The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard

by Patrick Hicks

  We therefore know that Guth wanted everything “made cleaner” and that he banned alcohol in the SS canteen until “after 2100 hours.”

  “This isn’t the front line,” he told his guards one night. “Here you have it easy because no one’s shooting at you.” He paused and raised a finger. “Write home to your mothers and sweethearts tonight. Tell them you’re safe. Tell them you love them.”

  Guth had the wood line widened to create better fields of gunfire as well as strategically defined boundaries of left and right vision for the guard towers. He put distance markers out in the forest so that his men could see how far their bullets might travel if an escape ever happened. He reinforced the barbed-wire fences and put a solid guard rotation into place so his men would get proper amounts of sleep. He ran drills. He inspected weapons. He laid out clear expectations of on-duty and off-duty behavior. He also made sure his men ate decent food, he got them beds instead of cots, and he had a wide moat of landmines placed around the camp. The prisoners were forced to dig these holes, and on ten separate occasions landmines went off killing inmates, but it was never determined if these were accidents or suicides. To the guards who ran Lubizec it hardly mattered, though. Dead prisoners were dead prisoners. We can only imagine what it must have been like to sow these angry explosives into the earth, but for the prisoners, it must have felt like they were building an invisible wall around themselves, that they were burying hope itself deep in the ground. We have no account of what these men were thinking because, after this wide moat of landmines was completed, they were all shot. Students, rabbis, shopkeepers, musicians, fishmongers, tailors, doctors, and poets. Every single one of them. Shot.

  Guth spent more time in his office, but unlike Wilhelm Fischel, he wasn’t a hermit. Far from it. He was on the phone constantly, drafting blueprints and making sure building materials were delivered to the camp on time.

  One detail that horrified Guth about Lubizec was his discovery that whores were brought in every weekend. Apparently under Fischel’s command, local women and huge cases of champagne were brought into camp.

  “We’re not running a brothel here,” he said to his guards one morning on the parade ground. The sky was salmon pink, smudged with blue clouds, and his men stood at rigid fixed attention with their shadows stretching away from them. They looked like a packet of bullets. Crows cawed and a tractor puttered in the distance. Guth took in the smoke of his cigarette, held it inside his chest for a long moment, and then spewed it out into the world.

  “Things are about to change around here,” he said, pointing to the empty rail tracks. “See that? In one hour a train will arrive with pallets of bricks. These bricks have a very special purpose. Since the world began spinning, no one has done what we are about to do in this place. It will be a triumph of logistics, and when you’re all old men sitting around talking about the great war in the east, you’ll be able to look back on this moment of your life with pride.” He raised a finger and smiled. “With pride.”

  Exactly one hour later a train huffed through the forest. It pulled up to Lubizec with steam erupting from both sides. After it squealed to a stop, prisoners were beaten out of the gates and ordered to unload bricks—“Schneller, schneller.” The sun was out and everyone felt their hair follicles open up with sweat. Guth handed a rolled-up blueprint to his subordinate, Heinrich Niemann. He was a giant of a man with a weird meandering scar on his chin. His fingers were meaty and Guth found this in keeping with the boxing information that was in Niemann’s file. Apparently in the early 1930s he was a regional Bavarian champ. He certainly had the fists for it.

  “When it arrives we’ll install it over there,” Guth said lighting a cigarette. He puffed and marched over to an imaginary X. “Right here.” He tapped his foot in the patchy grass. “Here. This is where the engine will go. And I want you to erect the showers just there. It all needs to be done in a week, but if you get it done in six days I’ll throw in a crate of champagne. Get it done in five days and you’ll get another crate. Understand?”

  He walked across the sandy earth in his polished boots and didn’t pay any attention to the prisoners who were straining to move impossibly heavy loads of bricks. One prisoner with a shock of black hair and long gangly legs—huge kneecaps—lost control, and his bricks spilled to the ground in a clattering clunk. A guard came over and began beating him until the man was hunched into a ball. The blows sounded like a carpet being smacked clean of dirt.

  Guth looked around and did a quick calculation about what still needed to be done. He walked over and spoke without anger.

  “Stop that.”

  Years later, when one of the guards was asked about Lubizec, he cited these few seconds as an example of Guth’s mercy. He said his commandant “didn’t like to see the Jews suffer.” Whether this is true or not is for the reader to decide, but we do know that Guth returned to his office after this incident and emerged often to make sure the gas chambers were built properly. He got out a level and made sure the brick walls were plumb. He made sure the cement was mixed into a thick paste that resembled oatmeal and he made sure prisoners smoothed out the concrete floors with long metal skims. As promised, the engine arrived the next day and it was pulled into place by a large bulldozer.

  Guth watched all of this while he smoked cigarette after cigarette. He said nothing as prisoners orbited around him in a frenzy.

  At night he closed his office door and pulled out a silver flask.

  His wife and two children were moving into a nearby house but they hadn’t yet arrived so he slept on a cot near his desk. He looked at charts, maps, train schedules, duty rosters, water table levels, food consumption rates, electrical needs, and he calculated the weight of two thousand bodies. He used a slide rule. A mound of cigarette butts sprouted up from his ashtray, and sometimes, when he was deep in thought, he sat back and spun his wedding ring. The stickier the problem, the slower he spun his ring until—“Ah, yes”—he leaned forward and scribbled the answer.

  This, we should note, is the face of evil, this studious man working late into the evening. In any other setting he would just be a building site manager, but Guth was a true believer in Nazi ideology as well as an excellent administrator. With his typewriter and pen he was able to kill hundreds of thousands of people. We must never forget that killing took on many forms in the Holocaust and that these crimes weren’t confined to a single place like a gas chamber. Guth was very good at his job. His desk became a weapon of mass destruction.

  We have a telegram dated June 25, 1942, where Guth tells his superiors how proud he is to be associated with “Operation Reinhard” and that Lubizec is ready to join the ranks of Sobibór, Belzec, and Treblinka as a model camp. He called in several guards and they toasted each other with tall glasses of brandy. They sat back and smoked cigars while, outside, the prisoners who built the gas chambers were all lined up and shot.

  Sometime the next day SS Hauptsturmführer Odilo Globocnik called Guth and congratulated him personally.

  “You are a credit to us all,” he said. “When can you begin?”

  Lubizec became a death camp on July 4, 1942, and Guth decided it might be fun to play some American big band music as the first train rolled in. He found a record player and put on Glenn Miller’s “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” to commemorate what he called Germany’s own version of Independence Day. The guards stood on the newly constructed platform next to the tracks—the smell of sawdust was strong in the air—and they waited as a black cloud of soot plumed up from the horizon. It looked like a foaming geyser of oil as the train passed over the rails until, at last, it hissed to a panting, complaining, shrieking, stop.

  It was one of the hottest summers on record and the guards mopped their foreheads with handkerchiefs. They drank water from canteens and laughed. They tapped their feet to the swinging music.

  When the doors finally clattered open, the people inside were saturated with sweat. The men had taken off their shirts and many of the
women were stripped down to their undergarments. A layer of damp coated everyone and deep inside the oven-hot cars were several infants that had died of thirst. What happened next is horrifyingly familiar to anyone that has studied a death camp. The victims were ordered off the train and promised a cold shower as well as plenty of pumpernickel bread. Guards made announcements about how they were in a transit camp and that they would be resettled to a “Jew village” a few kilometers down the road. There was a murmur of relief.

  It is good to pause here and remind ourselves that these 726 souls were not merely statistics. They were mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, and grandchildren. They each had a story. They were each packed with memory. They were each a vital part of the universe itself. But when the guards raised their clubs they were driven into oblivion.

  As we continue on with the story of Lubizec it is easy to become numb to its horror because the brutality of the place pushes us towards finding a coping mechanism, towards wrapping a shell around our hearts, and this often means it can be easier to imagine a faceless mass moving into the gas chambers instead of individual people with individual lives. But these people could have been our family members or neighbors. On that muggy day in July, they were all scared, worried, and nervous—as anyone would be—so rather than view these 726 souls as unknown characters lost to history, it would be better to imagine our own families on that wooden platform. Our parents are there. Our siblings too. All of our loved ones are soaked with sweat and terror. We glance around at each other and wonder about this strange new place called Lubizec.

  “Where are we?”

  In front of us is a handsome man in a uniform. His copper-blond hair is cut short and his boots are polished to a high shine. “Welcome to Lubizec,” he says. “My name is Commandant Guth.”

  And then? Then we are herded into the camp.

  2

  LIFE IN A DEATH CAMP

  Lubizec was divided into two separate areas. It was bisected across the middle by a large fence that had twigs and leaves woven into it and this “natural curtain,” as Guth called it, split the camp into zones of life and death. Camp I consisted of long wooden barracks for the prisoners that were intentionally built without running water, heat, or flooring of any kind. The barracks were designed to be as uncomfortable as possible and they were stuffed full of triple-layered bunks. Instead of mattresses, hay was used. A few puny windows were added to let daylight in and roll call took place in front of these buildings. Although the ground was stamped hard from use, stubborn tufts of grass grew up here and there.

  Immediately beyond the roll call area was the entrance to the camp. An iron gate had been installed and even though it was mostly locked, the hinges were well greased. Unlike places like Dachau and Auschwitz where the words Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Sets You Free) greeted each prisoner upon arrival, Guth wanted something else for his camp, something simple and ironic. And so, after a few days of thought, he had a large metal sign pounded out that simply read Willkommen (Welcome) in large black letters. It hung over the gate and faced the rail tracks, which were surrounded by a gauze of barbed-wire fencing. Beyond the camp, purple wildflowers waved in the wind.

  The living quarters for the SS were on the south end of Camp I. The guards enjoyed a well-stocked kitchen, a small post office, a barbershop, and they also had a vegetable garden full of green beans, onions, and potatoes. Beer was served in the canteen after 2100 hours, but only when Guth felt that it was deserved.

  Camp II took up the northern half of Lubizec and it was here the killing took place. It required one hundred prisoners to keep it going and there was a long wooden hut for cutting hair. The only brick building in the entire camp was also here: the gas chamber. It had four separate units, it was painted a creamy pale white, and there were huge flowerpots in front of it. Sometimes roses greeted the victims. Other times it was marigolds or geraniums.

  There were seven guard towers in total, each equipped with a powerful searchlight, and at night these giant cones of light roved the ground like animals on a leash. They sniffed here and there before moving on. Guards complained about moths fluttering around these powerful lights but there was nothing Guth could do about it.

  “Nature is nature.” He shrugged.

  As for the mass graves, they lay to the northeast, along with enormous pallets of quicklime.

  Guth was pleased with the first week of operations. “Delighted,” as one guard put it. The bodies had been buried and everything was running smoothly. He called over his second in command, Heinrich Niemann, and pulled out two cigars from his uniform. The sun was like a bullet wound. These jackbooted men stood in twilight with the tips of their cigars glowing hot, then dim. Smoke billowed from their mouths as fireflies floated above the grass. Frogs sang from a nearby creek as Guth tapped ash into the air. He nodded to the cantaloupe-colored sky.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Without waiting for a response he added, “We can go door to door in fifty-two minutes.”

  “Door to door?”

  Guth nodded to the rail tracks. “Door of the train to the door of that place,” he pointed to the silhouette of the gas chambers. “We can process twelve hundred units in fifty-two minutes.”

  Niemann hummed in understanding. “I see. Door to door. That must be some kind of record.”

  “I’d like to be faster.”

  “A tall order.”

  “We can do it. Imagination is the only thing slowing us down now.”

  What is striking about this exchange isn’t necessarily the callous nature of the men but that they saw absolutely no moral emergency in what they were doing. For them it was just a job, it was just a tweaking of numbers, and this is what horrifies us to the core about Lubizec and makes us want to turn away. For men like Guth and Niemann, though, mass killing was just a job. It was routine. Scheduled. There was no anger involved. There was only planning and execution.

  They continued puffing on their cigars, and when the searchlights snapped on, sending huge cones of bleached light into the air, they glanced over their shoulders. The world was a deep blue with a few stars coming out, and in that moment of approaching night, Guth said he was going home. His family had just moved into a house not far from the camp and he was keen to see them again. It was one of the perks of being a commandant: having your family close by.

  “See you tomorrow,” he said, turning on his heel. He paused and spoke with his head half turned. “And Niemann? Thank you.”

  He walked towards his Mercedes and drove away from the glowing searchlights. A deepening dark covered the world as he bounced over the rough dirt road. His tires maneuvered around potholes and skittered into watery ruts. Gravel pinged off the undercarriage as Guth pulled onto the main road and pointed his headlights towards the village. Little cones of light shot into the leafy darkness.

  In the backseat were wrapped presents for his wife and kids.

  Wooden boxes still needed to be unpacked and there was a ghostly presence in the air of something lost. The previous owners had been made to disappear ages ago, shortly after the war began, and the house had stood empty for nearly two years. There was a mustiness in the air. The smell of attic.

  Guth dropped his SS hat onto a marble table as his kids came around a corner with whoops of joy.

  “Daddy, Daddy!”

  His daughter, Sigrid, hugged his waist while his son, Karl, embraced his leg. Guth shuffled down the wood-paneled hallway with outstretched arms and pretended to be a lumbering giant. He lowered his voice.

  “Who are these little people? How did they get in my castle? I must eat them.”

  And then this man, who, in a single week, had organized the murder of eleven thousand people, bent down and gave his children lavish kisses. He held them and didn’t mind how they stepped on his polished boots or how they argued about who was going to wear his SS hat. He made sure his pistol was snapped into its leather holster.

  “You’re here
at last,” he cooed. “Now tell me about your journey. Tell me, tell me. I am one big ear.”

  Sigrid and Karl pulled him into a dining room that had a giant chandelier and an enormous marble fireplace. Ostrich feathers hung incongruously in the corner and there was a lush Persian carpet on the floor. Boxes of china plates and silver platters and crystal were stacked against a wall, and he looked at himself in a darkened window as his children tugged him forward. His wife came around the corner in a rose-colored dress and stood beside the fireplace. Her curly blond hair tumbled down to her shoulders. She held out a whiskey for him.

  “What’ve you been up to?” she asked.

  We only know about these private scenes of home thanks to Sigrid’s memoir, The Commandant’s Daughter, published in 1985. Her recollection of life in “the Villa” not only offers us an unusual picture of her father at rest, but it also documents her struggle to understand what it meant to be raised in the shadow of a death camp. We quickly learn that Guth was affectionate, sometimes moody, and that he often talked about how lucky he was. We also know from The Commandant’s Daughter that Guth’s wife, Jasmine, never called him Hans-Peter. She didn’t particularly like that hyphenated name and referred to him instead as Hans. Our understanding of life in the Guth household is further deepened by having Jasmine’s unpublished diary from this period of time. By reading both books against each other, we have the unusual opportunity of seeing how a particular moment in time transpired, and as we progress through the history of Lubizec these two primary sources will help us to understand Guth both as a father and as a husband.

  Guth was different at home. We know that much. But whether the man inside the Villa was the real Guth or the man running a barbed-wire kingdom was the real Guth, we will never know. What we can say with great certainty is that he slipped into the role of murderer as easily as he became a loving father at home. These two worlds never seemed to overlap in his mind, and this makes it all the more baffling that he could love his family and yet commit acts of such pure wickedness. Had Guth been a recluse who locked himself in his office and went about the business of obliterating lives it would be easier to comprehend his crimes, but this isn’t the case. He went home and took care of his family. Many Nazi officers were like this. They killed—then they played with their children.