Insubordination and Escapes
Direct challenges to the SS were madness, most veteran prisoners agreed. It was dangerous enough to charm, bribe, or trick SS officials, but to defy them directly could only lead to disaster. After a Flossenbürg prisoner was beaten senseless for insulting the SS during an evening roll call, Alfred Hübsch wondered what had possessed this “lunatic” to swim against the tide. “Everyone here must have learned a long time ago that any resistance will be broken!”227 Inevitably, acts of open defiance remained very rare during World War II. When they did occur, they burned themselves deep into the memories of survivors.
Some newcomers stood up to the SS because they did not yet understand the KL.228 When thirty-nine-year-old Josef Gaschler from Munich was taken to Sachsenhausen, in the early months of the war, and saw SS men punch other new arrivals in the face, he shouted: “What on earth is going on here? Have we fallen among thieves or do you still claim to be cultivated people?” The SS men answered him with feet and fists, dragged him to the penal company, and killed him (the official death certificate stated that he died of “insanity and raving madness”).229 Such assaults were enough to persuade most new prisoners to fall into line. Still, even veterans defied the SS on occasion. Some simply snapped; overwhelmed by despair, grief, or anger, they temporarily lost all self-control.230 Others were guided by moral or religious convictions. A hard core among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, remained firm in their refusal to carry out any work related to the German war effort. The SS fury about their obstinacy, which reached all the way to Himmler, hit these prisoners hard and several lost their lives.231 These brutal SS responses ensured that prisoner strikes remained exceedingly rare.232
One of the most deadly demonstrations of SS resolve came in spring 1944 in the Flossenbürg satellite camp Mülsen St. Micheln, set up a few months earlier in a disused textile plant near Zwickau. Its inmates worked on fighter plane engines on the main floor of the building, and slept in a crowded cellar below. The men never left the factory. Conditions were particularly poor for the hundreds of starving Soviets, who made up the majority of the prisoner population. On the night of May 1, 1944, some of them, delirious with hunger, set alight straw mattresses in the basement, perhaps hoping that this would allow them to flee. SS men made sure that there would be no way out of the inferno. They locked the prisoners inside, shot at those trying to escape, and prevented the local fire brigade from entering. “The smoke was rife with the stench of burning bodies. I could see nothing at all and I struggled for air,” one prisoner recalled, who survived by clinging for hours to the bars of a cellar window, with flames scorching his body. When the fire finally died down, around two hundred men lay dead and many more were badly burned. But the SS was not finished yet. Over the following months, it executed dozens of Soviets who had survived the blaze. The message was clear: open defiance would be met with absolute terror.233
Given the futility of physical resistance, a couple of bold inmates submitted written protests to the SS instead. In March 1943, several Polish women, who had been mutilated during human experiments, petitioned the Ravensbrück commandant. In their letter, they challenged him to justify the carnage caused by the operations: “We are asking you to grant us a meeting in person or to send us an answer.” Predictably, Commandant Suhren never replied. But the women did not give in. When the SS tried to continue the experiments, a few months later, the intended victims hid in their barrack, sheltered by fellow prisoners. “We decided among ourselves that it would be better if they would shoot us,” one of them later testified, “rather than have them cut us up all the time.” Once again, though, the SS imposed its will. The so-called rabbits were dragged to the bunker, and several were operated on; the other rebels were locked into their barrack for days without food or fresh air.234
With open challenges all but impossible, some prisoners came to see escape as their only chance to cheat death. During his imprisonment in Auschwitz, Stanisław Frączysty had a recurring dream, during which he turned into a small animal and slid with ease through the fence around the camp, leaving it and all its horror behind.235 Escape was on the minds of many inmates, and not just when they were asleep. In the end, though, only a few—mostly men—took the risk of fleeing, though figures were growing during the final years of the Second World War.236 The number of runaways from the Mauthausen camp complex, for example, rose from 11 (1942) to more than 226 (1944). In the Buchenwald complex, meanwhile, the SS reported the flight of 110 prisoners during a particularly turbulent two-week period in September 1944—though with over eighty-two thousand prisoners held there at the time, this was still an infinitesimal proportion of the inmate population.237
The rise in escapes reflects the changes in the KL system during the war. While it remained very hard to abscond from the established main camps—not a single prisoner seems to have managed to flee from Neuengamme until April 1945—the chances of success stood higher in hastily erected and poorly secured satellite camps.238 The proliferation of prisoner transports also offered greater opportunities for escape, as did the lack of veteran SS guards. As a Polish prisoner explained, after successfully absconding in July 1944, the staff shortages had “caused me constantly to think of escape.”239
The circumstances of escapes varied greatly. Some prisoners used force, drugging, beating, or killing guards to clear their way.240 More commonly, they relied on deception, climbing into trucks that left the camp or hiding in safe places until the SS called off its search. Disguises worked, too, with several prisoners dressing up as SS officials. One such escape unfolded in June 1942 in Auschwitz. Sneaking past the guards, four Polish prisoners broke into the SS storerooms, grabbed uniforms and weapons, and then drove off in a limousine. When they were flagged down at a checkpoint, the ringleader, dressed as an Oberscharführer, leaned out of the window and gesticulated impatiently at sentries at the barrier, which was quickly lifted. “A few minutes later, we were driving through the city of Oświęcim,” one of the conspirators recalled. After camp compound leader Hans Aumeier found out how his men had been duped, he “went almost crazy, tearing out his hair,” according to the Auschwitz underground leader Witold Pilecki.241
The ultimate success of escapes depended on many variables, with luck the most important ingredient, followed by outside connections. Once prisoners had left the immediate vicinity of the KL, they needed support, and quickly. In occupied Europe, some fugitives received shelter from members of the resistance, and often joined the underground themselves; following his own escape from Auschwitz, Witold Pilecki fought during the doomed Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Other escapees remained in hiding until the end of the war. After he fled from Monowitz in summer 1944, helped by his girlfriend and a German civilian contractor, Bully Schott changed into regular clothes and traveled on a packed night train to his hometown, Berlin. Here he survived, as one of a few thousand Jews hiding in the German capital, with the help of old friends, who moved him to different safe houses and provided him with false papers.242
A few runaways even crossed enemy lines. Among them was Pavel Stenkin. One of the few survivors of an attempted mass escape of Soviet POWs from Auschwitz-Birkenau in November 1942, he rejoined the Red Army and triumphantly entered Berlin as a liberator in 1945.243 Another was a Polish lieutenant by the name of Marcinek. Carrying forged papers, a pistol, and an SS uniform, he traveled by train and car from Berlin to the front line in Normandy, where he crossed over to the Allies on July 19, 1944, under heavy artillery fire. A German called Schreck, who accompanied Marcinek, had meticulously prepared their escape. To the surprise of the British troops, Schreck was no prisoner but a Sachsenhausen SS man; entangled in a corruption affair, he preferred Allied captivity to punishment by the SS.244
Escapes always prompted manhunts by the Nazi authorities, and although it is impossible to establish how many prisoners managed to evade the clutches of SS and police, the odds were stacked against them, at least until the final months of the war. Take
the following example of 471 men and women who fled from the Auschwitz complex between 1940 and 1945. In all, 144 stayed on the run and mostly survived the war. But 327 were arrested and delivered back to the camp, where they faced draconian punishment.245
SS Responses
Despite the low number of successful KL escapes, Heinrich Himmler was concerned. Anxious about the safety of the German public, he ordered his men in 1943 to use any means necessary to stem the flow, from planting land mines to training dogs that tore prisoners to pieces. To turn up the pressure, he also insisted that every KL had to inform him personally about escapes.246 Fearing Himmler’s wrath, Richard Glücks—who anxiously asked his managers in the T-Building each morning if any prisoners had run away—made the fight against escapes a priority.247 His WVHA office exhorted the local Camp SS “never to trust a prisoner” and tightened up procedures.248 Although official regulations for sentries required them to shout “stop” before discharging their weapons, an internal Camp SS manual instructed guards to shoot without warning.249 Superiors praised vigilant men who had foiled escapes, awarding furloughs and other bonuses, while they issued threats against negligent ones.250 The SS had a message for the prisoners, too: anyone who tried to escape would face a terrible fate.
Deterrence was the most important element in the Camp SS fight against escapes. Some recaptured prisoners were maimed by dogs, as Himmler had hoped; afterward, the SS displayed the mangled corpses on the roll call square.251 More often, the unfortunates were dragged back alive. First the SS tortured them, to find out who had helped them and how they had beaten the defenses.252 Then they were publicly humiliated, followed by the punishment proper. Some prisoners got away with fifty lashes or transfer to the penal company (apparently, the SS showed such “leniency” to inmates who had run away on impulse).253 Many more paid with their lives.
Some local SS men took matters into their own hands.254 At other times, the recaptured inmates were executed in line with official protocol, after commandants applied for, and received, permission to kill from their superiors.255 Starting in 1942, Camp SS officials carried out numerous such ritualized hangings of condemned prisoners, which resembled the first KL execution, of Emil Bargatzky in summer 1938. The killing of the Austrian prisoner Hans Bonarewitz is a case in point. Bonarewitz had escaped from Mauthausen around noon on June 22, 1942, hidden inside a crate on a lorry. Recaptured some days later, he faced a torturous death. For a week, he was paraded in front of the other prisoners, together with his wooden crate; on it, the SS had written mocking words like Goethe’s saying “Why stray far away, when everything good is right here.” Then, on July 30, 1942, the SS forced Bonarewitz on the cart used for taking corpses to the crematorium. Some prisoners slowly pulled it toward the gallows on the roll call square, while the others stood to attention. The procession, which lasted more than one hour, was led by a prisoner acting as master of ceremonies, and by ten inmates from the camp orchestra, who played songs such as the children’s classic “All the little birds are back.” Along the way, an SS man took photographs, documenting Bonarewitz’s final moments. At the gallows, the SS whipped and tortured him, and finally had him hanged; the rope broke twice before he died, accompanied by music from the orchestra.256
Prisoner reactions to public hangings—sometimes sarcastically called “German cultural evenings”—varied.257 Some quietly swore revenge or yelled in protest.258 Others were unmoved, blaming the executed inmates for the collective SS abuse that often followed escapes. The most common reaction, perhaps, was dread. One former Mauthausen inmate recalled that after the execution of two recaptured German prisoners, one of them so badly wounded he had to be carried to the gallows, he quickly lost any urge to flee himself: “The spectacle has worked: better to kick the bucket in the quarry than to go to the gallows!”259
Public executions were not the only SS means of deterrence. Occasionally, the authorities took family members of escaped inmates as hostages to the KL.260 The Camp SS also punished fellow prisoners in place of escaped ones. From early on, there were torturous roll calls, beatings, and other abuses. Later on, the SS resorted to murder, as well. Following the escape of a Polish inmate in spring 1941, the Auschwitz SS starved ten others to death in the bunker. A few months later, following a further escape, the SS punished another group of prisoners in the same way. To save one of these doomed men, the Franciscan priest Maksymilian Kolbe stepped forward to die in his stead. The SS accepted his sacrifice, but after he had survived for more than two weeks, its patience ran out; Kolbe was administered a lethal injection.261 Collective executions soon became a regular form of deterrence, in Auschwitz and some other KL. Among the many victims was Janusz Pogonowski, the young Polish prisoner who had remained in touch with his family by secret letters. He was one of twelve prisoners hanged in Auschwitz on the evening of July 19, 1943, in front of rows of other inmates, following the escape of three colleagues from his labor commando.262
The SS policy of collective punishment showed some effect, as prisoners thought twice about running away. And they had mixed feelings about the escapes of others. On the one hand, such escapes could boost prisoner morale, as every SS setback did, and offered hope that the world would learn about their fate.263 On the other hand, inmates dreaded the terror that often followed.264 The SS was well aware that many prisoners saw escapees as traitors against the community, and sometimes exploited their anger, as in the case of the waiter Alfred Wittig, a “green” prisoner in Sachsenhausen. One afternoon in summer 1940, Wittig went missing. While the SS searched the camp, all prisoners had to stand to attention, deep into the night. When the SS finally dismissed them from the roll call square, several had collapsed. The search for Wittig resumed the following morning and after he was discovered—hidden under a pile of sand—an SS officer delivered him to the other prisoners: “Do with him what you want.” Seething about their suffering the previous night, dozens of them trampled Wittig to death. For once, the cause of death was recorded accurately on the official paperwork, because the SS had not been directly involved: “Injury to lung and other internal organs (beaten to death by fellow prisoners).”265
Resistance by the Doomed
Mala Zimetbaum and Edek Galiński became lovers in Auschwitz, sometime in the second half of World War II. Theirs was one of the few relationships to blossom in the KL, and it has since become a symbol of hope and tragedy in the camps, commemorated in books, films, and a graphic novel.266 Both were veterans of Auschwitz. Zimetbaum, a Polish Jew, was deported from Belgium in September 1942, while Galiński had arrived more than two years earlier, on the first transport of Polish political prisoners. Over time, both gained privileged posts that allowed them to rendezvous in the X-ray room of the infirmary in the Birkenau women’s compound. They often talked about running away together, and after careful planning, they risked everything on the afternoon of Saturday, June 24, 1944. Dressed in stolen SS uniforms, they left the camp, each on their own, and strolled into town, as if they were SS staff on weekend leave. After they were reunited on the banks of the Vistula, they tried to make it to Slovakia. But after they had spent two weeks on the run, exhausted and lost in the Carpathian Mountains, border guards caught them. When they returned to Auschwitz, the SS threw them into the bunker—Galiński’s inscriptions on the walls are still legible today—and condemned them to die.
But the day of their execution, September 15, 1944, did not proceed as the SS had planned. Edek Galiński was marched along rows of prisoners in one of the Birkenau compounds for men and led up to the scaffold. Before the SS could read out his sentence, however, Galiński tried to hang himself. Held back by officials, he shouted a rallying cry as the executioner pulled the floor from under his feet. Over in the Birkenau women’s compound, Mala Zimetbaum also defied the SS. As she was escorted to the gallows on the roll call square, she produced a razor blade and cut her wrist. When an SS man tried to stop her, she hit him. Stunned officials dragged her away, and she was last seen, more dead tha
n alive, on a cart near the crematorium. Zimetbaum lived on in the memory of the other prisoners. Not only had she escaped from Auschwitz, she had confronted her tormentors, shattering the carefully staged SS spectacle. “For the first time we saw a Jewish prisoner raise h[er] hand against a German,” a young survivor later said with admiration.267
Defiance by the doomed was unusual, but it was not unprecedented. To stop condemned prisoners like Edek and Mala from addressing the others, SS officials sometimes gagged them before public executions.268 But the perpetrators knew that executions could still unite the other inmates in their loathing of the SS. This was one reason, no doubt, why most Camp SS murders took place in secret. But even behind closed doors, some prisoners resisted, attacking their killers, or shouting political slogans before they died. SS men tried to laugh off such incidents, but they must have been unsettled, because they had failed to break their victims.269
There was defiance at the Birkenau gas chambers, too. Some prisoners—Jews, Gypsies, and others—fought back as the SS pushed them inside, though such desperate resistance was in vain. Others sang political songs or religious hymns on their way to the gas.270 One of the most celebrated acts occurred on October 23, 1943, when, outside the Birkenau gas chambers, a Jewish prisoner wrestled a gun from the SS and shot at the guards, amid a general commotion. Unterscharführer Josef Schillinger was fatally wounded and another official seriously injured before SS men regained control and slaughtered the inmates; one guard was later commended for helping to “stifle the rebellion” through “determined action.” The sensational news of Schillinger’s death quickly reached other parts of the camp, and there were many rumors about what, exactly, had happened. In the most popular telling, the killer was a striking young woman, a dancer. As for Schillinger, the word among prisoners was that, as he lay dying, he had whimpered: “O God, my God, what have I done to deserve such suffering.” These final words may have sprung from revenge fantasies, but the subsequent SS rage was all too real; at night, guards fired machine guns into the Birkenau camp compound, mowing down more than a dozen prisoners. Of course, these deaths barely registered among the Auschwitz SS, which had long become used to mass murder on a far bigger scale.271
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