The Theory and Practice of Hell (67 page)

Prince Waldeck created an “ Office for the Germanization of Eastern Nations” —in Cassel! It’s real purpose was to offer refuge to SS shirkers and their harems. Prisoners who came to Buchenwald from other concentration camps told stories of similar SS practices. The Nazi apostles and warmongers fought a tenacious battle to escape the fate they had prepared for the nation.

A show of honor, loyalty, a clean family life within the con secrated SS fellowship—these “ virtues” by no means ex cluded open vileness, treachery and sexual dissipation with regard to those outside the group and especially to groups regarded as inferior—if it appeared appropriate to SS pur poses. Indeed, the SS almost demanded such a double stan dard, as we have come to call it. The constant references to “ high ideals” that appear in SS writings and speeches do not disprove its existence. These ideals shared only their names with those of mankind and Christianity generally. They had but a conditional validity, as a code for the “ Master Race” applicable only so long as it appeared useful.

It is not my thesis that the individual SS members were aware of these contradictions. Most of them were far too un critical. They harbored a deep hatred of purely objective in telligence—every kind, that is, except that which was purely a means to an end. They were quite simply attracted to the SS idealogy as the mode of life that appealed to them and agreed with them. And because this mode of life made no intellectual demands worth mentioning on them, while permitting their

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instincts free play, they accepted more or less willingly the harsh and inexorable disciplinary limitations designed to channel those instincts. This actually afforded them the ad ditional gratification of seeking compensation for the com pulsion which drill occasionally imposed on them by “ taking it out” on others, even on their own kind, with a great show of strength and virility. Here at last the “ inner son of a bitch” could be projected to someone else and “ licked” with an en thusiasm that ranged all the way to sadism.

It is in the very nature of such a fellowship that from the outset, and more and more so in the course of its growth, it is composed of members whose cultural deficiencies prevent them from occupying a satisfactory position in normal society. Any inquiry into the origins of SS members will show that in almost every case they were men who were maladjusted and frustrated, whom circumstances had deprived of success, whose innate endowment was slight, who often enough were total social failures. In this respect the SS was almost the epitome of National Socialism. This applies to its founders, Himmler and Heydrich, whose deep-rooted sense of in feriority was overcompensated by boundless ambition, and all the way down to the Death-Head cadres. In the course of time the black SS uniform—all but the
Waffen SS
—came to be the voluntary rallying point for all the kindred spirits among the German people, the Nazi party and the ranks of the professional and avocational soldiers—men of like mental and social make-up. It is this core that was the SS proper. All others either gradually returned to normal life of their own accord or were expelled—they were usually those who had been merely detailed to the SS against their will. As for the members of the
Waffen SS
who streamed in during the war, most of them were limited to the realization of a single SS ideal—a tough recklessness. To them this was the epitome of the SS. After the Polish campaign when the army submitted to Hitler a whole volume of documents about war atrocities committed by the SS, the
Waffen SS
replied with several volumes in kind about the army. But they knew little or nothing concrete about the SS super state or about SS aims. Those among them who in the light of our own standards were the worst, ultimately reached the Security Service and

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the concentration-camp complements. Only a Nazi victory could have shown how many of the hundreds of thousands of members of the
Waffen SS
were, or would have remained, true SS men in the fullest sense—primitive representatives of a caste whose mental reactions always took a typical, never an individual form.

Without doubt there were SS members who
were
idealists,

unselfish and high-minded. But as a rule their political sagacity, their general capacity to see and think in context were in inverse proportion to the intensity of their idealistic convictions. It took a good measure of folly to keep on

' believing in the general ideals proclaimed by Herr Himmler, in the face of the constant living evidence to the contrary. The true SS idealist, who at least gradually came to see the situation in its true light, necessarily yielded to despair. There were only three roads open to him; to get out of the SS, even if in the end it meant suicide (there were a number of such in stances); to engage in a quixotic fight for his ideals, which inevitably joined the issue and brought death; or to go to the front and find death there. It is certain that by 1944 there were no old SS members left who were still convinced and en-thusiastic SS idealists.

The natural sense of inferiority that afflicts those who have been dragged down the social scale created a strong predisposition among SS members toward hatred of men of real social prestige, of firmly held political convictions and of substantial education. With many SS men this sense of in feriority was deepened by their own illegitimate antecedents, a matter that should otherwise have been of no overwhelming importance but that denied them precisely the one thing arrogantly demanded by SS ideals—a long, stainless pedigree. Even the “ intellectuals” in the ranks of the SS—men who for some reason had never been able to finish college and also a disproportionately large number of dislodged grade-school teachers—all too frequently took out their sense of failure in arrogance, which is but the veneer of hatred.

Let a few case histories, from hundreds upon hundreds that resemble each other like rotten eggs, serve to illustrate what has been said.

SS Captain Hoven: Bom in 1903, the son of a postal of-

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ficial. Failed to graduate from high school. At sixteen went to Sweden, where he worked on a farm. Emigrated to the United States at eighteen, where he became foreman at a dairy farm. At twenty-one the lover of a wealthy woman, who got him a Hollywood contract at five hundred dollars a week. In 1925 he returned to Germany, helped out in the office of the Freiburg sanatorium established with great success by his brother, later becoming social director of this fashionable in stitution. In 1930 he went to Paris with a certain Baron de Maier, for whom he wrote society news at a salary of two thousand marks a month. When National Socialism came into power, he hastened back to Germany and joined the General SS. Now aged thirty-two, he quickly absolved his high-school graduation and began to study medicine, for his brother had died and he wanted to become his successor as medical head of the sanatorium. He passed his preliminary examination only on the second try, but enlistment in the
Waffen SS
enabled him to obtain his state license on an emergency basis, for it was 1939 and the war had broken out. He was now a doctor and within two years had attained such “ maturity” that he was able to become Deputy Chief Medical Officer for all the concentration camps. Another two years later the ver dict of experts during the Koch trial was to the effect that “ from the viewpoint of his knowledge and skill Hoven hardly deserves to be described as a physician.”

SS Major Fassbender: Origins unknown, adopted child of the owners of the famous German chocolate firm of Fass bender. A ne’er-do-well, drunkard and wastrel. Married to a Countess Stollberg. Made the acquaintance of the head of the so called Mounted SS, SS Major-General Fegelein, whom he financed, becoming battalion commander in the First SS Mounted Regiment, and together with Fegelein one of the worst SS criminals in Warsaw. Among other things, he “ Aryanized” the world-wide fur company of Apfelbaum, in concert with Slava Mirovska, secretary to the owner, who had fled. Fassbender marked down the value of the firm from around 40,000,000 to 50,000 marks. Responsible for the pregnancy of his mistress, he had Fegelein and the Gestapo arrest her husband, a Polish officer, and a few days later, again in concert with the Polish she-devil who obtained a general power of attorney to his fortune at the last moment,

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shot him down in his cell. Transferred to France, he com mitted . . . etc.,
etc.

SS Colonel Koch: Born at Darmstadt, in 1897, the son of a

registry official. Commercial apprenticeship from 1911 to 1914, then until 1916 a bookkeeper. War service, with two tours of duty at the front, the first time for two weeks, the second for six. Returned to clerical employment in 1920, holding at least seven jobs in succession during the years from 1922 to 1930, with a record of petty larceny in 1928. Married in 1924, he had a son Manfred who later spent some time in an institution because of marked feeble-mindedness but was still later assigned to the Brunswick music school of the
Waffen SS.
Koch’s marriage was dissolved in 1931 with himself as the guilty party. That same year he joined the Nazi party and soon afterward the SS. In 1932 he was expelled from the Party because of an affair that was never cleared up. He was soon re-admitted and in 1935 was the subject of proceedings for malfeasance and embezzlement. Nevertheless he became SS Commandant of the Columbia House concentration camp in Berlin, later of the Esterwege concentration camp. In 1937 he married his second wife, Ilse, and that same year embarked on his notorious career at Buchenwald.

For reasons of personal antipathy, Prince Waldeck and Koch were not on good terms. As long as Eicke was inspector of concentration camps—like the “ incorruptible” SS Lieutenant-General Pohl of the SS Main Economic and Ad ministrative Office, he collected “ considerations” of up to ten thousand marks from Koch!—Prince Waldeck had no chance to bring his enemy to book. But in 1941 Eicke was transferred to the front as a general in the
Waffen SS.