The Scourge of the Swastika

by Lord Russell of Liverpool

  BELSEN

  British troops clear the camp with bulldozers

  The dignity of the common man. A waggon-load of corpses at Buchenwald

  New arrivals at a concentration camp being paraded for medical inspection. From a photograph found on a German prisoner

  “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for their’s is the Kingdom of Heaven”

  “Selecting victims for the gas chambers”

  (Sketches made by Mile. Violette Lecoq while a prisoner at Ravensbrück)

  “They were forty thousand …”

  “These were women and children …”

  (Sketches made by Mile. Violette Lecoq while a prisoner at Ravensbrück)

  The leader of the “Grossaktion”, Major-General Stroop

  THE WARSAW GHETTO

  The people are driven from the shelter of the bunkers

  The march to the clearing station

  THE WARSAW GHETTO

  The victims are lined up before being searched

  General von Falkenhausen, who was the Military Governor of Belgium and Northern France, has testified1 that when the recruitment of labour was placed under Sauckel’s; direction the old arrangements were changed. Previously,, there was an officer on his staff who was responsible for the hiring of labour which, von Falkenhausen stated, was purely voluntary. Afterwards, orders were given directly by Sauckel to the Labour Branch, and all the Military Governor had to do was to carry them out.

  During the entire occupation, local field commanders; used conscripted labour for guard duties and work on fortifications. In France they impressed Indo-Chinese and workers from North Africa. In the latter half of 1942, two large contingents of slaves, all conscripted, were drafted to France to work in the Todt Organization;2 5,560 Algerians and 1,825 Moroccans.

  The Chantiers de Jeunesse3 were also used from 1943 onwards to supply forced labour. In January 1943 the. Labour Office of the German Armistice Commission in Paris announced that the Commander-in-Chief West, then von Rundstedt,4 was examining whether and in what ways more French labour might be called upon for the accomplishment of tasks ‘important to both countries’ and that it was intended to recruit members of the Chantiers de Jeunesse. Many of these new recruits were used by the Germans for work on the fortifications which formed what came to be known as the ‘Atlantic Wall’. It is difficult to understand how the construction of defences to keep out the allied armies then preparing to liberate France could accurately be described as a task ‘important to both countries’.

  As resistance to labour conscription increased, the occupation authorities promulgated ordinances imposing the death sentence on those disobeying requisition orders. An ordinance of 31st January 1942 decreed the following:

  Whoever fails to comply with these requisitions of service or goods imposed upon him by the Military Commander in France, or any authority designated by him … shall be punished by penal servitude … and in serious cases the death penalty may be inflicted.

  These serious violations of the Hague Regulations were the subject of numerous protests by General Doyen, the French Delegate to the German Armistice Commission.

  As early as 1941 he drew the Commission’s attention to the illegal use of forced labour in the Todt Organization in connection with the ‘execution of military work on the coast of Brittany’. He complained that the French civil authorities were forced to provide guards for vulnerable points such as bridges, tunnels, munition depots, and operational airfields and, in an appendix, he gave a list of the services so provided.

  General Doyen also protested vigorously against the ordinance of 31st January 1942, and stated that it was in contravention of both International Law and the Armistice Convention.

  The German assertion, so often repeated, that recruitment of labour in France was on a purely voluntary basis is without foundation. Those workers who signed German labour contracts were subject to physical and moral pressure at which the Nazis were adept. The pressure was both collective and personal.

  It is also beyond doubt that it was planned, as the following extracts from a German directive prove.

  Subject:— Increased mobilization of labour for the German Reich from the occupied territories and preparations for mobilization by force. The labour shortage renders it necessary for workers for the Reich to be recruited in the occupied territories to a much greater extent than previously…. In the first place, this mobilization should be carried out on a voluntary basis as hitherto. If, however, satisfactory results are to be obtained the German authorities in charge of the scheme must be able to exert any pressure necessary.

  This general directive was faithfully implemented by those to whom it was addressed, namely Sauckel’s representatives in France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, and Luxembourg. Propaganda was carried out to deceive workers of those countries in regard to the material advantages offered by the German employment exchanges. This was done in the Press and on the radio.

  Such propaganda produced poor results, for it did not take the French long to realize that these material advantages were non-existent. The next step, therefore, was to create artificial unemployment and to lower the living conditions of the workers and the benefits of the unemployed. This, too, was a failure and so-called voluntary recruitment was replaced by conscription.

  One of the measures taken to obtain French and Belgian slaves was disclosed by Sauckel at a conference which he attended in 1944 in connection with the Four-Year Plan. The passage here quoted is from a shorthand note taken during the proceedings. ‘The most abominable point against which I have had to contend is the claim that there is no organization in these districts to recruit Frenchmen and Belgians and despatch them to work. So I have had to train a whole staff of agents of both sexes who for good pay, just as was done in olden times for “Shanghaiing”, go hunting for men and dupe them, using liquor as well as persuasion.’ There must have been many a Frenchman who, after an evening out, woke up the next morning in a cattle truck en route for Germany, with a headache and a single ticket to Dachau1 via some armament factory in the Ruhr.

  The direct pressure put upon the workers was two-fold, moral and material. The Germans promised to offset the deportation of French workers to Germany by releasing a corresponding number of prisoners of war. It then transpired that the number of prisoners to be released was only in the ratio of one for five workers.

  The nature of material pressure used is illustrated by the following letter sent to a young Frenchman from the department office of the Reich Labour Minister in the Pas-de-Calais.

  Sir,

  On 26th March last, in Marquise, I ordered you to go and work in Germany at your own job, and you were to have travelled with the convoy which left for the Reich on 1st April. You paid no attention to this summons. I hereby warn you to present yourself with your luggage, next Monday 28th April before 19 hours at 51 rue de la Pomme d’Or in Calais. I call your attention to the fact that you leave for Germany as a free worker and that you will work there under the same conditions and earn the same wages as the German workers. In case you do not present yourself I must warn you that unfavourable consequences may very well follow.

  The letter was signed ‘Hanneran, Delegate for the Labour Ministry of the Reich’.

  Whether the recipient of this letter was impelled by the threat of ‘unfavourable consequences’ to obey the summons or not is unknown; but there were doubtless many others who were. What happened to them when they got to Germany is told elsewhere in this chapter.

  In January 1943 Sauckel was in Paris when he received a message from Speer to the effect that the Führer had now decided that it was no longer necessary, when recruiting skilled and unskilled labour in France, ‘to have any particular regard for the French’. Recruitment could therefore be carried on with more severe pressure and measures.

  Sauckel reviewed the requirements and decided that 150.000 skilled workers were at once required from France for the armament industry in Germany and that another 50.000 shou
ld be drafted from Holland and Belgium.

  A few days later he attended a meeting of the Central Planning Board in Berlin and told them that he had successfully persuaded Laval, who had already introduced compulsory labour in France, to extend the present law by the addition of three more age-groups and that these had just been called up.

  But this was a mere drop in the ocean. In June 1943 Sauckel sent Hitler a skeleton plan for the coming six months. It provided for the deportation to Germany of 500.000 more slaves by the end of the year. Sauckel requested Hitler’s approval and it was given for the asking.

  The plan, however, was one thing: its implementation was another. Sauckel returned to the Ritz and, from his luxurious quarters there, began a campaign to force his programme through, but the French had recovered from their stunning blow of 1940 and the scheme met with widespread passive and active resistance from Government officials and militant patriots.

  At a periodic conference of the Four-Year Plan in March the following year, Sauckel was forced to admit failure. ‘Last autumn,’ he said, ‘as far as foreign manpower is concerned the labour recruiting programme was sadly battered. I do not wish to elaborate on the reasons here, they have been discussed at length. All I have to say is, the programme has been wrecked.’

  Undismayed by this admission and notwithstanding the breakdown of the existing programme which it had disclosed, it was decided to proceed with the plan for the transfer to Germany during 1944 of well over a million foreign workers. These figures had been approved at a conference which Hitler had attended in January. This programme had called for 91,000 per month from France and 250,000 each from Belgium and the Netherlands for the whole year.

  Sauckel never ceased to bring such pressure as he was able on the Vichy Government to meet these insatiable demands, and in February 1944 the call-up bracket was extended to subject to compulsory labour all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty and all women between eighteen and forty-five.

  Nevertheless, the Plenipotentiary General had to report to Hitler that the ageing Marshal of France would not agree to compulsory labour for women in the Reich, but he was able to tell his Führer that the French Government accepted the demand that officials who sabotaged the enforcement of the programme should be liable to the death penalty, and assured him that he had made it abundantly clear that more rigid measures would be taken if the demands for more slaves were not met.

  But the sands of time were running out and the impending liberation of France grew ever nearer.

  The Germans had decided, in the event of the invasion of France by the Allies, to deport forthwith all male inhabitants fit for work, but the allied armies advanced so rapidly once they had set foot on French soil that these plans could not be carried out.

  The promise made to all these workers before they left their homes for Germany, that they would receive the same remuneration as the Germans, was never honoured.

  They received very little, as the fines which could be imposed by their employers for the slightest breach of discipline often reached the amount of weekly pay due, and the worker received nothing. Those employed in factories were generally confined in labour camps and the Poles who were largely employed on farms were housed in the stables and liable to corporal punishment.

  The camps in which the foreign workers lived were often administered by the firm which employed them. One such camp was situated at Schandelah and its inmates were employed by Steinoel & Co. in their factory nearby.

  This factory produced oil from slate. In 1943 oil was becoming scarce in Germany and Reich Minister Speer emphasized the necessity of getting more in order to be able to continue the war. The work of Steinoel was given priority and they were supplied with slave labour from the concentration camp at Neuengamme.1

  The manager of this firm was nominally responsible for the workers who were accommodated at Schandelah, and although he took no active part in its administration he was fully conversant with the general conditions of the camp.

  The conditions of life, diet, and hygiene in this camp were atrocious. The diet was barely enough to keep inmates alive. Clothing was rarely washed and still more rarely changed. The camp abounded in fleas and lice. To protect themselves from the cold the prisoners, for that is what they were, began to cover themselves with paper from cement bags on the working site. The civilian administrative staff objected to these bags being put to such use so the prisoners were, upon the orders of the Camp Commandant, beaten for using them. The punishment for this offence was twenty-five strokes administered in public.

  There was no medical officer in the camp and the hospital was run by the medical orderly, who in peace-time was a bricklayer by trade. He performed all his operations with a scalpel which he sterilized by dipping it in petrol.

  The following is an extract from a description of the medical orderly’s operations, given by one of the inmates who acted as his assistant.

  Personally I admired the manner in which he set to work, but as he was operating in a haphazard fashion on persons who were already three-quarters dead, it is not surprising that they all died. For example, he operated with my assistance on a Yugoslav whose stomach was terribly bloated but the remainder of whose body was exceedingly thin. The orderly told me that the stomach was full of pus. He opened it, took out the pus and sewed it up again. I shall never forget to the end of my life how the patient died three days later singing the Yugoslav national anthem. The orderly had a scalpel with which he did all his operations. He disinfected it with petrol which he stole from the garage. He also had some small pincers and a pair of scissors. There was no anæsthetics so nobody gave any. The patient was either held down by me, or bound to the table.

  The camp medical officer only visited the camp to inspect the dead and give death certificates. He was never called in for anything else.

  The attitude of the camp staff was that it did not matter whether the prisoners died or not. The staff themselves, however, did not die of starvation.

  At numerous war crime trials of concentration and labour camp staffs it has been argued in their defence that the chaotic state of Germany in 1944 and the early months of 1945 made it inevitable that conditions in such camps should greatly deteriorate. The clothing of the Schandelah camp staff, however, was quite good and their food adequate. They did not die of starvation. Although the SS kitchen was the same as the workers’, a special cooker was used for the SS food. They had 500 grammes of potatoes a day, they had thirty-five grammes of butter. The workers never got butter. The staff had sixty grammes of sausage daily, forty grammes of meat daily and no meatless days. Once a week they had milk soup: for this fifty litres of milk was used. They had 100 grammes of jam or artificial honey. They had twenty-five grammes of cheese daily: the workers rarely got cheese. The SS staff, moreover did no hard work.

  The real difference between the camp staff and the workers was this: the staff were regarded as human beings; the workers were regarded as expendable animal material.

  The work was very hard, particularly for men who were weakened by semi-starvation. If it was not done quickly enough they were reported by the civilian supervisor. When prisoners were so weak that they could no longer work, they were returned in batches to Neuengamme and replaced by fitter men. They were literally worked to death, that is to say, they did work on a starvation diet until they either died at Schandelah or, being unfit for work, were returned to Neuengamme to die there. The Commandant, whose name was Ebsen, was a sadistic brute and the rest of the staff took their cue from him. Before he had joined the SS he had been a gamekeeper, a lay preacher, and interested in young persons who had gone astray.

  It was he who gave the guards orders to beat all workers found wearing paper bags to supplement their clothing: these beatings were carried out with a small whip of rubber called a ‘Schlag’.

  He had complete power of life and death over the prisoners. He used to lecture the staff, telling them they must have nothing to do with the inmates whom he called
‘criminals’ and ‘scum’; and as ‘scum’ he treated them, beating all and sundry both on and off parade.

  Ebsen had an able lieutenant in his second-in-command, Truschel, who was known as ‘The Killer’ and appears to have been worse than his Commandant.

  One prisoner, a Pole, was found asleep in the boiler house on a cold night; Ebsen beat him severely with a length of cable. A Latvian prisoner was denounced by one of his comrades as being engaged in making daggers. He was reported to Truschel who killed him with a revolver shot in the head saying, ‘That will teach him to make arms and he won’t make any more now.’

  Wherever he went Truschel carried a whip, and all those under him went in perpetual fear. Another of the guards was a big man who in civil life had been a waiter and was described by one of the witnesses at his trial as being ‘as fat as a pig’. Clearly he was on no starvation diet. This man beat the prisoners regularly on every occasion and upon any pretext and for the purpose used a spade or a plank or whatever came handy. He also administered the punishment of twenty-five lashes which was awarded for minor breaches of discipline. He used to keep back part of the food which he was supposed to distribute to the prisoners.

  In this camp, as in all other concentration and labour camps, the Kapo system was in force. A Kapo was generally a German criminal brought from one of the ordinary concentration camps and appointed the superior of other prisoners. He was put in charge of a block of huts and in return for the brutal discipline which he enforced on his subordinates was better treated, did no work, got more food, and was given something to smoke. One of the Kapos at Schandelah was a man named Grosse who was head of the Arbeitsdienst of the camp, that is to say, he was responsible for allotting work. He had a pretty sense of humour and when he saw an unusually frail prisoner, and to be unusually frail in Schandelah one had to be a living skeleton, he would say to him, ‘You will soon be going to the crematorium.’ One of the inmates, who had been managing director of a sugar factory in France, was given a running beating by Grosse over a distance of eighty metres. Each time the prisoner fell down he was picked up and beaten again. Four hours later he died.