Piontek didn’t wake me, and I slept until eight o’clock. The kitchen was still working and I had an omelette with sausage. Then I went out. At the Stammlager and in Birkenau, the columns were pouring out of the camp. The Häftlinge, their feet wrapped in whatever they’d been able to find, were walking slowly, at a shuffling pace, surrounded by SS guards and led by well-fed, warmly dressed kapos. All those who had one had taken their blanket, which they generally wore draped over their heads, a little like Bedouins; but that was all. When I asked, I was told they had received a piece of sausage and bread for three days; no one had received any orders about clothes.
The first day, though, despite the ice and the wet snow, it still seemed to be going all right. I studied the columns leaving the camp, talked with Kraus, walked up the roads to observe a little farther on. Everywhere, I noticed abuses: the guards had prisoners pushing carts loaded with their things, or else forced them to carry their suitcases. Here and there by the side of the road I noticed a corpse lying in the snow, the head frequently bloody; the guards were applying Bär’s stern orders. Yet the columns were advancing without confusion and without any attempt at revolt. At midday I managed to make contact with Schmauser to discuss the problem of the clothes. He listened to me briefly and then swept aside my objections: “We can’t give them civilian clothing, they could escape.”—“Then shoes at least.” He hesitated. “Arrange things with Bär,” he said finally. He must have had other preoccupations, I could tell, but I would still have preferred a clear order. I went to find Bär at the Stammlager: “Obergruppenführer Schmauser has given the order to have shoes distributed to the inmates who don’t have any.” Bär shrugged: “Here, I don’t have any more, everything has already been loaded for shipment. Just see about it in Birkenau with Schwarzhuber.” I spent two hours finding this officer, the Lagerführer of Birkenau, who had left to inspect one of the columns. “Very well, I’ll take care of it,” he promised me when I gave him the order. Around nightfall, I found Elias and Darius, whom I had sent to inspect the evacuation of Monowitz and several Nebenlager. Everything was happening in a more or less orderly way, but already, by late afternoon, more and more inmates, exhausted, were stopping and letting themselves be shot by the guards. I left again with Piontek to inspect the nighttime stopover points. Despite Schmauser’s formal orders—there was a fear that inmates would take advantage of the darkness to escape—some columns were still advancing. I criticized the officers, but they replied that they hadn’t yet reached their designated stopping point, and that they couldn’t let their columns sleep outside, in the snow or on the ice. The points I visited turned out to be insufficient in any case: a barn or a school, for two thousand inmates, sometimes; many of them slept outside, huddled next to each other. I asked that fires be lit, but there was no wood, the trees were too damp and no one had tools to cut them down; where boards or old crates could be found, they made little campfires, but these didn’t last till dawn. No soup had been planned, the inmates were supposed to survive on what had been distributed in the camp; farther on, they assured me, there would be rations. Most of the columns hadn’t gone five kilometers; many were still in the almost deserted camp zone; at this pace, the marches would last ten to twelve days.
I went back to the Haus muddy, wet, and tired. Kraus was there, having a drink with some of his colleagues from the SD. He came and sat down with me: “How are things?” he asked.—“Not so good. There are going to be needless losses. Bär could have done a lot more.”—“Bär couldn’t care less. You know he has been named Kommandant at Mittelbau?” I raised my eyebrows: “No, I didn’t know. Who will supervise the closing of the camp?”—“Me. I’ve already received the order to set up an office, after the evacuation, to manage the administrative dissolution.”—“Congratulations,” I said.—“Oh,” he replied, “don’t think I’m happy about it. Frankly, I’d have preferred something else.”—“And your immediate tasks?”—“We’re waiting for the camps to be emptied. Afterward, we’ll start.”—“What will you do with the inmates who are left?” He shrugged and gave an ironic little smile: “What do you think? The Obergruppenführer gave the order to liquidate them. No one must fall alive into the hands of the Bolsheviks.”—“I see.” I finished my drink. “Well, good luck. I don’t envy you.”
Things got gradually worse. The next morning, the columns kept on leaving the camps through the main gates, the guards were still manning the line of watchtowers, order reigned; but a few kilometers farther on, the columns began to grow longer and unravel as the weaker inmates slowed down. More and more corpses could be seen. It was snowing heavily, but it wasn’t too cold, for me in any case, I had seen much worse in Russia, but I was warmly dressed, I was traveling in a heated car, and the guards who had to walk had pullovers, good coats, and boots; as for the Häftlinge, they must have felt pierced through to the bone. The guards were getting more and more frightened, they shouted at the inmates and beat them. I saw one guard beating an inmate who had stopped to defecate; I reprimanded him, then asked the Untersturmführer who was in command of the column to place him under arrest; he replied that he didn’t have enough men to do that. In the villages, the Polish peasants, who were waiting for the Russians, watched the inmates pass by in silence, or shouted something at them in their language; the guards treated harshly those who tried to hand out bread or food; they were nervous, the villages were swarming with partisans, as everyone knew, they were afraid of being attacked. But at night, at the stopping points I visited, there still was no soup or bread, and many inmates had already finished their ration. I figured that at this rate half or two-thirds of the columns would drop off before reaching their destination. I ordered Piontek to drive me to Breslau. Because of the bad weather and the columns of refugees, I didn’t arrive until after midnight. Schmauser was already asleep and Boesenberg, they told me at HQ, had gone to Kattowitz, near the front. A poorly shaven officer showed me an operations map: the Russian positions, he explained, were mostly theoretical, since they were advancing so quickly they couldn’t keep the markings up to date; as for our divisions still shown on the map, some no longer existed at all, while others, according to fragmentary information, must have been moving as roving Kessels behind the Russian lines, trying to meet up with our retreating forces. Tarnowitz and Cracow had fallen in the afternoon. The Soviets were also entering eastern Prussia in force, and there was talk of worse atrocities than in Hungary. It was a catastrophe. But Schmauser, when he received me in midmorning, seemed calm and sure of himself. I described the situation to him and set out my demands: rations and wood for fires at the stopover points, and carts to transport the inmates who were too exhausted, so they could be cared for and put back to work instead of liquidated: “I’m not talking about people sick with typhus or tuberculosis, Obergruppenführer, but just the ones who aren’t up to the cold and hunger.”—“Our soldiers too are cold and hungry,” he retorted sharply. “The civilians too are cold and hungry. You don’t seem to realize the situation, Obersturmbannführer. We have a million and a half refugees on the roads. That’s much more important than your inmates.”—“Obergruppenführer, these inmates, as a labor force, are a vital resource for the Reich. We cannot allow ourselves, in the present situation, to lose twenty or thirty thousand of them.”—“I have no resources to allocate to you.”—“Then at least give me an order so I will be obeyed by the column leaders.” I typed out an order, in several copies for Elias and Darius, and Schmauser signed them in the afternoon; I left again immediately. The roads were horribly congested, endless columns of refugees on foot or in wagons, isolated trucks from the Wehrmacht, lost soldiers. In the villages, mobile canteens from the NSV distributed soup. I reached Auschwitz late; my colleagues had returned earlier and were already asleep. Bär, I was told, had left the camp, probably for good. I went to see Kraus and found him with Schurz, the head of the PA. I had brought along Drescher’s Armagnac, and we drank some together. Kraus explained that he had had Kremas I and II dynamited
that morning, leaving IV till the last minute; he had also begun the liquidations that had been ordered, shooting two hundred Jewesses who had stayed in the Frauenlager in Birkenau; but Springorum, the President of the Kattowitz province, had taken away his Sonderkommando for urgent tasks and he didn’t have enough men to continue. All the fit inmates had left the camps, but there remained, according to him, within the entire complex, more than eight thousand inmates who were sick or too weak to walk. Massacring these people seemed to me, in the present state of things, perfectly idiotic and pointless, but Kraus had his orders, and it didn’t fall within my jurisdiction; and I had enough problems as it was with the columns of evacuees.
I spent the next four days running after the columns. I felt as if I were struggling against a mudslide: I spent hours advancing, and when I finally found an officer in charge and showed him my orders, he would apply my instructions as grudgingly as possible. Here and there I managed to organize distributions of rations (elsewhere, too, they were being distributed without my intervention); I had the blankets of the dead collected to give to the living; I was able to confiscate carts from Polish peasants and pile exhausted inmates on them. But the next day, when I found these same columns again, the officers had had shot all those who could no longer get up, and the carts were almost empty. I hardly looked at the Häftlinge, it wasn’t their individual fate that concerned me, but their collective fate, and in any case they all looked alike, they were a gray, dirty mass, stinking despite the cold, undifferentiated, you could only grasp isolated details, the colored badges, a bare head or bare feet, a jacket different from the others; men and women could be distinguished only with difficulty. Sometimes I glimpsed their eyes, under the folds of the blanket, but they never returned a gaze, they were empty, completely eaten away by the need to walk and keep moving forward. The farther away we got from the Vistula, the colder it was and the more inmates we lost. Sometimes, to make room for the Wehrmacht, columns had to wait for hours by the side of the road, or else cut across frozen fields, struggle to cross the innumerable canals and embankments, before finding the road again. As soon as a column paused, the inmates, dying of thirst, fell to their knees to lick the snow. Each column, even the ones where I had put carts, was followed be a team of guards who, with a bullet or a blow from a rifle butt, finished off the inmates who had fallen or simply stopped; the officers left up to the municipalities the job of burying the bodies. As always in this kind of situation, the natural brutality of some was aroused, and their murderous zeal went beyond orders; their young officers, as frightened as they, controlled them with difficulty. It wasn’t just the simple soldiers who were losing all sense of limits. On the third or fourth day, I went to find Elias and Darius on the roads; they were inspecting a column from Laurahütte whose itinerary had changed because of the swiftness of the advance of the Russians, who were coming not just from the east but also from the north, almost reaching Gross Strehlitz, according to my information, a little before Blechhammer. Elias was with the column’s commander, a young, very nervous and agitated Oberscharführer; when I asked him where Darius was, he told me he had gone to the rear and was looking after the sick. I joined him to see what he was doing and found him in the process of finishing off inmates with gunshots. “What the hell are you doing?” He saluted me and replied without losing countenance: “I’m following your orders, Obersturmbannführer. I carefully picked out the sick or weak Häftlinge and had the ones who can still get better loaded onto carts. We’ve just liquidated the ones who are completely unfit.”—“Untersturmführer,” I spat out in an icy voice, “liquidations are not your job. Your orders are to limit them as much as possible, and certainly not to participate in them. Understood?” I also reprimanded Elias; Darius, after all, was under his responsibility.
Sometimes I found more understanding column leaders, who accepted the logic and necessity of what I explained to them. But the resources they were given were limited, and they were commanding narrow-minded, frightened men, hardened by years in the camps, incapable of changing their methods, and, with the relaxation of discipline that resulted from the chaos of the evacuation, returning to all their old failings and habits. Everyone, I imagined, had his reasons for his violent behavior; Darius had no doubt wanted to demonstrate his firmness and resolution in front of these men, most of whom were much older than he. But I had other things to do than analyze motivations, I was just seeking, with the greatest difficulty, to have my orders carried out. Most of the column leaders were simply indifferent—they just had one idea in their heads, getting away from the Russians as quickly as possible with the livestock that had been entrusted to them, without complicating their lives.
During these four days, I slept where I could, in inns, at the village town halls, in local houses. On January 25, a light wind had cleared the clouds, the sky was clean and pure, brilliant, I went back to Auschwitz to see what was going on. At the station, I found an antiaircraft battery unit, most of them Hitlerjugend assigned to the Luftwaffe, children, getting ready to evacuate; their Feldwebel, rolling his eyes, informed me in a monotone that the Russians were on the other side of the Vistula and that there was fighting in the IG Farben factory. I took the road that led to Birkenau and came across a long column of inmates climbing the slope, surrounded by SS men who were firing at them pretty much randomly; behind them, all the way to the camp, the road was strewn with bodies. I stopped and hailed their leader, one of Kraus’s men. “What are you doing?”—“The Sturmbannführer ordered us to empty Sectors IIe and IIf and to transfer the inmates to the Stammlager.”—“And why are you shooting at them like that?” He made a face: “Otherwise they won’t move.”—“Where is Sturmbannführer Kraus?”—“At the Stammlager.” I thought for a minute: “You might as well drop it. The Russians will be here in a few hours.” He hesitated, then made up his mind; he gave a signal to his men and the group left at a trot for Auschwitz I, leaving the Häftlinge there. I looked at them: they weren’t moving, some were looking at me too, others were sitting down. I contemplated Birkenau, whose whole extent I could see from the top of this hill: the Kanada sector, in the back, was burning, sending a thick column of black smoke to the sky, next to which the little plume emerging from the chimney of Krema IV, still in operation, could scarcely be noticed. The snow on the barracks roofs sparkled in the sun; the camp looked deserted, I couldn’t make out a human form, aside from spots scattered in the lanes that must have been bodies; the watchtowers stood empty, nothing moved. I got back into my car and made a U-turn, abandoning the inmates to their fate. At the Stammlager, where I arrived before the Kommando I had encountered, other members of the Kattowitz SD or Gestapo were running all over the place, agitated and worried. The camp’s lanes were full of corpses already covered with snow, garbage, piles of dirty clothing; here and there I glimpsed a Häftling searching the bodies or slipping furtively from one building to another; when he saw me he promptly bolted. I found Kraus at the Kommandantur, its empty hallways strewn with papers and files; he was finishing off a bottle of schnapps and smoking a cigarette. I sat down and imitated him. “You hear it?” he said calmly. In the north, in the east, the hollow, monotonous booming of the Russian artillery resounded dully. “Your men don’t know what they’re doing anymore,” I declared as I poured myself some schnapps.—“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m leaving soon. And you?”—“Me too, probably. Is the Haus still open?”—“No. They left yesterday.”—“And your men?”—“I’ll leave a few to finish the dynamiting tonight or tomorrow. Our troops will hold till then. I’m taking the others to Kattowitz. Did you know the Reichsführer was appointed commander of an Army Group?”—“No,” I said, surprised, “I didn’t know.”—“Yesterday. It was named Army Group Vistula, even though the front is already almost on the Oder, or even past it. The Reds also reached the Baltic. East Prussia is cut off from the Reich.”—“Yes,” I said, “that’s not good news. Maybe the Reichsführer can do something.”—“That would surprise me. In my opin
ion, we’re done for. But we’ll fight to the end.” He emptied the bottle into his glass. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I finished the Armagnac.”—“That’s all right.” He drank a little and then looked at me: “Why are you so determined? For your workers, I mean. Do you really think a few Häftlinge are going to change anything in our situation?” I shrugged and finished my drink. “I have orders,” I said. “And you? Why are you so determined to liquidate these people?”—“I also have my orders. They are enemies of the Reich, there’s no reason they should get away while our nation is perishing. That said, I’m dropping it. We’ve run out of time.”—“Anyway,” I commented, looking at my empty glass, “most of them will only hold out for a few days. You saw the state they’re in.” He emptied his glass in turn and got up: “Let’s go.” Outside, he gave a few more orders to his men, then turned to me and saluted: “Goodbye, Obersturmbannführer. Good luck.”—“You too.” I got into my car and ordered Piontek to drive me to Gleiwitz.
The Kindly Ones Page 101
