The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  Weimar, and more recently a popular spot for picnics. It was known best as a retreat for the artists and intellectuals of the ducal court of Weimar and famously associated with writers like Schiller and Goethe, whose plays had been performed in an amateur theater in the parkland.3 The city of Weimar was the very epicenter of German classical cultural heritage, and for that reason it had been chosen after the First World War as the seat of the new democratic republic. The Weimar Republic was now long dead, and with the founding of a concentration camp on the Ettersberg, the Nazi regime was placing its own imprint upon Weimar’s heritage. Buchenwald—named 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 45

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  for the picturesque beech forest that made the mountain so pleasant—was more than just a prison camp; it was a model SS settlement whose scale would eventually rival that of the city itself.4 What happened here among the beeches would one day cast all of Weimar’s Germanic heritage in shadow.

  Many of the people imprisoned here called it not Buchenwald but Totenwald: Forest of the Dead.5

  At last, after eight uphill kilometers—more than an hour’s worth of gruel‑

  ing running—the Blood Road bent northward and emerged into a vast open space cleared in the forest. Scattered across it were buildings of all shapes and sizes, some complete, some still under construction, many hardly begun.6 They had reached Buchenwald.

  Ahead the road was straddled by a wide, low gatehouse in a massive fence studded with guard towers. This was the entrance to the prison camp itself; the small town being built outside its fences comprised the barracks and facilities of the SS, the infrastructure of the machine in which the prisoners were both fuel and grist. On the gateway were two slogans declaring the ideology that made the machine. Above, on the gate lintel, was inscribed: Recht oder Unrecht—Mein Vaterland

  My country, right or wrong: the very essence of nationalism and fascism.

  And wrought into the ironwork of the gate itself:

  Jedem das Seine

  To each his own. It could also be interpreted as Each person gets what he deserves.

  Exhausted, sweating, bleeding, the new arrivals were herded through the gate. There were now one thousand and ten of them; twenty‑five of those who had set out from Vienna were now corpses along the Blood Road.7

  They found themselves within an impenetrable cordon: the huge camp was surrounded by a barbed wire fence with twenty‑two watchtowers at intervals, decked with floodlights and guns; the fence itself was three meters high and electrified, with a lethal 380 volts running through it. The outside of the fence was patrolled by sentries, and within was a sandy strip called the “neutral zone”; any prisoner stepping on it would be shot.8

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  Immediately inside the gate was a large parade ground—the Appellplatz, or roll‑call square. Ahead and along one side were long, low barrack huts that marched in orderly, radiating ranks down the hill slope, with bigger two‑story blocks beyond, and a grid of streets between the blocks. The newcomers were ordered into ranks in the roll‑call square, and stood there at gunpoint, awkward and disheveled in their assortment of soiled and ruined business suits and work clothes, sweaters and shirts, raincoats, fedoras and office shoes, caps and hobnail boots, bearded, bald, slicked hair, tousled mops: a thousand men and boys with a thousand identities. While they stood, the bodies of the men who had died along the road were carried in and dumped among them.

  A group of finely uniformed SS officers appeared. One, a middle‑aged, pouchy‑faced man with a slouching posture, stood out. This, they would learn later, was Camp Commandant Karl Otto Koch. “So,” he said, “you Jew‑pigs are here now. You cannot get out of this camp once you are in it. Remember that—you will not get out alive.”

  The men were entered one by one in the camp register and each assigned a prisoner number: Fritz Kleinmann: 7290; Gustav Kleinmann: 7291.9 Orders came at them in a confusing barrage that Fritz and many of the Viennese found hard to understand, unaccustomed to the German dialects. They were made to strip naked and march to the bath block, where they showered in almost unbearably hot water (some were too weak to stand it and collapsed), followed by immersion in a vat of searing disinfectant.10 They sat in a yard to have their heads sheared, and under yet another rain of blows from rifle‑

  butts and cudgels, were made to run naked back to the roll‑call square. There they were issued with ill‑fitting camp uniforms: long drawers, socks, shoes, shirt, and the distinctive blue‑striped pants and jacket. If desired, for twelve marks a prisoner could buy a sweater and gloves, but few had so much as a pfennig, and would never know warmth again.11 All their own clothes and belongings—including the little package of warm clothing Gustav had carried from home—were taken away.

  With their hair gone, in uniform, the new arrivals were no longer indi‑

  viduals but a homogeneous mass, the only distinguishing features a rare fat belly or a head standing higher than the rest. The violence of their arrival had impressed on them that they were the property of the SS, to do with as it saw fit; they had no identities beyond their numbers. Each man had been issued a strip of cloth with his prisoner number on it, which he was required to sew 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 47

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  onto the breast of his uniform, along with a symbol: in this assembly all were Jews. They were given a Star of David made up of a yellow and a red triangle superimposed; the red denoted that, having been arrested on the pretext that they were Jewish‑Polish enemy aliens, they were under Schutzhaft, so‑called protective custody, a rubric under which political opponents were imprisoned as “protection” for the state.12

  Looking at the new prisoners, Deputy Commandant Hans Hüttig, a dedi‑

  cated sadist with a flat face like the back of a shovel, shook his head and said, “It’s unbelievable that such people have been allowed to walk around free until now.”13

  These annulled humans were marched to the “little camp,” an enclosure on the western edge of the muster square surrounded by a double cordon of barbed wire fences: the quarantine area. Inside, rather than barrack huts, were four huge tents lined with wooden bunks four tiers high.14 There wasn’t nearly enough room for all. In recent weeks, over eight thousand new prisoners had arrived at Buchenwald, more than twenty times the usual rate of intake, and the largest since the Kristallnacht pogrom nearly a year earlier.15 The tents were full to bursting. Gustav and Fritz found themselves sharing a bunk space only two meters wide with three other men. There were no mattresses, just bare wooden planks, but they had a blanket each, so they were at least warm.

  Squeezed in like sardines and their bellies empty, they were so dead tired they fell asleep right away.

  The next day, the new prisoners were registered with the political depart‑

  ment—the camp Gestapo. They were photographed, fingerprinted, and briefly interrogated, a process that took all morning. In the afternoon they received their first warm food: a half‑liter of soupy stew containing unpeeled potatoes and turnips, with a little fat and meat floating in it. The evening meal consisted of a quarter‑loaf of bread and a little 50‑gram* piece of sausage. This proved to be the standard camp ration. The bread was provided in whole loaves, and as there were no knives, sharing it out was a haphazard business which usually led to disputes and jealous quarrels.

  For eight days they were left in quarantine, then on October 10 they were put to work. Most were set to hard labor in the nearby stone quarry, but Gustav and Fritz were put to work on maintaining the canteen drains. All day long the workers were hazed and slave‑driven. Gustav wrote in his diary: “I have

  * 1¾ ounce

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  seen how prisoners get beaten by the SS, so I look out for my boy. It’s done by eye‑contact; I understand the situation and I know how to conduct myself.

  Fritzl gets it too.”

  So ended his first entry. He looked back over what he had written so far, just two and a half pages to bring them this far, through this much distress and danger. Eight days gone. How many more to come?16

  As Gustav had observed, to stay safe it was vital to remain unnoticed, invisible. But within two months of arriving in Buchenwald, both Gustav and Fritz had drawn attention to themselves—Gustav unwillingly, Fritz deliberately.17

  On their second day at work they were both switched to the quarry detail.

  Each morning, an hour and a half before dawn, shrill whistles yanked them from the exquisite forgetfulness of sleep in their comfortless bunk. Then came the kapos and the block senior, yelling at them to hurry. The kapos and block seniors were a shock to new arrivals; they were fellow prisoners—mostly “green men,”

  criminals who wore the green triangle on their striped uniforms—appointed by the SS to act as straw bosses and barrack overseers. The kapos drove the workforce, did the dirty work of slave‑driving, and enabled the SS guards to keep a distance from the mass of prisoners. A kapo was expected to be harsh, if not downright sadistic, and was motivated by the knowledge that if the SS

  removed his status, he would be placed back among the prisoners, who would exact their revenge.18

  As the whistles shrilled, Fritz and Gustav put on their shoes and scrambled down, sinking to their ankles in cold mud on the bare floor. Outside, the camp was ablaze with electric light along the fence lines, atop the guard towers, and in the walkways and open areas. They were herded to the square for roll call, and dished out a cup of acorn coffee each. It was sweet but caffeine‑free, with no power to stimulate, and always cold by the time they got it. Doling it out was a long process, and they all had to stand there in silence, motionless and shivering in their thin clothes for two hours. When it was time to go to work, dawn was lightening the sky.

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  SS barrack complex, a set of uniform two‑story brick buildings, some still under construction, arranged in a great arc like the blades of a fan. The Nazis adored their grand designs, even in their concentration camps— especially in their concentration camps—creating an illusive appearance of elegance, order, and meaning to screen the chaotic nightmare played out within.

  A little way down the hill, the prisoners passed through the inner sentry line. Out here there were no fences, and the work areas were surrounded by a well‑manned cordon of SS sentries about a dozen meters apart. Every second sentry was armed with a rifle or sub‑machine gun, and every other with a cudgel. Once inside it, any prisoner who crossed the sentry line was shot without hesitation or challenge. For the desperate, those who had been driven to the limit of what they could endure, running into the sentry line was a common means of suicide. For certain SS guards, forcing prisoners to run over the line to their deaths was one of their favorite means of enter‑

  tainment. An “escape register” was maintained, recording the names of the SS marksmen and awarding credit for kills, which added up to rewards of vacation time.

  The quarry was large—a pale, raw limestone scar on the green wooded hillside. From it, if one raised one’s head, and the mist and rain permitted, a broad, rolling countryside stretched to the hazy western horizon. But one didn’t raise one’s head, not for more than a moment. The work was hard, grueling, dangerous; the men in stripes dug stone, broke stone, carried stone, and were beaten if they slacked, beaten if they carried too little.

  There was a narrow railroad in and out, on which huge steel dump wag‑

  ons ran, each the size of a farm cart, carrying the stone from the quarry to the construction sites around Buchenwald. Gustav and Fritz were assigned as wagon haulers—which meant they and fourteen other men had to heave and push a laden wagon weighing around four and a half tonnes up the hill, a distance of half a kilometer, intermittently lashed and yelled at by kapos.19

  The rails were laid on beds of crushed stone, which slipped and grated under the men’s flimsy shoes or painful wooden clogs. Speed was imperative, and as soon as the wagon was emptied, it had to get back to the quarry with all haste, running down the return track propelled by its own weight, with the sixteen men holding on to prevent it speeding out of control. Falls were fre‑

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  crushed, broken, and dismembered. The badly injured would be carried off to the infirmary if they weren’t Jews, or to the death block—a holding barrack for the terminally sick—if they were.20 Men with crippling injuries would be given a lethal injection by an SS doctor.21 With no hospital treatment, even slight wounds could be life‑threatening in the insanitary conditions in which the prisoners lived and worked. For a man with poor eyesight, losing his spec‑

  tacles could effectively be a death sentence.

  Gustav and Fritz toiled on, managing to avoid both punishment and injury.

  “We are proving ourselves,” Gustav wrote in his diary.

  So it went on for two weeks. Then, on October 25, dysentery and fever broke out in the little quarantine camp. With over three and a half thousand weakened men crammed into its bunks (about one third of them Jews, the rest Poles), and sanitation consisting of nothing but a latrine pit, it was a fertile ground for disease. Each day the population was eroded by twenty‑five to fifty deaths. And the grinding life of the camp went on. Each day, impoverished rations; each day, standing for hours at roll call in the cold and rain; each day, beatings and injuries. The SS waged a special vendetta against a chief rabbi called Merkl, who was singled out every day and beaten bloody until eventually he was forced to run through the sentry line. And all the while the dysentery went on unchecked and the death toll rose.

  Some Poles, driven by hunger, cut their way out of the little camp and broke into the main camp kitchens. They managed to bring back twelve kilos of syrup, a delight that brightened the prisoners’ diets a little. It was a short‑lived pleasure. The theft was discovered, and the whole of the little camp was punished with two days’ withdrawal of rations. A few days later, on November 5, a crate of jellied meat was stolen from the store. Again the prisoners were starved for two days, this time with an additional punishment: they were forced to stand at attention on the roll‑call square from morn‑

  ing until evening. While the punishment parade was still going on, there was a break‑in at the piggery in the farm site at the north end of the camp, and a pig was taken. Camp Commandant Koch—who lived in a pleasant house in the Buchenwald complex with his wife and went for Sunday walks in Buchenwald’s own zoo just outside the main camp—personally ordered starvation for everyone until the thieves were caught. Every prisoner’s cloth‑

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  interrogations for three days. It was finally discovered that the culprits were some SS men.22

  Weakened by starvation, subjected to soul‑breaking labor, with dysentery running unchecked in the camp, the prisoners died in dozens each day. The living walked silent and hunched like specters of the already dead.

  Then, suddenly, things got even worse.

  On Wednesday, Novemb
er 8, 1939, Adolf Hitler flew to Munich. He was there to lead the Nazi Party’s annual commemoration of the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, when he and his followers made their first attempt to seize power in Bavaria. The following day the Nazi leaders who were veterans of the putsch were scheduled to reenact their legendary march through the city.23 Tonight, according to tradition, Hitler would open the occasion with an address before an audience in the grandiose Bürgerbräukeller beer hall.

  With the war only just begun and his planned invasion of France facing postponement due to bad weather, the Führer’s participation in the commemo‑

  rations were hurried and brief; tonight he would be rushing back to Berlin, and therefore he gave his beer hall address an hour earlier than scheduled.

  Afterward, at two minutes past nine, he left the Bürgerbräukeller for his train.

  Eighteen minutes later—when he should have been in the midst of his speech—

  a bomb concealed in a pillar next to Hitler’s podium exploded with colos‑

  sal force, bringing down a gallery above, blowing out doors and windows, obliterating the handful of people standing nearby, and injuring dozens of others.24 The perpetrator was apprehended the same evening. Georg Elser, a German communist paramilitary, had spent a year planning the operation and weeks carefully building and concealing the time bomb, hiding in the beer hall after hours and working through the night. His plan had been perfect—only thwarted by a last‑minute change of plan.

  Germany was appalled, and the reaction predictably furious. Although Elser was a Protestant with no Jewish connections, in Nazi eyes the Jews were responsible for every ill deed.25 In the concentration camps next day—which happened to be the anniversary of Kristallnacht—they took brutal revenge. In Sachsenhausen the SS subjected the inmates to intimidation and torture, while 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 52

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