwald, where they went about boasting of their foul deeds. They were plentifully supplied with valuables. They kept reminiscing about the “ wild life” at Auschwitz, with its “ strong medicine and constant alcoholic indulgences.”

The chief victims of Auschwitz were Jews from all the countries of Europe that had come under Hitler’s rule. But

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there were also Poles, Russians, aged and decrepit prisoners of other nationalities, and a contingent of the sick. The highest “ output” attained by Auschwitz was 34,000 bodies, in one continuous day and night shift. According to the con fession of Camp Commandant Hoss, during his reign alone, from 1942 to early 1944, some 2,500,000 persons were gassed at Auschwitz.

In a number of camps the SS, for reasons of “ efficiency,” carried out the executions ordered by Himmler or the Main Economic and Administrative Office immediately in or at the crematories. As a rule the prisoners were garroted, clubbed or hanged. Strong hooks were set into the crematory walls for this purpose. In Buchenwald there were forty-eight such hooks. The bodies thus had to be carried but a few paces to the furnaces. These executions were carried out by SS noncoms with the aid of the Prisoner Foreman of the crematory.

Time and again persons were brought in from the outside, or prisoners were called to the gatehouse, only to be taken straight to the crematory and butchered, always in the pres ence of the Camp Medical Officer and a headquarters representative. There was no distinction as to age, sex, profession or nationality. The victims included Russian prisoners of war, German and Polish women, British and French parachutists, slave laborers from the East, Jewish businessmen, Italian anti-Fascists and camp inmates. Their full number is unknown.

The prisoner registry at Buchenwald secretly maintained a list covering ten months (from March 28, 1944, to January 30, 1945) for Buchenwald itself and eight and a half months (from January 28, 1944, to October 11, 1944) for Camp “ Dora” near Nordhausen, then a Buchenwald subsidiary. This list, which has been preserved, contains all the names that were available, together with number, birth date, profession, nationality, and date of execution. It lists 288 names, including 10 Czechs, 1 Yugoslav, 47 Poles, 169

Russians, 1 Latvian, 1 Italian, 4 Germans, 1 Netherlands

citizen, 12 Belgians, 22 Frenchmen, 9 Britons, and 1

Canadian. All in all perhaps 1,100 victims were hanged in the Buchenwald crematory.

It happened on occasion that some Gestapo branch had already done the dirty work, merely sending on the bodies to

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be cremated. They were generally packed in straw sacks. In the fall of 1943 the remains of two old people—man and wife—thus arrived. One of the garments bore an iden tification: “ Hirschmann, Amstad.” In this instance the Weimar Gestapo itself had indulged the pleasure of torturing a defenseless Jewish couple to death.

Himmler prescribed cremation for the disposal of the dead in all the concentration camps. There were such enormous quantities of bodies, however, that frequently difficulties arose in keeping them until cremation. Before there were special morgues, the bodies were piled in heaps, sometimes like cordwood, in various camp buildings such as the privies. Initially it was not uncommon for some of the bodies still to show signs of life.

There were special corpse-carrying details. In many of the camps they were originally composed of Jews. Later they were chiefly Poles. These squads were generally well fed—they were on constant call and the work was hard. At almost any hour of the day or night the public-address system might ring out: “ Corpse carriers to the gatehouse!”

It goes without saying that no ceremony of any kind at tended the handling of the bodies. Only actual witnesses to such scenes can do them justice. One of the carriers would forcibly turn up the rigid arms of the naked corpse. The other would take hold of the feet. They would swing it back and forth—one, two, three!—and the body would hurtle atop a dozen others on the cart.

Until 1940 Buchenwald bodies were cremated at crema tories in Weimar and Jena. Bodies were supposed to be dressed in a shroud bearing name and number, and to lie in a coffin. Actually the number was often simply penciled on the skin and the bodies placed in a primitive box—two to a box if they were emaciated enough. On one occasion a hearse dropped a coffin en route to the crematory, and the bodies of two prisoners, reduced to skin and bones, fell out. This hap pened directly outside a Weimar caf6.

In 1940 and before the permanent crematory was installed in 1941, a mobile crematory, borrowed from somewhere, was installed at Buchenwald. The combustion chamber was small, and there were so many bodies that they had to be stuffed in.

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Occasionally limbs were not burned up and lay scattered in the roll-call area.

An autopsy was supposed to be conducted on every body

before cremation, the findings to be embodied in a report. The prisoners charged with this job were anything but anatomists. For years Buchenwald autopsies were in charge of a former baker, pimp and homosexual, a man with a long prison record. The fellow’s name was Stockel and he was later killed by other prisoners. His successor had once been a car penter. During the final year, until the fall of 1944, the Buchenwald autopsy room was under the supervision of a Czech Premonstratesian monk by the name of Thyl who time and again was saved from Dachau transports because of his extraordinarily humane character and his shining spirit of fellowship.

SS physicians rarely performed autopsies, though oc casionally medical men from university clinics would come to conduct studies on the bodies of prisoners. As for the dissecting-room personnel, even had it had the desire and a sense of responsibility, it would have been utterly unequal to its assigned task. Post-mortem reports were simply fabricated. They then served as the basis for falsified hospital reports, especially after mass liquidations. The autopsy, of course, would instantly establish the mode of murder. Killing was often done by injection with air, so that air embolisms would be found; or by means of carbolic acid, the odor of which would at once pervade the room; or by means of evipan. Strychnine, morphine and other alkaloids were used to kill prisoners, as was chloral hydrate. As many as thirty bodies of prisoners poisoned thus might arrive in the post mortem room in a single day. In every case the post-mortem report had to agree with the instructions received from the hospital beforehand. The following specimen is reasonably representative of all the camps:

Prisoner's Serial Number
______
First and Last Name

_____________
Date o f Death
______
A t th e
______
Con centration Camp Hospital
.

Admitted to the hospital o n
______
[this was dated back an appropriate period
j,
complaining o f fever and pain in

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EUGEN
KOGON

the left side o f the chest
.
Careful clinical and X-ray examination established pneumonia o f the lower left lobe. Despite intensive therapy, all efforts to improve the con
-
dition o f the patient failed. Heart disease, treated with car
-
diac drugs, further complicated the clinical picture. The patient died after prolonged suffering on
______
a t
______
o'clock.

Cause o f death: cardiac weakness complicated by pneumonia.

(Signature o f the Camp Medical Officer.)

In the case of men officially executed by the firing squad, the report would always read, notwithstanding the frequent signs of mistreatment: “ No other marks of violence except those hereinbefore described were noted.” The “ marks of violence” were wounds from rifle bullets fired at close range.

In order to evaluate the bodies of prisoners scientifically, a Pathology Section was installed in the large concentration-camp hospitals. It was given supervision over the post mortem room. It prepared all kinds of specimens for the study of pathology. They were sent to the Institute of Hygiene of the
Waffen SS
in Berlin or to the SS Medical Academy in Graz, and sometimes even exhibited in a local showroom. By and large the whole idea of these Pathology Sections was arrant nonsense. Only in the rarest cases were they run by qualified men.

The first man in charge at Buchenwald was SS Captain Neumann, later sent to Shanghai on government orders. From the fall of 1940, SS Captain Muller ran the Pathology Section. He was later assigned to Hitler’s headquarters near Berchtesgaden.

Muller collaborated with Dr. Wagner, a Camp Medical Of ficer who was writing a doctor’s dissertation on tattoo markings. Both of them searched the whole camp for tattooed men, whom they ordered photographed. The prisoners were then called to the gatehouse by Commandant Koch, selected according to the magnificence of their tattoo markings, and sent to the hospital. Soon afterward the finest skin specimens would appear in the Pathology Section, where they were prepared and for years exhibited to SS visitors as particular treasures. Koch himself had an “ artistic” table lamp