The Scourge of the Swastika

by Lord Russell of Liverpool

  Such was the daily round of the so-called prisoners in the camp, and it should be remembered that they were not criminals, though even that could not have justified their treatment. They were ordinary, peaceful, law-abiding citizens whose only crime was that they were inhabitants of countries which the German armies had invaded, and Germany needed them to work. So they were torn from their wives and families, often in the dead of night, loaded into trains and after a torturous journey, sometimes lasting five days, were dumped like so much ballast at the railway siding of a labour camp, there to enter upon a life of slavery.

  None but the stoutest of heart can have dreamed that he would ever survive; many must have looked forward to their last journey to the crematorium as a happy release from a life of insupportable misery.

  Early in 1943 a directive was issued by the Reich Government to the effect that pregnant foreign workers were not to be repatriated but that facilities for the delivery of infants were to be provided by local authorities ‘in the most simple but proper hygienic form’. Provision was also to be made for the accommodation, feeding, and nursing of the infants immediately after birth so that the women who bore them could return to the factories to work for Germany.

  A very large number of foreign workers were employed at the Volkswagenwerke near Hanover, and in February 1943 a ‘Children’s Home’ was established at Wolfsburg in the factory area and managed by a Russian staff. Later the Home, which was under the supervision of the Factory Welfare Department, was put under the care and control of the works doctor, Dr Korbel and a matron named Ella Schmidt.1 Eventually it was moved some twelve kilometres away to Rühen where it was housed in huts.

  It is known that between April 1943 and April 1945, 400 infants died there, sixty in the month of August 1944 alone. At first, the babies were admitted with their mothers, but the Reich Minister for Labour later insisted that the mothers should return to work not more than fourteen days after their confinement. The mortality rate thenceforth rapidly increased.

  The medical officer in charge was guilty of the most wilful and culpable neglect. Although in 1944 the death rate in the Home was 254 out of 310 admissions and increased towards the end of the year, Dr Korbel’s visits diminished in frequency to a weekly inspection. He took no steps to obtain the advice and assistance of a specialist in children’s diseases. He never personally examined any of the sick infants. No autopsy was ever performed upon the body of any baby who died there and he himself signed and accepted from others death certificates with the flippant diagnosis ‘feebleness of life’.

  The matron’s conduct was little or no better. She was brutal and callous in her treatment of the infants. There was a complete absence of the flimsiest hygienic precautions at times when the outbreak of boils and the ubiquity of bugs aroused the disgust of every visitor to the Home. She admitted that she was never on duty at night and never paid a surprise visit.

  When at last these wretched babies died, infested with lice, covered with sores, and weak from diarrhoea, they were left lying in a small room from which they were eventually collected in batches, packed in cardboard boxes, and transported to the local cemetery where they were interred without ceremony. Nor was any notice of impending death or burial ever given to the mothers.

  But the ‘Children’s Home’ at Rühen was not the only baby-farm set up by the Nazis. In 1944, owing to reverses in the field, there was an acute situation in Germany in regard to the production of food. It will be remembered that many foreigners were deported from Poland and Russia and brought to Germany for agricultural work. Many of these slaves were women, and it was not long before German farmers were complaining to their local Nazi Party Leader that Polish women employed as farm workers were losing time through child-bearing, ante-natal care, and subsequently while nursing their babies.

  In the province of Helmstedt a Home was accordingly established for the reception of the infant children of such women. The infants were to be taken from their mothers, by force if necessary, very shortly after birth so that the latter could return to work in the fields.

  This Home was situated at Velpke and consisted of two huts on one of the farms in the district. A woman named Billien was appointed by the Nazi Party Leader, one Gerike, as matron, and a man named Hessling was put in charge of its internal administration apart from the medical side. Frau Billien protested to Gerike about her appointment, informing him that she was only a school teacher and had no qualifications for the post.

  From the outset there was gross neglect of the babies and high mortality. The local doctor, who was supposed to keep an eye on the Home, was completely callous and indifferent; the farm huts were quite unsuitable for the purpose; there was no skilled supervision; the diet was unscientific and harmful; sick babies received no proper medical attention; and were not segregated from the healthy. The huts had corrugated iron roofs and the heat on the Helmstedt plains in summer was such that the babies suffered terribly.

  What Frau Billien lacked in skill and experience she could have made up with care and diligence. She gave little of her time to her duties, however, took all her meals out and slept out, and even during the day was frequently away for many hours at a time leaving in charge four inexperienced Russian girls and one other Russian woman of doubtful experience in the proper rearing of children. The cots were soiled and louse-ridden and although the babies were healthy on admission they soon developed sores on their buttocks, sunken cheeks, spindly legs, and became a ‘greenybluish colour’. Their garments were seldom changed and their diet was unregulated. The death rate was so high that between the months of May and December 1944, out of one hundred infants admitted, eighty-four died.

  In this home, also, when the babies died their bodies were not removed at once for burial, but were eventually placed in cardboard boxes and taken in handcarts to a field behind the cemetery where they were interred. So perfunctory was the burial that one day a dog was seen carrying in its mouth an infant’s skull covered with hair.

  These conditions were known to the responsible authorities but the knowledge did not produce any remedial action.

  The manner in which these and similar institutions were organized and administered illustrates once more the utter disregard of the Nazis for the human rights of those inferior beings who had neither the good sense nor the good fortune to be born Germans.

  Hundreds of innocent children could perish of disease and starvation; thousands of harmless men and women could be worked to death, and millions of Jews could be exterminated. All this was of no consequence, so long as it helped to fulfil Hitler’s prophecy that the Third Reich would last for a thousand years.

  1 Sauckel.

  1 General von Falkenhausen was interrogated on 27th November 1945 by the French War Crimes Investigation Section.

  2 The Organization Todt was a labour force employed in the occupied territories on such projects as the Atlantic Wall and the construction of military-highways. Albert Speer, the Reich Minister for armaments and war production used compulsory labour service to keep it up to strength. The organization was named after its founder Fritz Todt who died in 1942 and was succeeded by Speer.

  3 This was a Youth organization formed by Marshal Pétain after the armistice and modelled to some extent on the Hitler Jugend. Its marching song contained the refrain ‘Maréchale, nous voilà’.

  4 Field-Marshal von Rundstedt was one of the leading generals in the German Army and of the old school. He was later responsible for the Ardennes counteroffensive of December 1944 which was Germany’s last hit back. He was to have been tried as a war criminal in 1949 but the proceedings were dropped as he; was found by a special medical board to be unfit for trial.

  1 One of the Nazi concentration camps in southern Germany. See Chapter VI.

  1 See Chapter VI.

  1 Both Dr Korbel and the matron were tried and convicted by a British War Crimes Court. Korbel was sentenced to death.

  CHAPTER VI

  CONCENTRATION CAMPS


  LONG before the invasion of Poland in 1939 the concentration camp system was in full swing within the Reich, and under Himmler its organization had been perfected and its methods tried out and practised upon his fellow countrymen in time of peace.

  By the Presidential Emergency Decree of 28th February 1933 (Hitler lost little time in such matters) ‘Schutzhaft’ or protective custody was introduced into the legal system of the Third Reich. Anyone who gave the slightest sign of potential active opposition to the new regime could thus be put out of harm’s way and by these means, during the next six years, thousands of Germans were thrown into concentration camps for ‘treatment’, many of them never to regain their freedom.

  To the Gestapo was entrusted the task of ‘eliminating all enemies of the Party and National State’ and it was the activities of that organization that supplied the concentration camps with their inmates, and the SS who staffed them.

  How this weapon, forged and tested during the years immediately preceding the outbreak of war in 1939, was used during the war years as a means of terrorizing the inhabitants of occupied territories, and exterminating many millions of them is described in this chapter.

  When war was declared there were six concentration camps in Germany holding in all about 20,000 prisoners. During the next two years more camps were built, some of them now household names: Auschwitz, Belsen, Buchenwald, Fossenberg, Mauthausen, Natzweiler, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen.

  During the war, on the lowest computation, twelve million men, women and children from the invaded and occupied territories were done to death by the Germans. At a conservative estimate eight million of them perished in German concentration camps. Speaking of these Sir Hartley Shawcross, the chief prosecutor for the United Kingdom at the trial of major war criminals, said in his closing speech, ‘Twelve million murders! Two-thirds of the Jews in Europe exterminated, more than six million of them on the killers’ own figures. Murder conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Maidanek, and Oranienburg.’

  To these camps were brought millions from the occupied territories; some because they were Jews, some had been deported as slave labour and were no longer considered fit for work, many were Russian prisoners of war, some were victims of the ‘Bullet Decree’, many were Nacht and Nebel prisoners. There they were herded together in conditions of filth and degradation, bullied, beaten, tortured, and starved and finally exterminated through work or ‘eliminated’, as the Germans called it, by mass execution in the gas chambers.

  The deterrent effect of the concentration camp upon the public was considerable, and had been carefully planned. Originally, in Germany itself the veil of secrecy and officially inspired rumours were both employed to deepen the mystery and heighten the dread. There were many who did not know what went on behind those barbed wire fences but few who could not guess.

  It was not intended that this veil of secrecy should ever be wholly lifted. A privileged few were allowed an occasional peep and the many civilians who were employed in concentration and labour camps must have passed on to their relatives and friends outside some account of what they saw within. But Germany’s enemies were never to have real evidence of the crimes which were committed there and plans had been made for the destruction of all these camp sites and the liquidation of their surviving inmates which only the rapid Allied advance and the sudden collapse of Germany circumvented.

  The world has since learnt the full tragedy of the story. The survivors have told of their experiences, and the camps themselves have given testimony of the horrors of which their very walls were silent witnesses. Those who were the first to enter these camps will be forever haunted by the horror of what they saw.

  In the pages which follow an attempt will be made to describe the conditions in some of these camps, and the life of degradation, filth, and torture experienced by all confined in them.

  AUSCHWITZ

  The little Polish town of Auschwitz (Oswiecien), population 12,000 and situated about 160 miles south-west of Warsaw, was before the war quite unknown outside Poland. Its geographical situation was most unfavourable. Lying in the bottom of a flat basin, it was surrounded by a series of stagnant ponds and was damp, smelly, and pestilential.

  It is not surprising that in this misty bogland surrounding Auschwitz there was no human habitation. As someone once said, ‘it was avoided by life for a thousand years as death kept watch there’.

  If death kept watch there for a thousand years, it was not in vain, for it was here that the Germans established ‘Konzentrationlager Auschwitz’ where at one time ten thousand were passing through the gas chamber daily and not less than three million people, according to the Commandant’s own calculation, were killed in this and in other ways.

  When the camp was first opened it consisted of six old barrack buildings and a derelict tobacco factory; but later it was greatly extended. On ist May 1940 SS Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss was promoted, and transferred to Auschwitz from Sachsenhausen where he had held the appointment of Adjutant to the Commandant since 1938. Auschwitz was to be an important camp, principally for the suppression of opposition to the Nazi occupation of Poland, to which the inhabitants of that unhappy country were not taking too kindly. So an efficient Commandant had to be found.

  Höss possessed the necessary qualifications and must have had little difficulty in getting on the ‘short list’. After service in the First World War he worked on farms in Silesia and Schleswig-Holstein until 1923 when he took part in a murder, for which he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He was released five years later and pardoned, and in 1932 joined the NSDAP in Munich.

  Whilst in command of a horse SS squadron on a farm in Pomerania in 1933, he was noticed during an inspection by Himmler, who thought that his experience and bearing fitted him for an administrative appointment in a concentration camp.

  From then onwards his future was assured. He went in 1934 to Dachau where he started as a Blockführer in the Schutzhaftlager and remained there until posted to Sachsenhausen in 1938.

  In 1941 Himmler inspected Auschwitz and gave instructions that it was to be enlarged and the surrounding swamps drained. At the same time a new camp was established nearby at Birkenau for 100,000 Russian prisoners. From this time the number of prisoners grew daily although the accommodation for them was quite unsatisfactory. Medical provisions were inadequate and epidemic diseases became common.

  In 1941 the first intake of Jews arrived from Slovakia and Upper Silesia, and from the first those unfit for work were gassed in a room in the crematorium building.

  Later the same year Höss was summoned to Berlin by Himmler and told that Hitler had ordered the ‘final solution’ of the Jewish question in Europe and as the other extermination camps in Poland were not considered very efficient, and could not be enlarged, Höss was instructed to make a visit to Treblinka and inspect the extermination arrangements there.

  He visited Treblinka in the spring of 1942 and found the methods in use there somewhat primitive. Small chambers were used, equipped with pipes to induce the exhaust gas from internal combustion engines. This device was unreliable as the engines came out of old captured transport vehicles and tanks and frequently failed. The gassing programme had, therefore, not been carried out according to plan although according to the Commandant’s returns 80,000 had been gassed in the previous six months. But this was not enough for Himmler who was in the process of cleaning up the Warsaw ghetto.

  It was accordingly decided that Auschwitz was the most suitable camp for the purpose as it was a railway junction of four lines, and the surrounding country not being thickly populated, the camp area could be completely cut off.

  Höss was given four weeks to prepare his plan, and told to get in touch with SS Obersturmbannführer Eichmann, an official of some importance in Amt 4 of RSHA.1 Eichmann would arrange with Höss what drafts would be sent to him for extermin
ation.

  The numbers of convoys began to increase, and as the extra crematoriums would not be completed before the end of the year the new arrivals had to be gassed in temporarily erected gas chambers and then burned in pits.

  Two old farm buildings which were situated in an out-of-the-way spot near Birkenau were made airtight and provided with strong wooden doors. The transports were unloaded at a siding at Birkenau and prisoners fit to work were taken off to the camps at Auschwitz and at Birkenau itself. The others who were to be gassed and could walk, were marched to the gas plant which was one kilometre from the siding. The sick and those who were unable to march were transported in lorries.

  Outside the farmhouse all were made to undress behind a screen of hurdles. On the door was a notice ‘Desinfektionsraum’ (Disinfecting Chamber) and the prisoners were given the impression that they were being taken into the building to be deloused.

  When they were undressed they went into the room, according to the size of the convoy, about 250 at a time. The doors were locked and one or two tins of ‘Cyclon B’ were thrown in through specially constructed apertures in the walls. ‘Cyclon B’ gas was generally used for this purpose and contained a crude compound of prussic acid. The time it took to kill the victims varied according to the state of the weather but was seldom longer than ten minutes.

  Half an hour later the doors were opened and the bodies were removed by the prisoners’ Kommando, which was permanently employed there, and were burned in pits. Before the corpses were cremated gold teeth and rings were removed. Firewood was stacked between the bodies and when approximately 100 bodies were in the pit the wood was lighted with rags soaked in paraffin. When the flames had taken hold more bodies were piled on. The fat which collected in the bottom of the pits was put into the fire with buckets when it was raining to keep it alight. It took six to seven hours to cremate a pit full of bodies in these conditions and the smell of burning flesh was noticeable in the camp even when the wind was blowing away from it.