Hell's Cartel

by Diarmuid Jeffreys

  The buildings, except for those in which the directors and senior foremen worked, were mostly unfinished. As initiation, as was the general rule, we were given only the hardest and most strenuous work, such as transportation and excavation. I came to the dreaded “murder detail 4” whose task it was to unload cement bags or construction steel. We had to unload the cement from arriving freight cars all day long at a running pace. Prisoners who broke down were beaten by the German IG foremen as well as by the kapos until they either resumed their work or were left there dead. I saw such cases myself.… I also noticed, repeatedly, particularly during the time when the SS accompanied our labor unit themselves, that the German IG foremen tried to surpass the SS in brutalities.

  Another inmate, Rudolf Vitek, confirmed this point: “The prisoners were pushed in their work by the kapos, foremen, and overseers of the IG in an inhuman way. No mercy was shown. Thrashings, ill treatment of the worst kind, even outright killings were the norm. The murderous working speed was responsible for the fact that, while working, many prisoners suddenly stretched out flat, gasped for breath, and died like beasts.”

  For inmates who managed to survive the dreadful shifts at the Buna-Werke there was little respite in store when they got back to the camp at Monowitz. Anyone who showed signs of weakness on the return journey risked being categorized as unfit for work the next day, so as the watchtowers came into view the prisoners forced themselves erect, trying to ignore their hunger and exhaustion, their aches, cuts, and bruises, and the weeping sores on their feet. After they marched through the gates, past the gallows, and into the main square—always to the surreal accompaniment of the camp orchestra playing popular German tunes—they fell into formation by work Kommando for roll call, an hourlong process of counting and recounting to make sure that no one had been foolish enough to try to give the guards the slip. Only when everyone had been marked present (even the dead had to be carried back on stretchers to be accounted for) were the prisoners allowed to limp back to their barrack blocks, the long, low wooden sheds that sat in rows behind the camp’s high-tension electric fences.* The camp was not without amenities: the Aryan German aristocracy of “political” and “criminal” kapos and Blockmeisters, for example, were rewarded with better quarters and other privileges, the most remarkable of which was access to the Frauenblock, or camp brothel, in Hut 49. Set up by the IG as part of an incentive scheme for Aryan inmates, the brothel was staffed with a dozen or more women prisoners. To gain admission the kapos and their coterie had to get permission from the camp director and were allowed no more than one visit a week. But for the vast majority of inmates, conditions could hardly have been more primitive. Each leaking hut contained 148 three-tier bunks packed together so closely that a person could barely stand up between them. At least two, more usually three, inmates were assigned to each bunk, sleeping head to toe on a verminous straw mattress covered by a couple of thin blankets.

  But food, or the lack of it, was the inmates’ principal preoccupation. The ration at Monowitz, for which the IG was responsible, consisted of one small portion of bread and margarine in the morning and a ladleful of watery “buna soup” at midday and evening. On average this pitiful diet gave each prisoner around 1,100–1,200 calories a day, resulting in a weight loss of between six to nine pounds per individual per week. Within three months, most inmates were so weakened by hunger and nutritional deficiency they were incapable of any sort of labor and were selected for Birkenau. Prisoners assigned to the most physically punishing work details used up calories more quickly and succumbed much faster, as did those others who either were too weak to prevent their ration’s being stolen or had to barter it away to make good some fault with their uniform or pay for some other essential item or service.* Bartering, eating, and repairs all had to take place in the brief period between evening roll call and lights-out at nine—also the only time when prisoners, if they were desperate enough, could try to get medical attention for their cuts and bruises and other ailments.

  The hospital, or Krankenbau, at Monowitz consisted of eight huts identical to the others in the camp but separated from them by a wire fence. At any given time they held around a tenth of the population, but few inmates would willingly stay longer than two weeks because of the risk of being declared too sick to recover and sent to Birkenau—a policy that was openly endorsed by the IG because of the pressure on bed space. The facility was administered by prisoners, usually but not always with some sort of medical experience, under the supervision of three or four German doctors and a clerk or two. Examinations were carried out under the same conditions that prevailed elsewhere in the camp, with prisoners lining up in the open air for admittance, whatever the weather, and all decisions about treatment subject to the arbitrary authority of the German overseers. With medicines in extremely short supply—even, ironically enough, humble Bayer aspirin—treatment even for the most seriously ill often amounted to little more than confinement to bed. The most common ailments were dysentery and diarrhea, jaundice, tuberculosis, pneumonia, other infectious diseases of one kind or another, and injuries associated with heavy work—hernias, muscle strain, and so on. Many prisoners also suffered from phlegmon, a painful bloating of the limbs due to nutritional deficiencies, and from swollen and blistered feet, an inevitable consequence of their ill-fitting and broken wooden clogs. For the most part, fractures, which would have taken too long to heal, were not treated at all and the victims were sent straight to Birkenau; open wounds were left to fester or get better by themselves.

  It is true that, despite all the constraints and the shortages of equipment and medicines, the prisoner doctors at the Krankenbau managed to save some lives. A few simple operations could be carried out at the hospital—albeit without anesthetic—and the isolation of those with contagious diseases undoubtedly prevented the spread of infection. In most cases, however, treatment was merely a matter of postponing the inevitable, as Robert Waitz, one of the inmate doctors, later pointed out: “On account of the severe living conditions, the prisoners were exposed to the slow process of physical and mental dissolution. The final aim was unmistakable: the dehumanization and eventual extermination of the prisoners employed in IG Auschwitz. I heard an SS officer say to the prisoners at Monowitz: ‘You are all condemned to die but the execution of your sentence will take a little while.’”

  This brief period of grace was also extended to prisoners at the other concentration camp set up by the IG, at the Fürstengrube coal mine in nearby Wesola. The concern had taken a controlling 51 percent stake in this business back in February 1941, shortly after Ambros had received the go-ahead on the Buna-Werke. Fürstengrube’s management then acquired a further mine, the Janina, at Libiaz. Both pits needed extra workers to meet the IG’s demands for coal (new shafts had to be carved out of the rock) and the concern did its best to supply them. At first, the additional labor was provided by Soviet and British POWs and recruited Ostarbeiter (eastern workers), but the recruits soon drifted away to other jobs and the POWs (especially the British, who were covered by international conventions) were unsatisfactory. On July 6, 1943, for example, the manager of the Janina mine complained to the administration of the British POW camp that “recently there have been increasing numbers of cases in which the war prisoners who are employed by day at our mine refuse to work, or leave work early, or refuse to follow orders from the technical supervisors. Prisoner number 4522 refused to perform his work, asserting that he was not going to work for the sake of Germany.”

  Ten days later, complaints such as these brought the IG’s Walter Dürrfeld to a meeting with Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and a Fürstengrube manager named Düllberg, during which they drew up plans for a subcamp to be filled exclusively with Auschwitz inmates. The first group of prisoners arrived on September 2, while construction of the barracks was still ongoing, with the numbers rising to around thirteen hundred six months later. At Janina, meanwhile, the British POWs were moved out of their accommodations to be replaced b
y yet more Auschwitz inmates—with numbers there reaching around nine hundred by 1944.

  The terrible living and working conditions in these camps and mines made them de facto penal colonies for particularly difficult prisoners from the Buna-Werke. The beatings, killings, and selections and the resulting high death rate were as bad as anything at Monowitz, if not worse. One prisoner, Jan Lawnicki, was sent to Fürstengrube with nine others as punishment for the attempted escape of two members of their Buna-Werke Kommando.

  After arriving in Fürstengrube, we realized to our horror that the conditions in Monowitz, which had seemed awful, were nevertheless completely bearable in comparison to those at Fürstengrube.… The conditions there had no equivalent to those elsewhere, especially in terms of danger and effort. The places where we worked were often under water in which we waded up to our ankles or had such low ceilings that we had to bend over all the time. We worked on a quota system and, depending on where we were assigned, we each had to show a required number of wagons filled with coal.… The kapos, Vorarbeiters [foremen], and some of the professional miners shoved us and struck us in the face continually.… During the time that I worked extracting coal in the mines (five weeks) one prisoner committed suicide and two went mad. There were also cases of injuries caused by collapsing walls. When we finished working, they brought us up to the surface, where we had to march quickly down iron steps lined by SS men who hurried us along by screaming, kicking, and punching us.

  Having labored underground in near darkness for ten hours, the prisoners had to endure the same marching back to camp and roll call as the Monowitz inmates, with equally atrocious food and sleeping accommodations. Because injuries and terminal exhaustion were even more common than at the Buna-Werke, selections were more frequent. At one point the beatings of mine prisoners carried out by IG-employed kapos became so savage that even the SS protested that they were causing inmates to deteriorate too quickly. Few inmates lived longer than four to six weeks.

  Nevertheless, so long as the transports kept arriving at the railheads in Auschwitz and at Birkenau, the supply of replacements for the IG’s construction machine seemed secure. Indeed, IG managers now began to participate directly in the selection process to ensure they got the best crop of prisoners from each incoming train. Skills were becoming as important as physical strength and the concern wanted to make sure it obtained chemists and electricians, bricklayers and welders before they were whisked away by the overeager SS. By November 1943 Dürrfeld himself was meeting trains, accompanied by Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Schwarz, commander of the SS garrison at Monowitz. On one occasion they reviewed thirty-five hundred prisoners and sent around half of them off to Birkenau. The Buna-Werke was still nowhere near finished, of course, and the IG’s desperation to see it completed could hardly have been greater, but by now the whole project had assumed a ghastly self-sustaining logic, seeming to be as much about the consumption of prisoner labor as about producing synthetic rubber. During 1943 alone more than thirty-five thousand inmates passed through Monowitz. By the end of the year more than twenty-five thousand had been killed; the rest were halfway to their deaths.

  * * *

  ALL OF THIS begs an obvious question. Were the IG’s managers aware of what was happening to the Jews they were sending to Birkenau? The short, simple, and unequivocal answer is that, yes, they were. They must have been. Even if they were not directly informed about the mass exterminations (which some of them almost certainly were aware of) and didn’t know the precise details, the conditions under which the concern’s staff lived and worked at Auschwitz and their close connections with the SS, both official and unofficial, would have made it impossible for anyone in a senior position to remain in the dark for very long. Nevertheless, because of the blanket protestations of ignorance about the genocide made by the IG’s top men after the war, it is worth examining the question in depth.

  The first thing to note is that by mid-1943 rumors of what was going on at Birkenau were rife even among the most junior employees at IG Auschwitz. By December of that year there were in excess of twenty-five hundred Reich German civilians directly engaged at the Buna-Werke. At first, many of these were straight transfers from the company’s employ at Ludwigshafen, Frankfurt, Leverkusen, Berlin, and Leuna, but as the plant began to take shape others had come from elsewhere in Germany—younger recruits who had signed up looking for promotion or adventure in the new eastern territories or were simply eager to get their families away from the increasingly intense Allied bombing at home. Strangers in a foreign environment and living within close proximity to one another—either in one of the two hundred or so apartments on the IG’s newly built “chemists’ estate” or in housing requisitioned from the local Poles—they formed a close-knit group who spent their workdays and their leisure time together or with the area’s other sizable German community, the SS officers and men who ran the concentration camps. On Wehrmacht Day in March 1943, for example, several IG employees were invited to the camp by the SS for a “communal feast followed by entertainment in the afternoon.”

  Like any other group of people thrown together under difficult conditions, these employees talked—about their work, about what they saw at the plant each day, about the Jews, POWS, and foreign civilians whom they supervised. They complained to one another about their living conditions, the difficulties of getting the project finished, and the very evident frustration of the top management at the plant. Above all, they gossiped—albeit discreetly—about what was going on behind the wire at the camps and about the dreadful stench that hung over the town and was sometimes so pungent that it reached Katowice, thirty miles away.

  One of these employees, Hermann Müller, later remembered a drinking session he was invited to attend at the SS barracks by the Auschwitz main camp in the summer of 1943.

  I hadn’t been in IG Auschwitz long and I was curious about this terrible sweet smell.… One or two people at the factory had told me not to be stupid and ask any questions, others had said they [the camp authorities] were disposing of typhus victims. I got drunk that night and asked one of the SS men, who I had got to know quite well, if this was true. He took me quietly to the side and said that it was Bolshevik Jews “going up the chimney at Birkenau and good riddance to them.” You know what? I’m embarrassed to admit that I agreed with him. We had been told all these bad things about the Jews and how they were trying to destroy Germany.… Now I know it was wrong and that the Nazis had told us all these lies, but I was very young at the time and didn’t realize it was just propaganda. Then I found out that everyone at my place of work knew about what was being done. A little later my SS friend came to see me and asked me not to repeat what he had told me or he would be very severely punished, but I had to tell him that I had discovered by talking to others that it was already well known.

  Another newly arrived IG Auschwitz employee, Georg Burth, wrote to a colleague at home in July 1943 in only slightly more euphemistic terms: “That the Jewish race is playing a special part, you can well imagine. The diet and treatment of these sorts of people is in accordance with our aim. Evidently an increase in weight is hardly ever recorded for them. That bullets start flying at the slightest attempt of a ‘change of air’ is also certain, as well as the fact that many have already disappeared as a result of ‘sunstroke.’”

  By this time, the threat of being sent to the gas chambers at Birkenau was openly used by the IG’s kapos at the Buna-Werke to spur inmates to work harder. The threat was reinforced by the constant disappearance of other inmates and an odor, as British POW Charles Coward would later make plain, that was almost impossible to ignore: “The population at Auschwitz was fully aware that people were being gassed and burned.… They complained about the stench of burning bodies. Of course all the Farben people knew what was going on. Nobody could live at Auschwitz and work in the plant, or even come down to the plant, without knowing what was common knowledge to everybody.”

  But what of direct knowledge among the c
ompany’s top executives? No references to the mass murders can be found among the weekly reports to the Vorstand from Walter Dürrfeld and Max Faust, although this is hardly surprising given the determination of the SS to keep the Final Solution hidden from the outside world (even if they could not stop it from being an open secret among the IG’s Buna-Werke employees). If the killings were ever mentioned in other, more confidential company correspondence, those documents were almost certainly destroyed before the war’s end.* It makes little difference either way, however, because several members of the Vorstand had ample opportunity to see for themselves what was going on. Otto Ambros, Heinrich Bütefisch, Fritz ter Meer, August von Knieriem, Carl Krauch, Christian Schneider, and Friedrich Jaehne (in charge of plant development) all visited the Buna-Werke between 1942 and 1944, some of them repeatedly. Ambros, for example, visited Auschwitz on eighteen separate occasions in that period, sometimes staying several days. Heinrich Bütefisch visited seven times.* As for the IG Auschwitz employees on-site, it is inconceivable that they were unaware of the fate of the “selected” Jews from Monowitz. Walter Dürrfeld and Max Faust, among others, were in almost daily contact with the SS hierarchy; they regularly saw inmates being taken away to Birkenau (often on the company’s recommendation), and lived amid the all-pervasive stench from the Birkenau crematoria. Dürrfeld, of course, even took part in selections, and on at least one recorded occasion asked Commandant Höss directly whether it was true that the Jews were cremated in the Oswiecim [Auschwitz] camp. Höss’s reply, that he couldn’t discuss the matter, was hardly a denial.

  In any event, there are plenty of indications that by late 1943 the word had spread right up to the top echelons of the IG. On one occasion, for example, Friedrich Jaehne journeyed by train to Auschwitz to see his son Norbert, an engineer at the Buna-Werke. Norbert later told Nuremberg prosecutors that his father had asked him about the gassings, saying that he had heard about them from a police official traveling in the same railway carriage. During another Berlin-to-Auschwitz rail trip in late 1942, Ernst Struss, assistant to both Ambros and ter Meer—and later the Vorstand’s secretary—actually got into an argument with a fellow passenger about the murders: “In a loud voice [the passenger] was telling other people in the compartment that in Auschwitz concentration camp people were burned in a crematorium and in large numbers and that the air in Auschwitz was filled with the smell of death. I was very deeply affected and I sprang up and said that he should not spread such lies.”