1944

by Jay Winik

  Yet Roosevelt was not the only one taking a rest.

  AS THE WAR GROUND on and the body count mounted and the D-Day invasion loomed, SS officers sought the quiet of a retreat to rejuvenate themselves. Taking a break from the savagery and killings, they were eager for a good time. And why shouldn’t they have been? They were finally getting a respite from the god-awful business of war. To look into the frightened eyes of the near-dead or the soon to be dead, however hated these people were, was difficult for even the hardest of men. And the SS did so on a daily basis. To grasp the magnitude of their mission, a horrific reality that entailed the deaths of so many, week after week, day after day, even minute after minute, was no easier. Earlier in the war, a number of their colleagues cracked under the pressure. These officers were different, however. Tucked away in the heavily forested outer reaches of Upper Silesia in Poland, their operation was carried out under a veil of such secrecy that until recently, its location didn’t appear on most maps, and even many of their colleagues were unaware of their work. For some, their days stretched from four in the morning to as late as midnight. They had to face the continued threat of nearby air raids, the maddening cacophony of barking dogs, the bright floodlights, the constant watch for insurrection, the ghastly smoke and smells, and always the demand to “do more.” That was the business of their particular war.

  By all accounts, though, these officers accepted their jobs with an alacrity that was almost hard to fathom. Also by all accounts, many of them approached those jobs with enthusiasm; for a number of them, this was the high point of their lives, a moment spiced, as it were, with the excitement of great events. And for a job well done, they were now being handsomely rewarded.

  They were accompanied often by a bevy of young, attractive women—for the most part administrative specialists—and even babies and bright-faced children. Their bus rumbled eighteen miles or so past the outskirts of their camp, past the timbered slopes that ran alongside the Sola River, past small villages whose cottages were still untouched by war, through the mountains until they reached a small wooden bridge. Soon, they were at their destination: a peaceful Alpine-style recreation lodge tucked into the hills at the Solahütte retreat along the scenic river itself.

  They were here for eight days of vacation.

  THEY BOUNDED OUT OF the bus in freshly starched uniforms. Somewhere, a photographer took snapshots of their vacation, recording it for posterity. Over the next week or so—the time frame is inexact—the beaming officers and their female companions looked as if they were posing for travel posters, or as if they were summering in Maine or Martha’s Vineyard, nestled among hills and fir trees; all that was missing were the swimsuits and the sound of gramophone music. The women, with their perfect white skin, frolicked, while the officers smoked and chatted. The feeling was comfortable—like a tranquil William Glackens painting—much as life had once been, decades earlier, before the war and the years of the crippling Depression. On the occasional warm afternoon, they would lie languidly in deck chairs on the lodge’s wide wooden porch, blankets covering their legs; a few napped, some gossiped or sunned themselves or sipped a drink. Others cradled their children, or romped with their dogs like “Favorit,” teaching them to sit or stay or lie down. Later, the men would go off by themselves, gathering on long benches around a metal table to drink wine and beer; some rolled up their sleeves before having yet another smoke.

  Recapturing the simple pleasures of life, they were making the most of their time here, enjoying good company, good food, fresh air, and festive gatherings. And the rest of the world seemed quite far off. War? Impending invasion? All that was forgotten.

  The air was clean and at last they could breathe deeply, eat well, and even find romance in a picturesque setting. And they sought rest not only now, but throughout the year. Come June, more vacationers would arrive. Then, the weather would be warm, the fields full of flowers. The young women, clad in identical white shirts and neat black skirts, would array themselves in a line, sitting on the railing of a pastoral wooden bridge, while merrily scooping up blueberries out of little bowls. One of their companions would entertain them with an accordion. When they were finished, they playfully held their bowls upside down in mock dismay.

  The men accompanying them were handsome and well groomed, and the women looked demure and lovely; remarkably, despite the raging war they appeared so composed, so cultivated, so cultured. And in setting after setting, they posed for the camera. They posed during a sing-along—the officers and young women, about a hundred all told, crowding together on a hill, barely able to contain their giddiness. They posed when the accordion played, and when they danced to its tunes. They posed at outdoor time and shooting practice and in their summer clothes. They posed during moments of banter; or when a soft rain began to fall and they deliriously scooted for cover; or in the evening, when their dining table was covered with a crisply pressed white tablecloth, fine china, and elegant wineglasses, and filled with plentiful food. During the winter season, they posed during the ritual lighting of the Christmas tree. And later, they would even pose at a funeral in the snow, where coffins—too often a rarity on the battlefield—were draped with Nazi flags.

  There was a time, however, when they did not pose: at the end of their vacation, when they returned to their bloody work. The juxtaposition was chilling, for these frolicking vacationers were otherwise the dreaded SS. Their place of work: Auschwitz. Indeed, even their holiday retreat, Solahütte, was a satellite facility of the camp, built during 1942 and overseen by Auschwitz SS Obersturmführer Franz Hossler, using Jewish forced labor. The vacationers drawn to the lodge and its environs included Joseph Mengele, who conducted ghastly medical experiments on the unsuspecting inmates; Carl Clauberg, who performed sterilization experiments with acid; and the former camp commandant, Rudolf Hoess. The women themselves were members of the SS Helferinnen (“helpers”). When all was said and done, their sole function at Oswiecim was to do one thing only: implement Hitler’s Final Solution.

  Or, more starkly: kill Jews.

  SPRING ALWAYS SEEMED TO come late to Auschwitz. The omnipresent cold and the leafless landscape were a constant in so many brief lives. And the surviving Jews? As slave laborers, they had a life of unending terror and heartache. Those spared immediate execution and consigned instead to the labor camps often wore out in a matter of weeks, after which they too were dispatched to the gas chambers.

  Those who remained could only gaze helplessly over the horizon of barbed wire. Every day, they were awakened in pitch blackness at 4 a.m., worked a backbreaking twelve hours with virtually no rest and only the meagerest food, and were then forced to endure endless roll calls at night. When the time for sleep finally came, sometimes after midnight, initially they had sacks filled with straw, and later crude, hard three-tier plank wooden bunk beds; usually six people and sometimes as many as eight were packed into a bed designed for three. In general, the SS crammed more than 700 people into barracks built for 180. There was no heat, no electricity, no paved floor—the floor was simply damp, boggy ground. And if the gas chambers did not kill the inmates soon enough, sickness did: spotted fever, dysentery, and typhus all flourished, but just as often a simple cold was enough to do the job. And many people’s bodies simply seemed to decay from within. Open sores oozed on swollen legs. The ubiquitous lice were as big as fingernails and carried encephalitis within their nits and shells. They too were killers. Meanwhile, the barracks were overrun with vermin. Basic rampant filth and negligible sanitation also raised the butcher’s bill.

  Inside the camp, the prisoners’ world seemed enveloped in darkness. During the winter, winds and snow lashed at their barracks, as they slept almost naked, with no blankets, in subzero temperatures, hovering between life and death. Their only pillow was a fist—that is, if they could even clench a hand. And sleep was hard to come by—there were continual outbursts of hacking coughs among the prisoners, and the deeper wheezing sounds made by the very ill. Often, a priso
ner would wake in the morning and find the one next to him dead. Too weak to move even the pathetically light bodies of their comrades, sometimes too weak even to move themselves, the living just continued sleeping.

  In the grim environment of Auschwitz, the Nazis’ daily cruelties could turn even the gentlest prisoners into monsters. Emaciated prisoners were ready to kill each other for a mere crust of bread; sons were forced to select their fathers for the crematorium; mothers were forced to strangle their babies. Many of the prisoners were drawn from the intellectual class of Jews, comprising distinguished doctors, lawyers, accountants—respected professionals from every field. Yet even these formerly eminent figures had been reduced to animals by their treatment at the hands of the Germans, by the disgusting living conditions, the indiscriminate murder brought on by the slightest (or no) provocation, and the intentional, prolonged starvation.

  The Nazis erased the identity of every prisoner, one more means by which they stripped the Jews of any remaining dignity. Once in the camp, the prisoners no longer had names; instead they were identified by numbers that were painfully tattooed in their forearms with a single needle. Remarkably, some seven hundred babies were born in the camp—they were registered as “new arrivals”—and they too received tattoos: on their buttocks or their thighs. Moreover, the prisoners had to wear whatever filthy rags they were given. The clothes might be much too large or much too small. It didn’t matter. The same for shoes. Indeed, the clothes themselves were a health hazard; they were never washed but only steamed, and then only every six weeks, until they were falling apart. Even the underwear, when the prisoners had any, was invariably disgusting.

  Daily roll call was a special hell. The few children in the camp who weren’t immediately selected for the gas chambers had their own diabolical version of it. They were forced to stand for hours in water, until they had no choice but to urinate—or defecate—in it; this then became the water they were forced to drink. For everyone else, depending on the whim of the SS, roll call might last an hour, three hours, or all day—or night. Waiting for their numbers to be called, the prisoners were subjected to repeated harassment, isolation, and debilitating drills. Standing at attention for hours is difficult enough for a healthy person; for the weak and humiliated, it was almost impossible. There were some whose knees buckled, some who toppled over, some who simply couldn’t stand straight. They were severely beaten by the SS, or, while standing half naked, doused with buckets of ice-cold water.

  There was no letup from the cruelty.

  No offense was too trivial to be punished. A poorly washed food bowl could lead to solitary confinement with only bits of bread and dirty water. A missing button was enough to send a prisoner to a tiny windowless cell, somewhat like a telephone booth, where he was forced to stand shoeless on cold stone. Dirty fingernails were punishable by a beating with a bamboo cane. Failure to take off one’s cap when the SS walked by often merited fifty lashes with a whip, the dreaded “cat.” And an inappropriate scowl or grimace was enough to result in a torture dating from the Middle Ages: dangling precariously from a post with the arms tied behind the back and raised high. Death was often the result. At one protracted roll call in 1940, eighty-four prisoners died from exposure and beatings.

  Frequently the camp administration left the corpses of dead prisoners languishing in the courtyard as an example.

  Yet, remarkably, there were prisoners who survived the first couple of weeks in the camp. They often clung to the notion that their living conditions might somehow improve, that the beatings might cease, that a modicum of normality would be restored. It was not to be. With cruel Orwellian logic, the SS formed a prisoner orchestra—it included many of the finest musicians from the capitals of Europe, and even the renowned director of the Warsaw Philharmonic—that played music while other prisoners trudged off to their work details in the chill early-morning darkness. Many of the work details were in effect graveyards themselves. The timber yard, the gravel pit, and the construction site all produced tremendous losses nearly every day.

  The malnutrition was appalling. For breakfast, if one could call it that, prisoners were given an unsweetened coffee substitute or something that resembled herbal tea. For lunch, they had a thin, watery soup that might contain small bits of potato, parsnip, or millet. For dinner, the prisoners were allotted a couple of ounces of stale, moldy bread, and this was the last food they had until breakfast. All told, they were forced to live on only a few hundred calories a day. They died quickly, but the work continued uninterrupted, as fresh trainloads of Jews arrived daily.

  And the SS was always exhorting the same thing, shouting at the prisoners, “To work! TO WORK!”

  Life in the camp was in all ways brutal and sordid. Even using the toilet was perilous. Many prisoners could relieve themselves only in outdoor privies, regardless of the weather. Others, in barracks built later, had to share a single latrine with perhaps thirty or more inmates. Many of the prisoners had diarrhea, so there were long lines and endless waits, often for hours. The SS would shoot on sight anyone seen relieving himself anywhere other than in the latrine. Those unable to reach the crude holes in time were killed and their bodies were left lying in the feces and urine. The stench was suffocating. And so were the foul bodily odors that clung to the living prisoners.

  So horrible was the situation that many prisoners tried to end their lives, hurling themselves against the electric barbed wire surrounding the perimeter of the camp.

  And those who hung on, even those who had been hardiest and strongest, were quickly reduced to living skeletons, insane with hunger and scarcely capable of life. Their teeth decayed and fell out. Their hair and nails refused to grow. Their eyes became great sunken hollows in fleshless faces. When the day came that they could no longer walk, they tried to crawl; when they could no longer crawl, they tried to prop themselves up on their elbows; and when they could no longer do that, they sat up with frightened eyes, silent and shunned by the other prisoners, picking at discarded potato peels, until they just faded away.

  No one at the camp thought of actually living; the inmates just thought of living a little longer.

  As one of the Nazis put it, “This was the way of Auschwitz.”

  THERE WAS INDEED A “way of Auschwitz.” Inside the tangled barbed wire walls stretched hundreds of one-story buildings, a state within a state, a fine-tuned apparatus created for one man, Adolf Hitler. From its seemingly innocuous beginning as a work camp in 1939, Auschwitz had become an institution with the muscle of an absolute despot and the heart of a monster. Technically its commandant, and the SS, answered to Berlin, but in truth they became independent overseers of death. True, their titular masters were Hitler and his notorious inner circle—committed Nazis such as Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Eichmann, and earlier Reinhard Heydrich—but in practice the administrators of Auschwitz largely answered to no one. It became the worst killing center the world had ever seen; its powers were nearly absolute. With undeterred abandon, they confiscated public property. They controlled their own funds and could effectively suspend any public official in their domain. They freely dispensed with anything resembling due process or international law as a mere nuisance. And operating in almost total secrecy, with the tap of a finger or the wink of an eye they decided the fate of almost 2 million innocent souls—nearly three times as many as the recorded dead in the American Civil War.

  Even when the German Reich came under extraordinary pressure in 1944, even when Hitler’s health deteriorated and disgruntled factions and cabals multiplied in the Nazi Reich, Auschwitz never faltered. Until the moment when the Nazis were overthrown, it was seemingly omnipotent.

  In 1944, Auschwitz was far more than the single death camp called by this point Auschwitz II or Birkenau. It was an entire network of death, twisted experimentation, and slave labor: there was Auschwitz I, the parent camp; and also Auschwitz III, a sub-camp conglomerate that included Monowitz, a separate facility churning out synthetic rubbe
r for the Nazi war effort. Eventually, an ambitious complex of some thirty subcamps affiliated with Auschwitz came into being. At these, the SS and the German private sector worked hand-in-hand with cold, ruthless efficiency. Attracted by the cheap slave labor—remarkably the SS charged the companies for each worker, but gave discount rates to state industries—an array of industries soon moved into the sprawling Auschwitz system: there were producers of consumer goods, manufacturers of chemicals, and fabricators of metals. There was the IG Farben synthetic oil and rubber factory operated at Auschwitz (IG Farben also held the patent on the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers). And there were the famous Krupp plant, the Siemens factory, the Silesian shoe company, the United Textile Mill Works, the Trzebinia oil refinery company, and the Reichsbahn. They were joined by the German Earth and Stone Works factory, the German Food Company, various coal mines, and the German Equipment Company. There was even a fish and poultry breeding plant, and an SS agricultural estate. But for the prisoners, these enterprises were almost interchangeable. They all involved the same hunger, hard work, and ruthless exploitation.

  Chillingly, the lives of ordinary Germans in the camp or the nearby town remained largely untouched by the mass murder. With something oddly like the pioneering spirit of Americans moving west, German settlers arrived at Auschwitz and its environs from all parts of the old Reich: Hamburg, Cologne, Münster, Magdeburg, Munich, and even Vienna. These settlers had a buoyant belief in their own future, and a sense that it was their duty to bring enlightened German culture to the backward Slavic east. With joyous hearts, they came—or professed to come—in order to realize Hitler’s expansive vision of constructing a new society, one resting not simply on money, status, or name, but on courage and the test of character.