We had already moved on to the Kanada, where the confiscated goods were sorted and warehoused before being distributed, when the chimneys of the crematorium that we had just left began to smoke, spreading that same sweetish, hideous smell I had experienced in Belzec. Höss, noticing my discomfort, commented: “I’ve been used to this smell ever since I was a boy. It’s the smell of cheap church candles. My father was very religious and took me to church often. He wanted me to be a priest. Since there wasn’t enough money for wax, they made the candles from animal tallow, and they gave off the same smell. It’s due to a chemical compound, but I’ve forgotten the name; it was Wirths, our head doctor, who explained it to me.” He also insisted on showing me the other two crematoria, colossal structures, inactive at that time; the Frauenlager, or women’s camp; and the sewage treatment station, built after repeated complaints from the district, which alleged that the camp was contaminating the Vistula and the surrounding aquifer. Then he took me to the Stammlager, which he also had me visit from top to bottom; finally he drove me to the other side of town to show me rapidly the Auschwitz III camp, where the inmates working for IG Farben lived: he introduced me to Max Faust, one of the factory engineers, with whom I agreed to return another day. I won’t describe all these installations: they are very well known and are described in many other books, I have nothing to add. Back at the camp, Höss sought to invite me horseback riding; but I could barely stand up and wanted a bath more than anything, and I managed to convince him to drop me off at my quarters.
Höss had assigned me an empty office in the Stammlager Kommandantur. I had a view of the Sola and of a pretty square house surrounded by trees on the other side of the Kasernestrasse, which was in fact the home of the Kommandant and his family. The Haus where I was staying turned out to be much quieter than the one in Lublin: the men who slept there were sober professionals, passing through for various reasons; at night, the camp officers came to drink and play billiards, but always behaved correctly. We ate very well there, copious helpings washed down with Bulgarian wine, with Croatian slivovitz as an after-dinner drink, and sometimes even vanilla ice cream. My main interlocutor, aside from Höss, was the chief physician of the garrison, Sturmbannführer Dr. Eduard Wirths. He had his offices in the SS hospital in the Stammlager at the end of the Kasernestrasse, opposite the premises of the Politische Abteilung and a crematorium due to go out of service any day now. Alert, intelligent, with fine features, pale eyes, and sparse hair, Wirths seemed exhausted by his tasks, but motivated to overcome all difficulties. His obsession was the struggle against typhus: the camp was already going through its second epidemic of the year, which had decimated the Gypsy camp and also struck, sometimes fatally, SS guards and their families. I spent long hours in discussion with him. He reported, in Oranienburg, to Dr. Lolling, and complained about the lack of support; when I let on that I shared his opinion, he opened up to me and confessed his inability to work constructively with a man so incompetent and furthermore addled by drugs. He himself was not an IKL professional. He had served at the front with the Waffen-SS since 1939, and had won the Iron Cross, second class, but he had been discharged because of a serious illness and assigned to camp service. He had found Auschwitz in a catastrophic state: for almost a year, the desire to improve matters consumed him.
Wirths showed me the reports he sent monthly to Lolling: the conditions in the different sections of the camp, the incompetence of many doctors and officers, the brutality of the subalterns and kapos, the daily obstacles blocking his work, everything was described in plain, straightforward language. He promised to have copies of his last six reports typed out for me. He was particularly up in arms about the use of criminals in positions of responsibility in the camp: “I’ve talked about it dozens of times with Obersturmbannführer Höss. Those ‘greens’ are brutes, sometimes psychopaths, they’re corrupt, they reign with terror over the other inmates, and all with the connivance of the SS. It’s inadmissible, not to speak of the fact that the results are lamentable.”—“What would you prefer? Political prisoners, Communists?”—“Of course!” He began to count on his fingers: “One: they are by definition men who have a social conscience. Even if they can be corrupted, they’ll never commit the same atrocities as the common-law prisoners. Do you realize that in the women’s camp the Blockältesten are prostitutes, degenerates! And most of the male block elders keep what they call here a Pipel, a young boy who serves as their sex slave. That’s what we have to rely on here! Whereas the ‘reds,’ to a man, refuse to use the brothel reserved for inmate functionaries, even though some of them have been in the camp for ten years. Two: the priority now is organization of labor. Now, what better organizer than a Communist or an SD activist? The ‘greens’ just know how to hit and hit again. Three: they object to me that the ‘reds’ will deliberately sabotage production. To which I reply that, first of all, it couldn’t be worse than the present production, and then that there are ways to control this: political prisoners aren’t idiots, they’ll understand very quickly that at the slightest problem they’ll be sacked and that the common-law criminals will return. It will thus be wholly in their own interest, for themselves and for all of the Häftlinge, if they guarantee good production. I can even give you an example, that of Dachau, where I worked briefly: there, the ‘reds’ control everything and I can assure you that the conditions are incomparably better than in Auschwitz. Here, in my own department, I use only political prisoners. I have no complaints. My private secretary is an Austrian Communist, a serious, self-possessed, efficient young man. We sometimes have very frank conversations, and it’s very useful for me, since he learns from other inmates things that are hidden from me, and he reports them to me. I trust him much more than some of my SS colleagues.” We also discussed the selection. “I think the principle is odious,” he frankly confessed to me. “But if it has to be done, then it might as well be done by doctors. Before, it was the Lagerführer and his men who ran it. They did it any which way, and with unimaginable brutality. At least now it takes place in an orderly fashion, according to reasonable criteria.” Wirths had ordered all the camp doctors to take their turn at the ramp. “I myself go there too, even if I find it horrifying. I have to set an example.” He looked a little lost as he said that. It wasn’t the first time someone had opened up to me this way: since the beginning of my mission, certain individuals, either because they instinctively understood that I was interested in their problems or because they hoped to use me as a channel to air their grievances, confided far beyond the requirements of the service. It’s true that, here, Wirths must not often have found a friendly ear: Höss was a good professional, but devoid of any sensitivity, and the same must have been true for most of his subordinates.
I inspected the different parts of the camp in detail. I went back several times to Birkenau, and had them show me the systems for inventorying the confiscated property at the Kanada. It was chaos: crates of uncounted currency lay in heaps, one walked on banknotes, torn and pressed into the mud of the alleys. In principle, the inmates were searched at the zone’s exit; but I imagined that with a watch or a few reichsmarks, it must not have been difficult to bribe a guard. The “green” kapo who kept the accounts confirmed this to me indirectly: after showing me around his piles of clutter—the shifting mountains of used clothing, from which teams unstitched the yellow stars before repairing the clothes, sorting them, re-piling them; the crates of glasses, watches, pens, jumbled together; the orderly rows of strollers and baby carriages; the clumps of women’s hair, consigned in bales to German firms that transformed it into socks for our submariners, mattress stuffing, and insulating material; and the disparate piles of religious paraphernalia, which no one really knew what to do with—this inmate functionary, as he was about to leave me, said to me carelessly, in his cheeky Hamburg dialect: “If you need anything, let me know, I’ll take care of it.”—“What do you mean?” “Oh, sometimes it’s pretty easy. Anything to be of service, y’know—we like to obli
ge.” That was what Morgen was talking about: the camp SS, with the complicity of the inmates, had come to consider this Kanada as their private reserve. Morgen had advised me to visit the guards’ barrack rooms: I found SS officers lounging on expensively upholstered sofas, half drunk, staring off into emptiness; a few female Jewish inmates, dressed not in regulation striped uniforms but in light dresses, were cooking sausages and potato pancakes on a large cast-iron stove; they were all real beauties, and they had kept their hair; and when they served the guards, bringing them food or pouring them alcohol from crystal carafes, they addressed them familiarly, using the du form, and calling them by their nicknames. Not one of the guards had gotten up to salute me. I gave the Spiess who accompanied me on my visits a shocked look; he shrugged: “They’re tired, Sturmbannführer. They’ve had a hard day, you know. Two transports already.” I’d have liked to have them open their lockers, but my position didn’t authorize me to: I was sure I’d have found all kinds of objects and money. What’s more, this generalized corruption appeared to rise to the highest level, as remarks I’d overheard suggested. At the bar of the Haus der Waffen-SS, I had surprised a conversation between a camp Oberscharführer and a civilian; the noncom, sniggering, was explaining that he had delivered to Frau Höss “a basket full of panties, the best quality, in silk and lace. She wanted to replace her old ones, you see.” He didn’t say where they came from, but I guessed readily enough. I myself received propositions; I was offered bottles of Cognac or victuals, to improve my usual fare. I refused, but politely: I didn’t want these officers to mistrust me; that would have harmed my work.
As agreed, I went to visit the great IG Farben factory, known as Buna, the name of the synthetic rubber it was eventually supposed to produce. Construction, apparently, was going forward slowly. Since Faust was busy, he assigned one of his assistants to my visit, an engineer named Schenke, a man about thirty years old, in a gray suit with the Party insignia. This Schenke seemed fascinated by my Iron Cross; while he spoke to me, his eyes kept shifting over to it; finally he asked me, timidly, how I had gotten it. “I was in Stalingrad.”—“Oh! You were lucky.”—“To have gotten out?” I asked, laughing. “Yes, I think so too.” Schenke looked confused: “No, that’s not what I meant. To have been over there, to have been able to fight like that, for the Heimat, against the Bolsheviks.” I looked at him curiously and he blushed. “I have a childhood deformity, in my leg. A bone that broke and didn’t heal well. That prevented me from going to the front. But I would have liked to serve the Reich too.”—“You’re serving it here,” I pointed out.—“Of course. But it’s not the same. All my childhood friends are at the front. One feels…excluded.” Schenke did limp, but it didn’t prevent him from striding along with a nervous, quick step, so that I had to hurry to follow him. As he walked, he explained the factory’s history to me: the leadership of the Reich had insisted that Farben build a factory for Buna—a vital product for armaments—in the East, because of the bombardments that were already ravaging the Ruhr. The site had been chosen by one of the directors of the IG, Dr. Ambros, because of a large number of favorable criteria: the confluence of three rivers providing the considerable quantities of water required by the production of Buna; the existence of a broad plateau that was almost empty (aside from a Polish village that had been razed), geologically ideal since it was elevated; the intersection of several railway lines; and the proximity of many coal mines. The presence of the camp had also been a positive factor: the SS had declared it was delighted to support the project and had promised to provide inmates. But the factory’s construction was dragging, partly because of the difficulties of getting supplies, and partly because the output of the Häftlinge had turned out poor, and management was furious. However often the factory returned to the camp the inmates unable to work and demanded replacements, as the contract allowed, the new ones would arrive in a scarcely better state. “What happens to the ones you send back?” I asked in a neutral tone. Schenke looked at me with surprise: “I have no idea. That’s not my business. I guess they fix them up in the hospital. Don’t you know?” I pensively contemplated this young, motivated engineer: Was it really possible that he didn’t know? The chimneys in Birkenau were smoking daily eight kilometers away, and I knew as well as anyone else how gossip spread. But after all, if he didn’t want to know, it was possible for him not to know. The rules of secrecy and concealment could serve that purpose too.
However, judging from the treatment of the inmates employed, it didn’t seem that their ultimate fate was a major preoccupation for Schenke or his colleagues. In the midst of the immense, muddy construction site that was to become the factory, columns of scrawny Häftlinge in rags carried at a run, under the shouts and cudgel blows of the kapos, beams or bags of cement far too heavy for them. If a worker, in his big wooden clogs, stumbled and let his load fall, or collapsed himself, the blows redoubled, and blood, fresh and red, gushed onto the oily mud. Some never got up again. The din was infernal, everyone was yelling, the SS noncoms, the kapos; the beaten inmates screamed pitifully. Schenke guided me through this Gehenna without paying the slightest attention to it. Here and there, he paused and conversed with other engineers in well-pressed suits, holding yellow folding rulers and little fake-leather notebooks in which they jotted down figures. They commented on the progress of the construction of a wall, then one of them muttered a few words to a Rottenführer, who began to yell and viciously hit the kapo with his boot or rifle butt; the kapo, in turn, dove into the mass of inmates, distributing savage blows with full force, bellowing; and then the Häftlinge attempted a surge of activity, which died down on its own, since they could scarcely stand up. This system seemed to me extremely inefficient, and I said as much to Schenke; he shrugged his shoulders and looked around him as if he were seeing the scene for the first time: “In any case they don’t understand anything but blows. What else can you do with such a workforce?” I looked again at the undernourished Häftlinge, their rags coated in mud, black grease, diarrhea. A Polish ‘red’ stopped for an instant in front of me and I saw a brown stain appear on the back of his pants and the rear of his leg; then he resumed his frenetic run before a kapo could approach. Pointing him out, I said to Schenke: “Don’t you think it’s important to oversee their hygiene better? I’m not just talking about the stench, but it’s dangerous, that’s how epidemics break out.” Schenke replied somewhat haughtily: “All that is the responsibility of the SS. We pay the camp to have inmates fit for work. But it’s up to the camp to wash them, feed them, and take care of them. That’s included in the package.” Another engineer, a thickset Swabian sweating in his twill jacket, let out a coarse guffaw: “Anyway, Jews are like venison, they’re better when they’re a little gamy.” Schenke smiled thinly; I retorted curtly: “Your workers aren’t all Jews.”—“Oh! the others are hardly any better.” Schenke was beginning to grow annoyed: “Herr Sturmbannführer, if you think the condition of the Häftlinge is unsatisfactory, you should complain to the camp, not to us. The camp is responsible for their upkeep, I told you. All that is specified in our contract.”—“I understand very well, believe me.” Schenke was right; even the blows were administered by SS guards and their kapos. “But it seems to me that you could obtain better output by treating them a little better. Don’t you think so?” Schenke shrugged: “Ideally, maybe. And we often complain to the camp about the workers’ condition. But we have other priorities besides constantly splitting hairs.” Behind him, knocked down by a cudgel, an inmate was dying; his bloody head was buried in the thick mud; only the mechanical trembling of his legs showed that he was still alive. Schenke, as we left, stepped over him without looking at him. He was still thinking about my words with irritation: “We can’t have a sentimental attitude, Herr Sturmbannführer. We are at war. Production counts above all else.”—“I’m not saying otherwise. My objective is just to suggest ways to increase production. That should concern you. After all, it’s been, what? Two years now that you’ve been cons
tructing, and you still haven’t produced a kilo of Buna.”—“Yes. But I should point out to you that the methanol factory has been functioning for a month.”
The Kindly Ones Page 72
