By then the Final Solution was getting under way, the first mass transits of Jews to Auschwitz were about to begin, and two new gas chambers were being set up at Birkenau as well. The first of these, known as the “Red House,” or Bunker 1, was established in the abandoned redbrick property of a resettled Polish farmer and went into operation on March 20. The second, known as the “White House,” or Bunker 2, was set up in a whitewashed building a short distance away and began operating two months later. In the interim, the SS had also decided to construct two large crematoria on the site, buildings that would eventually incorporate more sophisticated and custom-built gas chambers of their own.
Thus the ghastly, industrialized ritual of mass murder at Auschwitz swung into action, mirroring the genocide that was already being carried out at the Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec death camps (a program code-named Operation Reinhard after the assassination of Heydrich) but differing from it both in terms of scale and in the fact that Auschwitz fulfilled a labor function as well. Arriving Jews were separated by “selection” into those considered fit for work and those—predominantly the old, the sick, and the very young—chosen for immediate murder.* It was this process that Himmler most wanted to see in action.
His arrival at the main Auschwitz camp on July 17 was attended by a certain degree of ceremony. A few days earlier, on Commandant Höss’s orders, some of the more decrepit-looking prisoners had been dispatched to the gas chambers. Those deemed fit to be seen were given new uniforms on the morning of the visit and were made to line up for several hours in front of their barracks. There was a moment of last-minute panic among the guards when it was noticed that one prisoner, Yankel Meisel, was without his full quota of tunic buttons. For this sin he was taken back inside the barrack by his embarrassed block wardens and beaten to death. His screams had only just faded away when the limousines bearing the Reichsführer and his aides swept through the main gate. On cue, the camp orchestra burst into the Triumphal March from Verdi’s Aida. Himmler got out of the car, listened appreciatively for a moment or two, and then walked over with Höss to inspect the prisoners. Inmate Rudolf Vrba was standing in one of the front rows.
He passed close to me, close enough for me to touch him, and for the moment our eyes met. They were cold, impersonal eyes that seemed to see little; and yet I found myself thinking: “If he finds out what is going on, maybe he’ll improve things. Maybe the food will get better. Maybe there won’t be so many beatings. Maybe … maybe we’ll see some justice around for a change.” Already you see, I had forgotten Yankel Meisel. And so had everybody else because Heinrich Himmler was smiling.*
The Reichsführer’s entourage then moved on to the design office, where Hans Kammler, the SS’s chief architect, showed him plans for the next stages of development at Auschwitz, including blueprints for the new crematoria, which were about to be built with the help of civilian contractors. After a brief tour of the grounds, the party climbed back into their cars to drive the short distance to Birkenau. There Himmler was shown around the camp’s overcrowded barrack blocks and the primitive toilet and washing facilities, before being taken to the Auschwitz railway station (the branch line directly into Birkenau had yet to be built) to watch the disembarkation of a newly arrived transport of Jews from Holland. An SS doctor carried out a selection on the platform. The men and women considered fit to work were separated from the others and marched off to the barracks. The rest were loaded into trucks to be driven to the Birkenau “shower room.”
Himmler and his aides followed the convoy back to Birkenau so that he could see the whole extermination process from beginning to end. He looked on impassively as the now naked prisoners were shaved (typically the hair was taken away in sacks and either woven into warm socks for U-boat crews and Luftwaffe pilots or used as luxury stuffing for mattresses). Then he saw the group being moved into the sealed Bunker 2 gas chamber. After the Zyklon B pellets had been poured in through the roof, he put his eye to the small observation window in the airtight door and watched in silence as those inside died in writhing agony. The whole process took around twenty minutes. After lingering to see the Sonderkommando, or special units of prisoners, begin clearing away the bodies for burial in mass graves around the camp—a temporary measure until the crematoria were finished—Himmler got back in his car for the trip up the road to the site of IG Farben’s Buna-Werke.* Less than half an hour after watching the murder of hundreds of Dutch Jews, the Reichsführer SS was smiling and exchanging Nazi salutes with Max Faust, his official guide for the day, and a small team of IG engineers.
If Himmler was the slightest bit perturbed by what he had just experienced he didn’t show it. As the party walked briskly around the site he cast keen darting glances here and there and bombarded the IG men with questions. At one point Faust stopped to show him a set of plans for the plant and Himmler expressed his skepticism about the IG’s practice of tinkering with the designs in an attempt to make the factory more efficient than its predecessors at Schkopau, Hüls, and Ludwigshafen. Surely, he said, it would make more sense to build in accordance with existing plans and put up with certain disadvantages in manufacture rather than waste time on constant revisions. Perhaps seeking by this remark to deflect criticism of the SS for failing to meet its labor quota in full, Himmler immediately threw Faust on the defensive. Faust hastened to assure him that the factory would be ready on schedule by mid-1943 (although he must have known it wouldn’t be), and having done so he couldn’t very well complain about the labor shortage. On the other hand, Himmler raised no objections to the IG’s plans for its own concentration camp, which he might have done in different circumstances. Instead he expressed his general satisfaction with the way things were going, shook hands all around, and set off back to Auschwitz for a comradely dinner in the SS officers’ mess and an evening of banal conversation in the Katowice home of Fritz Bracht, the gauleiter of Upper Silesia.
The next day, after witnessing the flogging of a woman accused of stealing and another round of inspections, including one of a section devoted to sorting out the confiscated belongings of murdered Jews, Himmler complimented Rudolf Höss on his efforts and promoted him to the rank of SS Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel). In the process, he confirmed again Auschwitz’s central role in the Holocaust. “Eichmann’s program will continue and will be accelerated every month from now. See to it that you move ahead with the completion of Birkenau. The Gypsies are to be exterminated. With the same ruthlessness you will exterminate those Jews who are unable to work.”
* * *
MONOWITZ, OR AUSCHWITZ III as it was sometimes known, resembled a state-owned concentration camp in almost every respect. Although IG Farben built it (using prisoner labor) and paid its running costs, it was equipped with the same watchtowers, armed guards, electric fences, sirens, gallows, punishment cells, mortuary, and searchlights as Auschwitz and Birkenau. Its wooden barrack blocks, which would eventually hold around eleven thousand inmates, were just as confined, if not more so, than the accommodations in the other camps, and its washing and sanitation facilities just as primitive and dehumanizing. The SS supplied the inmates and guards, had ultimate authority over camp security, discipline, and internal organization, and even installed the Auschwitz motto, Arbeit macht frei, over the main gate. Indeed, the only real difference between Monowitz and the other camps was that the IG took over responsibility for food and health care—a distinction of singular irrelevance to most prisoners because the provision of both was as criminally inadequate as anything supplied by the state.*
The first six hundred inmates arrived on October 28, with another fourteen hundred joining them over the next two days. This was actually several weeks later than planned but an outbreak of typhus in the other two camps held the process up. For a short time, in order to maintain a quarantine, inmates designated for the Buna-Werke, including one group of 405 people from Buchenwald, were sent straight to Monowitz without passing through the Auschwitz main camp or Birkenau. But the pop
ulation still grew more slowly than anticipated. To make up for the shortfall the SS diverted further transports on January 23, 24, and 27, bringing in 5,022 Jewish men and women directly from the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. After “selection,” however, only 614 men and 316 women from this group were deemed fit for labor. The remaining 4,092 people, “as a result of their poor condition and the large numbers among them who were underage,” were sent to the gas chambers.*
The Auschwitz Complex, June 1944. (Map drawn by Neil Gower)
Meanwhile the savage conditions and the appalling workload continued to take their toll, with the IG using up prisoners almost as fast as the Nazi authorities could provide them. Of the thirty-eight hundred inmates present at Monowitz in late December 1942, only fifteen hundred were still alive by the end of February 1943; the steep death rate took even the SS by surprise. Gerhard Maurer, head of the SS Labor Office, came to investigate and on February 10 promised Dürrfeld and Faust that he would raise the numbers to forty-five hundred, largely out of transports of Jews from Berlin.† But this target, too, wasn’t reached because of the unexpectedly large numbers of children and elderly people emerging from the boxcars. By March 1943 the population at Monowitz had crept back above three thousand, but of these an estimated 730 were receiving some kind of medical treatment for injury and disease and could not produce an effective day’s work.
This extraordinary turnover was directly linked to the IG’s increasing anxiety over the long-term future of the plant. The cartel had committed itself politically and financially to the success of the Buna-Werke in the expectation that its huge investment would eventually pay substantial dividends. But in mid-1942 it heard that Standard Oil had been forced to yield its buna patent licenses to other American manufacturers and that the U.S. government—cut off from strategic supplies in the Far East—had committed itself to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on creating and supporting what now promised to be a massive new industry. Although this news can hardly have been a complete surprise, it dashed the IG’s hopes of monopolizing the international synthetic rubber market. The only hope now was that a German victory in Europe would be enough to secure the IG’s position at home and that its superior technology would be allowed it to compete aggressively with the Americans on the foreign stage after the war. Cost effectiveness was going to be crucial to this endeavor: to survive, all the cartel’s buna plants, but especially the Buna-Werke, would have to be as economical as possible. The IG knew from experience that ensuring efficiency meant building it into a factory’s infrastructure right from the start—a painstaking and exacting process that could not be rushed or short-circuited. Unfortunately, the regime in Berlin was not known for its patience. The Nazis had asked if the IG could increase the supply of buna and synthetic fuel, and in both cases the concern had said yes. Now it was expected to deliver—and quickly. Trapped between its own aspirations for the Buna-Werke and the government’s urgent demands for product, the concern was feeling the strain.
This pressure was passed on down through Fritz ter Meer, Heinrich Bütefisch, Otto Ambros, Hermann Schmitz, and others on the Vorstand to Walter Dürrfeld and Max Faust, the two men in charge of the Buna-Werke construction. They in turn passed it on to their subordinates—the hundreds of supervising foremen, engineers, designers, administrators, and master craftsmen brought in from IG plants across Germany to oversee and manage the work. Bedeviled by delays in supplies of vital materials and frustrated by the inadequacy of their labor force, many of these men were gradually becoming brutalized by their close association with the SS and the mounting insanity of their surroundings. By Christmas 1942 the first of the large carbide production halls, essential for the buna process, was taking shape at the northern end of the site, but elsewhere road and rail tracks were still unfinished, vast tracts of land still had to be flattened and shaped, mile upon mile of piping and cable had still to be laid. In their desperation, the IG supervisors, without pity or compassion, drove their exhausted and emaciated workforce even harder—and turned the Buna-Werke and Monowitz into a living hell.
For many of the plant’s “free” foreign laborers, especially those recruited from Belgium, Holland, and France, the deteriorating conditions now became too much to bear. Usually the only new clothes they could obtain were the items the SS had confiscated from incoming prisoners, which, having been deemed too ragged to send back to Germany for sale, had been bought by the IG for redistribution through the camp stores. Many foreign laborers were reduced to wearing the standard camp-issue wooden shoes that were made in a Monowitz workshop, although in contrast to inmates they were at least able to choose a pair that fit. Their diet was poor, too, consisting of only marginally more generous portions of the same thin soup that was doled out to the prisoners, while “luxuries” such as soap and tobacco were in increasingly short supply. Their living quarters were also worse than they had been led to expect. The IG’s German employees were billeted in and around Auschwitz town, with the more senior living in the company’s well-constructed modern housing, but the foreign workers were accommodated in drafty wooden huts that resembled those the IG later put into its concentration camp. Nevertheless, none of this was as hard to bear as the violence that the workers saw meted out regularly to the prisoners who worked alongside them. Usually reluctant volunteers in the first place (most had been assigned by the occupying Nazi authorities to work for the IG whether they liked it or not), the foreign workers made their unhappiness known, returning to their barracks in inclement weather, taking unscheduled breaks, and sometimes refusing to work altogether. In August 1942 the IG was forced to send 160 of the worst Belgian and French “shirkers” home and began threatening others with transfer to the main Auschwitz concentration camp if they didn’t cooperate. Not surprisingly, many just disappeared, setting off on the risky journey back across occupied Europe without papers or authorization. Eventually around 23 percent of the “voluntary” foreign workforce deserted in this way, although how many actually made it home isn’t known.
Conditions were infinitely worse for the Jewish prisoners, whose presence at Monowitz and the Buna-Werke was just as much a consequence of the Nazi policy of racial annihilation as the mass shootings and the gas chambers elsewhere, except that death came in a form profitable to the Third Reich. Their situation was also paradoxical: given the intense pressure the Nazis were putting on IG Farben to finish the Buna-Werke, it would have been more logical for the regime to keep the Jews alive and working rather than to kill them and have to find replacements. But even during the extreme manpower crises that became ever more frequent in Germany once the Wehrmacht had been bloodily repelled from the gates of Moscow and Stalingrad, such logic always took second place to Nazi racial ideology, which saw wiping out the Jews as a sacred duty transcending almost all the Reich’s other needs. As a result, the Jews’ time in Monowitz and at the Buna-Werke was necessarily brief because it was part of a carefully planned process of extermination through labor. Jews who could work at the required levels of intensity or who had special skills that were in demand might escape the gas chambers for a short while; if not, they were sent immediately to their deaths and replaced by others. So long as the transports delivered substitute workers, the SS, and therefore by extension the IG’s managers, felt no compunction to keep prisoners alive for one moment longer than was deemed necessary.*
The stories of those who through chance or extraordinary circumstance managed to survive testify to the barbarism and brutality of the regime at Monowitz and the Buna-Werke. Kai Feinberg, for example, arrived at the camp in late 1942. A Norwegian Jew, he had surrendered to Vidkun Quisling’s collaborationist authorities in Oslo because his sister had been threatened with arrest if he did not give himself up. As it happened, his entire family was subsequently arrested, becoming part of a group of 521 Jews who were handed over to the Nazis for deportation to Auschwitz.
After three weeks, on December 23, 1942, my father, his two brothers, and I were quarter
ed in the special concentration camp of Monowitz. Conditions were unbearable. It was almost impossible to breathe. We had to get up at 4:30 a.m. It took three quarters of an hour to march to our place to work. On the first day—the day before Christmas, 24 December 1942—we had to work through until 3:00 a.m., 25 December, without food. We unloaded boxcars, iron poles and bags containing cement, as well as heavy ovens. On January 5, 1943, my father was already so weakened that when we had to drag a 50-kilogram bag at doubled pace he collapsed before my very eyes. He was carried to the camp by his comrades. He had been beaten constantly by the guards, and this most severely on the last day.… He died in my presence on 7 January 1943. One brother of my father injured his right arm during work, and he was gassed. The second brother of my father had become so weak that he died while at work, about one or two weeks after my father in Buna. I myself was able to stand the work until 15 January 1943; then I contracted pneumonia and resumed work from 15 February until the end of February. Then I was declared unfit for work because I was no longer able to walk and it was decided that I was to be gassed. It so happened that on that day no truck came to the Buna works and I was returned instead to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
Norbert Wollheim had a similar experience. After being separated from his wife and three-year-old son on arrival at Monowitz in 1943, he was processed as was customary—robbed of all his possessions, shaved, deloused, and tattooed with a number, 107984—and then taken to the Buna-Werke.
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