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

by Patrick Hicks

  “Jews are filthy.”

  “I know that. You know that. Everyone knows that. I need to know you’re telling me the truth though, especially after I’ve sacrificed so much by moving out here. I want to know you can trust me and that you need me and that we’ve got a shared life. A shared life, Hans. These these these killings … they’re not true, are they?”

  He shook his head.

  “Because I’ll march into the woods if I have to and if I find out you’ve lied to me again I’ll go straight back to Berlin. With the kids. I’ll pack our bags so fast it’ll make your head spin.” Her voice was full of sparks and her eyelashes were beaded with tears. “Don’t think I won’t. I’m sick to death of this.”

  As Sigi watched her parents in the mirror it felt like she was in a darkened cinema watching a color movie. That wasn’t really her mother—it was a beautiful actress—but when the woman in the mirror threatened to move away, something raw and cold bristled in her chest. Would they really leave? For the first time Sigi began to wonder about Lubizec. Really wonder about it. What happened there? Was her father a bad man?

  In The Commandant’s Daughter, Sigi writes about her mother’s thought process and how she could view his evasiveness as somehow worse than genocide. In a long chapter devoted to this topic, Sigi comes to the realization that her mother was obviously a terrible anti-Semite but that she also felt her husband was aloof, detached, and totally unwilling to have a shared life based on trust and openness. She was clearly unhappy in Poland, and she must have seen Guth’s dancing around the truth as a convenient opening to leave him, but it wasn’t necessarily what was happening in Lubizec that got her angry—it was what was happening inside her own home. This is the only way Sigi can explain how, for her mother, lying could be worse than trainloads of people being shoved into gas chambers. Although such thinking is horrible for us to hold in our imaginations, we need to remember that millions of Germans just like the Guths were more interested in what was happening in their own homes than what was happening to the Jews. Morally speaking, we have gone through the looking glass here. Black is white. White is black. Ethics have been rewritten.

  “Don’t lie to me, Hans. If I find out you’ve lied again I’m going to leave.”

  “Don’t talk to me like this.”

  “I’m warning you.”

  “You’re warning me? Do you know who I am?” he half shouted. “You’re warning ME?” His whole body tightened and his mouth twisted into a volcano top. He knocked a chair aside and looked around as if a joke were being played on him. “YOU’RE WARNING ME?”

  Sigi pushed away from the mirror, suddenly very scared. It was one of the few times her father had raised his voice.

  A second passed before he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and spun his wedding ring. Around and around it went, slower and slower, until, finally, at last, he opened his eyes. There was a smile of calm. He said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lose my temper.”

  Jasmine crossed her arms. She narrowed her eyes.

  Guth walked across the carpet and reached for the overturned chair. He righted it and shuffled the photographs into a neat little pile. He tapped them onto the table like a deck of cards.

  A train whistled from somewhere deep in the woods and he turned to the noise. He checked his watch and made a face. “I should get to work.”

  “That’s right. Run away. You promised to stay home all day but that must have been a lie too.”

  He walked around the perimeter of the room so that he wouldn’t have to cross her path. He jogged upstairs. A few minutes later he came down in his SS uniform. His jackboots clacked on the wooden floor as he reached for his officer’s cap and placed it on his head as if it were a crown. He adjusted his pistol. And then, without saying a word, he patted Sigi on the cheek.

  Then SS Obersturmführer Hans-Peter Guth marched outside and slammed the door.

  8

  THE ROAD TO LUBIZEC

  There is of course the physical road the commandant took to Lubizec after his fight with Jasmine, the narrow dirt one that led through the forest to the camp, but there is also the long, twisting, metaphorical one, the one that began when he joined the Party in 1931. He wasn’t born a serial mass murderer, but like thousands of men from his generation, he slipped into Nazism almost effortlessly. Guth was tight lipped about his early years but we do know a few things worth mentioning at this point in time.

  Sigi would later say in The Commandant’s Daughter that trying to understand her father was like “looking down a foggy road at night.” Even historians would have trouble shining a light into the landscape of his youth but we do know he was born near the shipyards of Hamburg on January 1, 1900. Because of this moment of happenstance his mother often joked that he was as old as the twentieth century itself, and as he grew up so did the dizzyingly fast modern age swirling around him. Wireless telegraphy and the telephone were shrinking the world, cinematography made pictures move on a wall, cars appeared with spluttering petrol engines, homes were lit by electricity, radio antennas pulsed Morse code through the air, Joseph Lister developed antiseptic surgery, J. J. Thompson was probing the structure of the atom, an obscure German named Einstein published something called The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity, and the Wright brothers built a flying machine that actually worked. Ships crossed the Atlantic at the breakneck speed of five days and subways burrowed beneath the streets like gigantic metal worms. The world had never been so full of such dazzling, awe-inspiring technological wonder.

  Guth’s mother spoiled him with chocolate and took him for long walks around the ritzy part of Hamburg. Trams clattered beside them as she wondered about big American cities like Chicago and New York.

  “Oh my angel,” she whispered, “isn’t life big and pretty?”

  His father was a foreman and whenever he came home from the shipyards he stank of creosote and sweat. A black mask of dust was on his father’s face, and as he collapsed into a chair he snapped his fingers for a pipe. He never touched alcohol except on New Year’s Eve when he allowed himself a few glasses of schnapps. He was deeply religious and made sure his sons (Wilhelm, Karl, Hans-Peter) were educated in the ways of the Roman Catholic Church. Guth’s father had strong views on Jews, socialists, and anarchists. As a foreman he was used to barking out orders, so there was no room for disagreement.

  Guth became an altar boy. He watched a thurible of incense get waved around the tabernacle and he listened to the old priest murmur Latin. He often wondered how bread and wine could be changed into the body and blood of Christ, because one minute it was food and the next it was something else, something holy. It was like a magic trick. And in these moments Guth wanted to be a priest so that he too might hold such secret power in his hands. He liked the idea of standing in front of a crowd and commanding them to kneel down before almighty God. He also liked the hierarchy of the Catholic Church because everyone knew their place: Priests were at the bottom, then came the bishops, then the archbishops, then the cardinals and then, at very top, was the pope. It felt militaristic and proper. Guth liked being in God’s army.

  Germany too was caught up in militarism when the Kaiser promised to build a navy that would make the British tremble. The shipyards of Hamburg thundered with noise as rivets were driven into steel and battleships were outfitted with monstrous guns. “They bristle like hedgehogs,” the Hamburger Zeitung proudly stated in 1912. These ships were launched with bottles of foaming champagne, and as they slowly churned towards the North Atlantic, fireworks boomed overhead. A brass band played. People cheered. Guth forgot about the priesthood as he watched these mighty vessels go out to threaten the world.

  He developed broad shoulders and his mother began calling him a “gentleman of the first order.” By 1914 he was self-conscious about a mole on his neck (it was the size of a pfennig) and he wore starched collars to hide it. He was meticulous in school and his teachers noticed he always liked things done a certain way. He excelled at mat
h. Did poorly at art. When the Great War began he ached to join his older brothers at the front, but he was only fourteen so he took it upon himself to lift weights. With luck, the war would last.

  And last it did.

  As Germany slogged through one bloody battle after another, and as the years ticked by in an awful stalemate, Guth finally went down to the recruiting office and lied about his age. It hardly mattered by 1917 though—they would have taken anyone with good eyesight.

  He was assigned to the 112th Landwehr Division and was sent to a strangely named place called Passchendaele. He never talked about what he saw in the trenches but history tells us it was awful. Lice, maggots, rats, fleas. Everything was muddy. Trees had been blasted away. Whole towns were reduced to nothing more than skeletonized buildings and, worst of all, bodies rotted in the muddy shell-pocked waste of no-man’s-land. The dead were everywhere and Guth got used to seeing hundreds of bodies scattered around him. It was normal to see torn limbs, smashed skulls, and meaty insides that had been pushed outside. When shells exploded they tossed chunks of the dead high into the air—cartwheeling—and when the British ran towards his trench he opened up his machine gun and watched them fall like stalks of wheat. He rattled out so many bullets his machine gun nearly overheated. Killing became routine. It became as normal as eating or sleeping. His brothers and friends were cut down at places like Ypres, Verdun, and the Somme. Death was sprinkled onto everything. He grew numb to it.

  When the war finally ended in 1918, he trudged back to Hamburg in old soggy boots and told his mother he was finished with guns forever. He’d never shoot again, not even to hunt partridges in the forest.

  But as he stared at his bitten fingernails one night he considered that it wasn’t the army’s fault Germany lost the war. Not at all. The army would have kept on fighting for months, maybe years, if only the people back home grew a spine and supported them. The newspapers called it an “armistice” but that wasn’t the same thing as “surrender.” The more he thought about this, the more he bubbled with rage. Guth slapped the kitchen table with an open palm.

  “My brothers died for this? For this? We were stabbed in the back!”

  He enrolled at the University of Hamburg shortly after this because he wanted to reinvent himself. He read books about management and administration. Dressed in a new waistcoat and hat, he thought of himself as a scholar, as an intellectual, as someone on the move. He began to feel he survived the war for some unknown reason and he sat back in a chair each night, imagining an ordered universe. A hierarchy kept things nailed into place, and it was only when order broke down, it was only then that chaos threatened to swallow everything.

  He joined the Party in 1931. He liked to tell the story of how he poured himself a tall brandy and sat near the radio. It was a cold October evening and leaves were being plucked from the trees one by one. They skittered down the darkening street. He lit a cigarette, kicked off his dark shoes, and wiggled his toes. A politician was speaking. Someone named Adolf Hitler. As this Hitler spoke, slowly at first, then more loudly, Guth sat up. He nodded at the man’s wisdom.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  The universe clicked into place and two days later he put on a Nazi uniform. He snapped himself back to military attention.

  Up to this point, Guth may seem like someone who got caught up in the tide of history but we should never lose sight of the fact that he became the Commandant of Lubizec. No matter how much we try to understand his background or search for clues that might point us towards the mass murderer he became, we must never forget he willingly assumed control of a death camp. True, he suffered during World War I, but he committed breathtaking crimes against humanity in World War II. We may feel a twinge of regret that he joined the Nazi Party, we may even wish he could “re-choose” a new path for himself, but in the end he made sure the trains arrived on time and he personally inspected the gas chambers each morning to make sure they were in perfect working order.

  And here is one final thing to consider: Of the 710,000 souls murdered at Lubizec, virtually all of them saw Guth sometime during the last thirty minutes of their lives. This, this, is what he will always be remembered for. He was an architect of genocide. He devoted himself to murder. The gates of Lubizec opened wide for him and he saw not horror, but opportunity.

  As he stepped across the threshold he adjusted his uniform. Clean, well fed, and straight backed, he passed under the WELCOME sign.

  9

  THE ROASTS

  We almost get a sense that Guth was relieved to return to Lubizec because no one questioned his authority there. Inside the camp he was a god. He was sovereign. He did whatever he liked. In the Villa he had to follow certain rules and expectations, and after his big fight with Jasmine it’s almost as if he decided to jettison the outside world completely and let the camp itself become his new home. This does much to explain not only why he spent increasing amounts of time at Lubizec, but it also helps us to understand why he began sleeping in his office by early September 1942.

  “There’s just so much to do,” he told his wife over the phone.

  While it is safe to assume Guth would have carried out his orders with the same enthusiasm even if he had a perfect home life, the fact that he and Jasmine were now snippy with each other should in no way overshadow or somehow explain away his crimes. Even if he had a wonderful marriage, we get a sense that Guth would have willingly dispatched thousands of lives a day. For him, home life had nothing to do with ridding the Third Reich of so-called “useless eaters” (as Jews were sometimes called). Guth threw himself into the camp. He barked out orders and wanted to know why sand hadn’t been raked on the Road to Heaven, or why flowers hadn’t been changed in front of the gas chamber, or why suitcases were allowed to pile up on the platform.

  “Astonishing. Can’t I leave this place for twenty-four fucking hours without it going to hell?”

  Prisoners took off their caps and scuttled away as he passed. He demanded a tall brandy from one of his junior officers and marched into his office, where he sat down in a grand chair that had been stolen from a nearby castle. He worked at his typewriter while sunlight filtered through the window.

  It would be nice to comfort ourselves with the idea that Guth looked up when the shrieking began, but that noise was so much a part of the soundscape of Lubizec that he didn’t notice it. It was no more special than car horns in a city or seagulls at a beach. He simply went about his business like a grocery clerk. Goods came in. Ashes came out.

  The air in his office was thick with cigarette smoke. A slide rule sat on top of a ledger and he studied a plan for a new drainage ditch. The last transport of the day had been processed and he sat back to rub his eyes. The Roasts would soon be lit and he decided to watch. He called Jasmine and told her he wouldn’t be coming home.

  “Don’t wait up,” he said. “The camp needs me.”

  He emerged from his office with a ledger and a sharpened pencil. His boots sank into the sandy ground. Frogs and crickets began to sing beyond the perimeter of the fence and fireflies appeared as he walked by the vegetable garden and turned left at the SS canteen. Lawn chairs were scattered around the front door. The lights were on and, through the window, he saw men lifting steins of warm beer. A phonograph was playing a song about fighting for the Fatherland.

  In black we are dressed.

  In blood we are drenched.

  Death’s head on our caps.

  Ja! Ja! Ja!

  We stand unshaken!

  He walked up the Road to Heaven, passed through the gas chamber, and moved out through an exterior door to Camp II. Silence hung in the air and he took no notice of the prisoners who snapped off their caps as he marched past. To him they were just walking corpses. He wore leather gloves even though the evening was warm and pleasant.

  There wasn’t a crematorium at Lubizec because it had been decided to burn bodies in an open field just north of camp. After the daily gassings, the dead were dragged ov
er to a wooden table where their mouths were opened with crowbars and their teeth were checked for gold fillings. The corpses, which only an hour before had been living mothers, daughters, wives, husbands, sons, nieces, nephews—all beloved human beings with a rooted place in the universe—were now just carcasses tugged across a field.

  They were laid out on a grillwork of truck chassis. Five such chassis were lined up in a pit (old rail lines were later used) and the bodies were stacked head to foot in order to maximize space. Women burned better than men so they were placed at the bottom. And because fat people burned better than skinnier people, large women were placed on the very first row.

  “It was like building a campfire,” one guard said. “The Roasts were huge. Massive. We used to call them the Bonfires of Hell.”

  One would think that burning thousands of bodies a night would require a huge number of SS guards but, in fact, only a handful were needed. As with virtually every other aspect of the camp system, the Nazis forced the Jews to do their dirty work: It was prisoners who cleaned up luggage from the platform, it was prisoners who sorted clothing, it was prisoners who pulled bodies from the gas chambers, and it was prisoners who stacked their brothers and sisters into pits. We can only imagine what this was like. Again, language fails us.*

  When Guth arrived that evening, the pile was already shockingly high. The whole mass of flesh had been marinated in gasoline. Fitted between the bodies were logs that had been bathed in tar. Fat people, thin people, the old, the young, teenagers, babies—they were all formed into an enormous brick of organic matter.

  At Guth’s command, the prisoners lowered torches onto the victims’ remains.

  The flames licked the sky, slowly at first, but as the jumble of heads and arms and torsos began to blacken, odd colors like green and purple, mustard yellow, and gaseous blood shimmered into the night. Pyrolysis. Chemiluminescence. Oxidation. Incandescence. The whole pit began to shake with roaring heat.