American Reich

by Pliss, Todd

  During Wayne’s first workday in camp, a prisoner was singled out by a guard for slackness in his duties. The prisoner was trussed up on a tree in a special harness that the SS used for such a purpose.

  “Why were you pissing off?” the SS guard who had singled the man out asked.

  “I was not, sir,” the prisoner nervously said from his hanging position above the guard.

  “Then you are calling me a liar,” the SS guard noted.

  “No, sir. I would not say such a thing.”

  “Either you were pissing off your work or I am a liar,” the SS guard commented.

  The prisoner knew that by saying or even suggesting that the guard was a liar would be enough to get him killed. He decided to go the safer route and said meekly, “I was neglecting my work, sir.”

  “Pissing off on your work?” the SS guard said loud enough so all of the other men, who continued to concentrate on their jobs at hand, could hear. “Lazy son-of-a-bitch. You are pissing off your work while everybody else out here is busy doing their share for the Reich. You will serve as an example for other vermin that piss off work. Your type will know that being a lazy motherfucker will not be tolerated at Hollenburg.”

  The SS guard began to throw heavy rocks at the trussed up prisoner, specifically aiming the stones at the man’s head. Three more SS guards joined in the fun, and after only a few hits, the prisoners head was bleeding form deep cuts.

  Wayne kept his eyes focused on his work as he continued pounding away at the cold ground with a pickax. Though it was a cold day, he sweated excessively. Wayne could hear the thumps of the stones hitting the man’s body, which could not have been more than 10 yards away, from where he stood. Wayne knew enough to know that the SS guards were using that unlucky prisoner as a model for him and the other new arrivals. It was yet another scare tactic to keep the prisoners walking on eggshells.

  “There will be no pissing off of work at Hollenburg,” one of the SS guards said between throwing rocks at his human target, now bleeding heavily from the head and unconscious. The SS guard who had signaled the man out picked up his gun and put it to the man’s skull.

  Wayne heard the pop of a gun being fired. He swallowed hard.

  The prisoners received a fifteen-minute lunch break. Lunch was the standard pint of thin soup and a small piece of bread per man, an inadequate meal for a person doing hard labor.

  To Wayne, it felt fantastic just to be able to give his aching back and feet a rest. He placed his soup down and rubbed his weary eyes, completely exhausted.

  He did not look to be tired as Wayne appeared to be. “Let me give you some advice, son,” the older prisoner whispered to Wayne in a husky voice. “Work with your eyes more than your hands or you won’t last a week here. And you might make the rest of us look bad. Think about it.” Having said that, he walked off.

  Wayne, on that day, did not pay much attention to what the man had told him. He was too worn out to concentrate on anything. Wayne went to grab his small bowl of soup, but it had vanished. He had a good idea, though, of who had taken it.

  On Wayne’s second night in Hollenburg, the SS held one of their occasional night inspections. Though winter loomed on the horizon and it was already bitter cold, the prisoners were allowed only to wear shirts while sleeping underneath the paper-thin blankets that had been issued to them. Any prisoner caught wearing socks, underwear, or any other article of clothing, could expect to receive severe punishment. Block leader Hans Kammler, the SS corporal in charge of the barracks and with keeping the men in them disciplined and who was also fond of spending most of his evenings acting like the drunken buffoon that he was, always led those impromptu inspections. The new arrivals, including Wayne, had heard from the old timers that Kammler always held a late night inspection within three days of a new batch of prisoners arriving.

  At three past midnight during that drizzly night, Kammler and three of his SS coadjutors held one of his surprise inspections of the men in Barracks 19. Block leader Kammler and his men stormed the barracks, which was quiet except for the snoring of a handful of prisoners. Kammler’s men flicked up the switch to the lights, illuminating the sleeping occupants.

  They went around banging loudly on the bedposts with their shiny steel clubs and shouting, “Up, vermin!”

  The inmates, wearing only their nightshirts, were made to line up beside their bunks as Kammler strutted through both wings of the barracks.

  On that particular evening, all of the prisoners were dressed according to regulations. But that was not good enough to satisfy the tipsy Kammler. No, he had to find some reason to dish out pain to at least a few of the subhumans standing half naked before him. For block leader Hans Kammler and his men in reality could not care less whether or not any of the prisoners wore clothing to bed that they were not supposed to. The true purpose of a late night visit to a barracks was to fulfill their barbaric, sadistic urges. So, on the pretext that the prisoners did not get out of their bunks quick enough, the prisoners were forced to get down on the cold, wooden floor and do fifty pushups each, calling out the number of each pushup as they did them. Doing the pushups was a tough enough task for the average person to perform at any hour, but even more so difficult for a person having just awoken out of a deep sleep.

  As the prisoners complied with the order to do the pushups, Kammler strolled about, yelling out, “Faster, you swine! All the way down or else you’ll spend thirty days in the hole!”

  Wayne had always done pushups regularly as part of his exercise regiment, so the fifty to him was no big deal. Most of the men, though, struggled to get past thirty.

  Some of the older and weaker men could not do the pushups fast enough for the block leader, no matter how much he prodded the man along. In those frequent cases, Kammler would have an SS aide issue a swift blow with their club to the unlucky inmate’s back or legs. Kammler personally kicked a large amount of the prisoners in their stomachs with his steel tipped leather boots with as much force as he could.

  With the rising sun, Wayne and the other prisoners once again began the daily routine of living as concentration camp inmates. Roll call would always end with the command from Stepp, “Caps off! Caps on!” That was the morning salute for Captain Himmelmann, the camp commandant, who was always present at roll call with, of course, his beloved horse, Snowflake.

  Stepp would next issue the command, “Labor details - fall in!”

  With that, each prisoner would move out to his assigned work assembly point – the location where all members of a work detail would gather before moving out to their work detail site. As the prisoners dispersed in columns of five abreast out to a long backbreaking day of labor, the camp band played merry tunes as if a celebration or parade was taking place.

  At Hollenburg, prisoners were categorized into one of three groups. The first group was the “shiftless elements”. That group included alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, wife beaters, people who showed up late for work one time too many, and other such types of persons that the Reich thought needed some time in a camp for “re-education” until they were ready to return to the racial community of German society as better men. The second group consisted of the political opponents. Those were men who were overheard saying something “anti-Nazi” or “anti-German”, which basically included any kind of criticism at all. One man had been sentenced to two years of hard labor at Hollenburg because, as he traveled on a public bus to work, he complained to a fellow worker, “I think we’re spending too much money and wasting manpower on building the new Reich War Museum.” The Gestapo had picked him up at his work place within three hours of him innocently making the former comment. The third group at Hollenburg was made up of the inferior races, which comprised anyone who was not of German blood who did not fit into the other two categories. Wayne had been interned as a political opponent.

  For Wayne, the day meant the endless work of the quarry. As he pounded away at the rock, he thought about what had been said to him about working
with his eyes more than his hands. He realized what that older prisoner had implied. There were too many workers in the quarry for the guards to keep an eye on all of the time. Wayne noticed that only when one of the SS slave drivers or detail leaders put in an appearance, did most prisoners start hauling ass in their work. Otherwise, they pretended to work while keeping a look out of the corner of their eyes. Wayne began the practice of doing that and greatly reduced his workload, and his exhaustion, during the day.

  Since the prisoners weren’t fed breakfast, by the time lunch came, most of the men were feeling the pangs of hunger. Wayne, who had always been in the habit of eating a large breakfast, was especially hungry by mid-morning.

  The prisoners received their fifteen-minute lunch break each day. Lunch was always the standard “meal” of bread and thin tasteless soup of one type or another. To Wayne, the soup sometimes tasted like chicken soup, sometimes like potato soup, often like a vegetable soup, and once in a while like fish chowder, but it was impossible to tell exactly just what was in it. Wayne was not sure he wanted to know, either.

  There never was enough lunch to go around for everybody. The SS made sure of that. It was one example of the little sadistic practices implemented in the camp on a daily basis. Instead of complaining or fighting with one another about who would eat lunch on that day, or who more deserved to eat, the prisoners whom received their meal allowances would share what scanty amount of food they had with the men who had received nothing. Every prisoner, at one time, would be shorted a meal ration. Some of the prisoners, the handful who had refused to share their meal rations at all with those men who had received nothing on a given day, were treated in the same manner by the other prisoners when they became the ones without lunch rations. Wayne was thrown a few bite size pieces of bread by some of the other men on a day when the lunch rations ran out before he was lucky enough to get one.

  After lunch, it was back to work for the prisoners until six o’clock. The prisoners would then march back in organized columns for evening roll call to the roll call area, where, as the men arrived, the camp band would again play merry tunes.

  Roll call officer Stepp would proceed to call off the prisoner’s numbers. Wayne and the other inmates would have to often stand for hours on end, regardless of rain or ice cold weather, until it could be established that no one had escaped during the day.

  After roll call, it was almost always punishment time for some unlucky inmate who had an SS detail leader or an SS sergeant determine that the inmate did not give his full effort in his day’s duties, or for an inmate who was noticed by an SS sergeant not following a proper procedure. The unfortunate man would be secured to a whipping rack and then be given the standard twenty lashes to his back. All of the prisoners would be forced to watch and listen to the loud crack of the leather whip as it snapped against their fellow prisoner’s back. Captain Himmelmann was always present for those lashings and would sometimes take great pleasure in dealing them out himself. The only time Wayne ever saw the camp commandant with a smirk on his ordinarily stolid face was when he was cracking the whip at an inmate. Wayne knew the pain of receiving such a lashing and felt pity every time that he witnessed another man being treated with so much brutality. With the lashings occurring at the end of almost every evening roll call, Wayne figured that sooner or later his turn would come up.

  The prisoners would then file into the mess hall and line up to have dinner dished out to them by the prisoners whom worked in the kitchen. Kitchen detail was a much sought after job, since it was known among the inmates that the men whom toiled in the mess hall operation ate better than the men working on other non-food related details. The night meal commonly consisted of a piece of white bread, a dab of margarine, a bit of sausage, a cup of soup (the same kind that had been served as lunch that day) and a spoonful of cottage cheese. Once in a while, Viking salad of ground fish bones and potatoes would be served. Wayne never ate enough to satisfy his hunger.

  At night, the prisoners would have a small amount of free time before the lights went out at ten. Many of the men would talk amongst themselves, play cards, take a short stroll in front of the barracks, or simply enjoy a smoke. Some of the men, fatigued, would immediately fall asleep upon returning to the barracks. The camp band, made up entirely of prisoners, could often be heard throughout the camp blowing out their upbeat tunes on their brass instruments as they rehearsed. The band sometimes played at official SS functions and was always being ordered to learn new tunes. Reading material, such as the German daily newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter, would be available to the inmates, though it often ended up being used as toilet paper.

  At Hollenburg, incredibly enough, there was a brothel. The SS wanted to discourage any homosexual activity from taking place in camp and decided that the satisfaction of the sexual libido was a basic need for men, even slave laborers. The ladies whom worked in the brothel were inmates from Hollenburg’s female prison camp population. Wayne never did find out how one gained admission to the brothel, but he did know that there was a waiting list and that the SS men were frequent visitors.

  At ten o’clock, it was lights out for the prisoners. With the new morning, there would come another backbreaking day of labor for the men.

  For seven weeks, Wayne and lived the daily schedule as a concentration camp slave laborer. With each passing day, he felt less and less that he would ever get an opportunity to leave the hell that his life had become and felt more and more depressed about his situation. He kept to himself, making little more than small talk with the other incarcerated men. Wayne would trade his cigarette rations with other men in his barracks for food, making out with a small amount of additional bread.

  Wayne had not spoken to Samuel since the day he had arrived at Hollenburg. Samuel appeared to Wayne to be the authority on every facet of life in camp. It seemed that whenever a prisoner had a question relating to some aspect of camp life that nobody else could reply to, they would ask Samuel and he would have the answer. Due to the length of time he had been at Hollenburg and the fact that he was an outgoing guy, Samuel knew all of the prisoners by first name and he took pride in that. One evening, shortly after the inmates had arrived back at the barracks at the end of a long day of work, Wayne bumped into Samuel.

  Samuel said, “Don’t tell me. You were...”

  “Wayne.”

  “I said don’t tell me. I would have gotten it,” Samuel said disappointed that Wayne did not give him a chance to show that he indeed remembered Wayne’s name. “That’s right, Wayne, the nonsmoker.”

  “And you’re Samuel.”

  “Samuel to some,” he said and then pointed to his marked forearm, “One eight seven two four to others.” He asked, “Where you from, Wayne?”

  “New York.”

  “Shhh. Don’t let the SS hear you call it that. Is the ghetto back there as bad as they say it is?”

  “Which ghetto is that?” Wayne said, not knowing what Samuel was talking about.

  “The one you came from,” Samuel replied. “I assume you came from the ghetto. You speak in that funny way,” he said alluding to Wayne’s thick New York accent, “and you came in on a shipment with ghetto-dwellers.”

  “Oh, yeah, you’re right,” Wayne said in agreement. He knew it would be easier to go along with that Samuel thought about where he came from instead of trying to tell him otherwise. “My mind is dazed from working in the quarry so much. You’re right, it’s pretty bad back in the ghetto.”

  “Well, it ain’t no garden of roses here either,” Samuel stated.

  Wayne had been curious about something since he had first arrived in camp, but was apprehensive about asking any of the other prisoners about it for fear of inviting unwanted attention or suspicion unto himself. Wayne felt semi-comfortable enough around Samuel to inquire of him, “Let me ask you something. Have a lot of people escaped from camp?”

  “Only one since I’ve been here.”

  “How long ago has that been?”
r />   “I ain’t quite sure,” the long time prisoner said. “I guess it’s been ‘bout twelve years or so.”

  “Only one escape in twelve years.” Wayne said with disheartenment. “Don’t prisoners regularly try and leave here?”

  “And go where? Ain’t nothing out there but more Nazis. There isn’t a person in here that hasn’t thought of escape at some time or other, myself included. But, believe me, it ain’t worth it. They’d find you.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so,” Samuel said confidently. “And you know what’d probably happen to you when they did. Same thing that happened to that last guy that escaped.

  “Which was?”

  “The SS took it out on the rest of us big time when that asshole left,” Samuel explained with a tinge of anger from the memory of the incident. “Food was kept from us for days, work hours were extended late into the night, and hell, just ‘bout everyone of us got twenty-five lashes. So when the Gestapo caught the escaped guy, which took them ‘bout a week, and he was brought back here to Hollenburg, the SS didn’t do nothing to him but return him to his old barracks.”

  Wayne asked, “That’s all they did?”

  “That’s all they had to. During the night, a couple of real hungry, real tired prisoners took care of him in their own way.”

  “What’d they do to him?” Wayne wanted to know.

  “Well,” Samuel hesitated, as if thinking about how to phrase his answer, “let’s just say he hasn’t been heard from since. So, keep them thoughts and ideas of escape out of your head. Don’t even talk ‘bout it. You never know who’s listening. It ain’t worth it. Understand?”

  Wayne was dismayed to hear the things Samuel said to him on the subject of escape. He felt more hopeless than ever.