Hell's Cartel

by Diarmuid Jeffreys

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  AT THE AGE of thirty-nine, Otto Ambros was exactly where he wanted to be. When he was a boy, his father, an agricultural scientist, had often taken him into the laboratory where he worked. The experience had left Ambros desperate to become an industrial chemist. His fervor lasted through school in Bavaria (where one of his friends had been the future SS leader Heinrich Himmler), on to university, and then into a research post with the newly formed IG Farben. Within a few years his passion, initiative, and eagerness to please brought him to the attention of Carl Bosch, Carl Krauch, and the Sparte II boss, Fritz ter Meer. The latter took Ambros under his wing at Ludwigshaven and quickly fired him with enthusiasm for his pet project, the hoped-for marriage of the molecule butadiene with the element sodium to make synthetic rubber. A short while later ter Meer sent him on an exciting trip to the plantations of south Asia, to study how natural rubber was produced and gather vital information about manufacturing costs that his boss could use when preparing his frequent pitches for company funds. It wasn’t long before Ambros became a key figure in the IG’s development of buna, devoting much of his skill and energy to the technical challenges of the product the Nazis had identified as a key element in strategic autarky. He was delighted when the Schkopau plant produced its first few pounds of buna in 1936, and he basked in the reflected glory when it won a gold medal at the International Exposition at Paris in 1937. His star was beginning to shine.

  But Ambros’s spectacular rise wasn’t due just to his chemical expertise. Intensely ambitious, he had a talent for making good use of his friends in high places. Ter Meer was always a powerful ally, but Ambros stayed close to Carl Krauch as well, and in the golden years of the Four-Year Plan his common bond with Himmler also enhanced his status. As a result, he was increasingly given license to think imaginatively about how best to meet the IG’s commitments to the Wehrmacht (his willing assumption of responsibility for the concern’s poison gas program demonstrating his lack of concern about the consequences of this partnership). By 1937, the year he joined the Nazi Party, he had parlayed his growing influence into a seat on the Vorstand as the director in charge of rubber and plastics—a crucial position in the run-up to war.

  Although Ambros would later maintain that he hadn’t been particularly keen to increase the IG’s buna production strength (on the grounds that managing the existing capacity was challenge enough), there is no doubt that, in the autumn of 1940, when the Economics Ministry and high command laid out their pressing demands, he responded very enthusiastically. The IG had already made some independent moves in this direction, spending nearly four million reichsmarks in 1939 on the foundations for a buna factory at Rattwitz, near Breslau. The project had been mothballed after the successful invasion of France seemed to render stepped-up capacity unnecessary, but Ambros knew that, theoretically at least, it could be revived.

  The IG had never been truly happy with Rattwitz—the site had numerous geological and topographical problems—and so, before committing to satisfy the Wehrmacht’s increased demand, Ambros decided to see if there were better options elsewhere. The manufacture of buna required abundant supplies of coal, water, and lime and the right terrain on which to construct a plant. From his travels before the war Ambros knew of one region that had all these things—Upper Silesia, formerly part of Germany. The occupation of Poland had brought the area’s coalfields (lost in 1921) back into German hands and the survey evidence suggested that they were rich and underexploited. The region also had plentiful deposits of lime and it was crisscrossed by several major rivers, vital for a factory that would need to access more than five hundred cubic feet of fresh water per hour if it was to meet its production targets.

  Ambros got out his maps and set off with his subordinates to visit various sites. Rattwitz was examined once more, in case the alternatives failed to come up to scratch, then Heydebreck in Lower Silesia, Grosshowitz and Gross-Dobern (both near Oppeln), and Emilienhof (near Gogolin).* As his team moved farther east into Upper Silesia, he reminded his men to take note of all road and rail links and to remember that the area around any potential site had to be able to cope with the large influx of managers, engineers, and specialist workers that the IG would bring in from its parent plants on the Rhine. The question of accommodation was especially serious. Poor housing stock was the region’s Achilles’ heel and Ambros knew that unless he found a solution to that problem the new factory would struggle to attract senior staff.

  When and how Ambros first encountered the area around Auschwitz—or Oswiecim, as the Poles called it—isn’t known for sure, although it is possible that in late November 1940 he went there to investigate rumors that another German firm, the Mineralölbau GmbH, was considering opening a plant in the vicinity. In any event, by the middle of December it had moved to the top of his list of “probables,” with one site in particular exciting his interest. Situated on a large level plain between Auschwitz and the nearby hamlets of Monowitz and Dwory, it lay just south of the confluence of three rivers, the Vistula, Sola, and Przemsza. The terrain was sound and suitable for building, and because it sat sixty-five feet above water level it could generally be considered safe from flooding. The site’s attractiveness was further enhanced by the fact that the coal mines of Wisola, Brzeszcze, Dzieditz, and Jawiszowitz were all within easy reach, while the larger mining districts around Kraków were only twenty miles away. Communication links were also good, with three major rail lines converging in the area.

  On questioning the local authorities, including the ethnic German mayor, Herr Gutsche, Ambros’s experts learned more about the actual town of Auschwitz. It wasn’t, they were forced to admit, the most appealing of locations: “Apart from the large marketplace the town itself makes a very wretched impression.” But, as they reported to Ambros, there might be some counterbalancing advantages as far as accommodation was concerned: “The inhabitants of Auschwitz consist of 2,000 Germans, 4,000 Jews, and 7,000 Poles. The Germans are peasants. The Jews and Poles, if industry is established here, will be turned out, so that the town will then be available for the staff of the factory.”

  Ambros also took note of Auschwitz’s other important feature. In March 1940 the SS had taken possession of the town’s old Austrian cavalry barracks and was in the process of transforming them into a holding camp for Polish political and military prisoners. Further inquiries revealed that a few thousand inmates were already there and many more could be expected. As Ambros prepared to return to Germany to weigh the relative merits of the proposed buna sites—not least the question of where he might find the necessary construction labor—this last bit of news was to the forefront of his mind.

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  THE CAMP AT AUSCHWITZ had been established in the context of Hitler’s plans to use Poland as a buffer zone against the Soviet Union. As agreed in his deal with Stalin of August 1939, half of the country and more than twenty million people had fallen under the Reich’s control. The Führer’s intention—announced in the Decree for the Consolidation of the German Nation, of October 7, 1939—was that the western regions of this territory (Upper Silesia, Danzig-West Prussia, Warthegau, and East Prussia) should be fully Germanized in line with Nazi racial and imperial ideology. This was to involve the expulsion of the native inhabitants, the influx of a new German population, and, of course, the systematic removal of all Jews and Jewish influences. The rest of German-controlled Poland—a de facto colony known as the General Government, administered from Kraków—was to be exploited economically under SS and military rule and would serve as a dumping ground for Poles, Jews, political opponents, and other “undesirable elements” until such time as the regime could arrive at more lasting solutions.

  Much to his satisfaction, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler was put in charge of this “resettlement” program. Not only did the position offer him the opportunity to fulfill his ambitions to create a racially pure German East, it also gave him an excuse to further embellish his expanding SS apparatus and enhance h
is standing vis-à-vis Göring and Goebbels, his rivals at Hitler’s court. He had already begun this process by consolidating the various state police services he controlled. The Sipo (Sicherheitspolizei, or security police)—which consisted of the Gestapo (political police) and the Kripo (criminal police)—had been combined with the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, or intelligence service of the SS) into a new organization, the RHSA, or Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptampt). Under the leadership of his deputy, SD chief Reinhard Heydrich, the RHSA would become Himmler’s main vehicle for the exploitation and enslavement of the conquered lands.

  Heydrich was a man most aptly suited to his job. Even prior to his new elevation, he had terrorized the subjugated Polish territories. On the eve of the invasion, with the Reichsführer’s cognizance and on Hermann Göring’s authority, Heydrich had arranged for seven SS and SD Einsatzgruppen (Operational Groups) to accompany German forces over the border. Principally, the Einsatzgruppen’s responsibilities involved the liquidation of anyone who might prove capable of organizing anti-German resistance—a definition Heydrich’s men enthusiastically applied to lawyers, doctors, teachers, aristocrats, senior civil servants, businessmen, landowners, intellectuals, writers, and priests. But the groups also carried out savage revenge attacks against the civilian populace for supposed breaches of military laws, murdered mental hospital patients to ensure vacant beds for German wounded, and, increasingly, conducted large-scale massacres of the Jews. Nonetheless, the Einsatzgruppen’s brutal actions against the Jews were deemed inadequate. The conquest of Poland had brought around 2 million Jews under German control, of whom some 700,000 lived in the areas set aside for annexation, while the rest were scattered in villages around the General Government. Having forced the Jews out of the fatherland, the Nazi leadership was determined to remove them from the Reich’s new territories as well.

  On September 21, 1939, Heydrich called the commanders of several SS groups back to Berlin to discuss the regime’s approach to the “Jewish problem.” In chilling if still guarded terms, his briefing set out the framework for the nightmare to come. He began by emphasizing that “the overall measures envisaged (i.e., the ultimate aim) must be kept strictly secret.” A distinction had to be made between “the final goal, which would require a lengthy period, and the stages toward the achievement of this final goal.” The first stage, “the concentration of Jews from the countryside in the larger cities,” must be speedily implemented. If possible, most of western Poland “should be cleared completely of Jews,” or at least they should be gathered in as few centers as possible. Elsewhere in Poland, Jews should be concentrated only in cities situated at railway junctions or along a railway, so that “future measures could be more easily facilitated.”

  Himmler’s promotion of Heydrich to the position of chief of the new Reich Security Main Office (RHSA) came six days after he had sketched out this blueprint for the ghettos at Warsaw and Lodz, and it hinted at worse for the future. When Hitler’s Decree for the Consolidation of the German Nation gave Himmler jurisdiction over the fate of the population, the SS, the RHSA, and Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen were primed to act with savage vigor.

  The old cavalry depot in Auschwitz first caught Himmler’s eye in early 1940, when he was considering ways to cement the domination of the border zones and looking for suitable places to build concentration camps for incarcerating political opponents. Initially there was some doubt about the site’s suitability. Himmler’s inspectors warned him that the barrack buildings were decrepit and sat on swampy ground that was liable to breed malaria. On the other hand, they noted, it had the advantage of being easy to seal off from the outside world, which was always a desirable factor in camp location. Furthermore, as Otto Ambros would later realize, the area had excellent transportation links, which would make the movement of prisoners that much easier. However, the most compelling factor, at least in Himmler’s eyes, was something more romantic. Five centuries earlier, until it had been wrested from them, the district had been under the control of German knights, a seductive detail of Teutonic history that the Reichsführer thought too significant to ignore. He began to envisage how prison labor could be used to turn Auschwitz into a model German town suitable for population entirely by true Aryans and complete with its own agricultural estate. At one and the same time Himmler could right a historical wrong and take a step in his mission to restore the fatherland’s racial hegemony. On April 27, 1940, he gave the go-ahead to begin work.

  The first people to suffer the consequences of Himmler’s decision were twelve hundred Polish refugees who were expelled from their temporary homes next to the barracks and three hundred Jews from the town of Auschwitz whom the SS forced into clearing up the site. In early June 1940, when the prison camp was officially declared open, over one thousand Poles from prisons near Kraków and Wisnicz Nowy—mostly soldiers and students—were brought in to work on further construction. Transports of 1,666 and 1,705 political prisoners from Warsaw followed in August and September. During this initial phase, most of these new inmates were members of the Polish political intelligentsia, including some Jews, who had been swept up as part of the Einsatzgruppen’s postinvasion campaign. While they were not the targets of systematic murder, they were nonetheless subject to the cruel and violent treatment that the SS routinely meted out to those in its charge: hunger, harassment, and intolerable working conditions, indiscriminate beatings, hangings, and shootings. By the late autumn of 1940, with the first phase of construction nearing completion and Himmler’s planners already drawing up schematics for his ambitious farming project, more than seven thousand prisoners had passed through the gates and much of the usual SS concentration camp apparatus of humiliation and repression was falling into place. Auschwitz still had some way to go, however, before it would attain its singular status as the largest and most dreadful of all the Nazi camps. For that to happen, another spark was needed.

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  IT IS NOT known exactly how Himmler first found out about the IG’s interest in Auschwitz. His old school friend Otto Ambros may have passed on the news but it could just as easily have come from Heinrich Bütefisch, who was a member of his Circle of Friends, or even from Christian Schneider, the head of Sparte I, who was an honorary SS colonel and well connected to the Reichsführer’s office in Berlin. Alternatively, Himmler may have been informed by Ulrich Greifelt, his liaison with the Four-Year Plan, or by SS Major Rudolf Höss, the newly appointed commandant of Auschwitz, who would undoubtedly have picked up gossip about Ambros’s visits to the area. One thing is clear: when Himmler did find out about the IG’s interest he was determined to do whatever he could to turn its cautious probing into a positive decision. He understood immediately that the creation of a large plant near the town would be of enormous benefit to his plans. It would bring a flood of money and a huge supply of construction materials to the area—which he could use to turn Auschwitz into a significant German center—while the influx of racially pure Aryans the plant would necessarily entail would give a massive boost to his repopulation schemes. There was also the chance that the inmates of the concentration camp could be employed at the plant to generate revenue for his ambitious programs elsewhere. It was vital, therefore, that the IG make the right choice.

  But even as Himmler was pondering how best to bring this about, Ambros was beginning to have second thoughts. Each time he came close to making a recommendation to his colleagues, another report about the wretched state of the town and the paucity of its accommodation would land on his desk. “Auschwitz and villages give an impression of extreme filth and squalor,” one asserted. “The most difficult problem will be that of organizing a plant staff.”

  At the end of January 1941 he sent two IG construction chiefs, Max Faust and Erich Santo, to take another look. They met with the newly appointed provincial governor of Upper Silesia, Fritz Bracht, and his chief regional planner, Herr Froese. Having hastily consulted with the SS authorities, Bracht and Froese did their best to be
reassuring. Froese told the visitors that an architect from Breslau had already been hired to draw up a master plan for the overhaul of the town and that local Poles and Jews were facing imminent deportation. As far as construction labor was concerned, “the concentration camp already existing with approximately seven thousand inmates is to be expanded. Employment of prisoners for the building project is possible after negotiations with the Reichsführer SS.”

  This tip was enough to swing the balance for Ambros. On February 6, 1941, he met with Fritz ter Meer and Carl Krauch and put Auschwitz forward as his favored location for the IG’s buna plant. There were housing problems, he acknowledged, and they would have to be overcome. As one of his experts had made plain, “Construction of a large-scale settlement, including schools, cultural centers, etc., must therefore be started at least at the same time as the factory buildings in order to create living conditions for the staff that would provide even a modicum of comfort.” But none of these challenges were insurmountable, providing the more pressing problem of labor could be resolved. Removing the local population of Jews and Poles to make space for IG staff would deplete the numbers of people available for building work. Unless this was dealt with, the factory would take far longer to build than anyone wanted.

  Krauch took the hint and went straight to the top to obtain a solution. On February 25 he was able to inform Ambros that Hermann Göring had “issued special decrees to the supreme Reich authorities concerned.… In these decrees the Reich marshal ordered the offices concerned to meet your requirements in skilled workers and laborers at once, even at the expense of other important building projects or plans.”* Göring had also written to Himmler requesting that “the largest possible number of skilled and unskilled building workers … be made available from the adjoining concentration camp for the construction of the buna plant.” Between eight and twelve thousand people would be needed.