by Nigel Jones
CHAPTER IV
WHAT was this concentration camp at Sachsenhausen where I now found myself?
Although I spent more than five years within the boundaries of its walls, my direct knowledge of the treatment of the inmates and the conditions of life there is very slight. Yet I lived so close to it and had so many contacts with men forming part of the camp community that, what I learned by personal observation, and what came to me by hearsay, perhaps allows me to give a picture more dispassionate and of greater continuity than many reports which have been published on the evidence of the conditions found at the end of hostilities and of the stories of prisoners found in the camps. Of course my experience relates only to this one camp and I have no means of judging what happened at extermination camps such as Frei Mann and Flossenberg in Germany, and those such as Auschwitz in occupied areas. It will be understood that I was throughout intensely interested in everything that went on around me, and that I seized every opportunity which came my way to learn something about the conditions in which the tens of thousands of men lived on the other side of the wall which was all that separated us. Great disbelief has met all protestations of Germans accused of war crimes when they expressed ignorance of the appalling atrocities committed in these camps, but having myself spent so many years virtually within one, and having experienced the close veil of secrecy which was drawn round everything that went on, I can believe that such ignorance was very well possible.
Take my guards, for instance. Except for one or two, I can definitely state that most of them had no idea of what was happening around us, and that they firmly believed that all prisoners in so-called protective custody, i.e. all the regular inmates of the camp, were well treated. These men, before they were detailed for duty in my cell, had performed guard duties around the camp in the course of which they were allowed no contact with prisoners; their duties did not take them into the camp itself, and many of them had never set foot inside its walls until they first came to the Bunker, to reach which they had to walk along one side of the main camp square. Whilst they were on duty in the Bunker they were never allowed to stray from this path, and their observation of camp events was confined to what they chanced to see during this walk. In the Bunker itself the names of prisoners were kept secret and reference to them was made by the number of their cells and, when particularly important or secret prisoners left their cells for any purpose, my guards and the trusties were shut into their sleeping quarters so that they should not see them. Going to and from the dentist, a visit which I managed to arrange some dozen times a year, I followed the same road taken by my guards on entering and leaving the Bunker and my observations agree with theirs. In the Bunker the maintenance of secrecy threw a great strain on the warders, and often they were careless, so that we in time generally heard all interesting news regarding other prisoners.
It will probably be argued that the fact that my guards did not tell me of the more horrible events which took place in the camp is no proof of their ignorance, but against this I can say that on a few occasions they did witness acts of cruelty, and I have no doubt whatever that their expressions of horror and disgust when telling me about such incidents were absolutely genuine. They were under no compulsion to tell me anything, and if they did it was only because they were so deeply shocked that they could not keep silence. Anyhow, this is what I learnt during my five and a quarter years at Sachsenhausen.
The camp at Sachsenhausen was opened towards the end of 1936, taking the place of a smaller one at Oranienburg, with which it has often been confused, as the village of Sachsenhausen lies only about three miles farther north. Neither money nor pains had been spared in its construction and it was intended to be everything that a concentration camp should be, if it is accepted that there should be such places at all; it was, indeed, a monument worthy of the genius of Heinrich Himmler. The original staff of Waffen-SS warders was mainly drawn from the much older camp at Dachau and both Eccarius and Ettlinger came to the opening of the camp bringing with them a selected nucleus of political prisoners. Until the outbreak of war, except for a short period in 1938 when a number of men belonging to the Algemeine-SS came to the camp to replace regulars who had been sent to the Czechoslovak border, when that country was subjected to peaceful penetration, the whole staff and all the guards at the camp were regular enlisted men of the Waffen-SS. When I reached the camp in December 1939 most of the regulars had been withdrawn for active war service, and their place taken by men between forty-five and fifty who had served in the First World War and younger men of low medical categories.
The commandant, from the time of the first establishment of the camp until the autumn of 1939 was a certain Oberftihrer Baranowski. According to all that I heard of him, he must have been a pathological sadist of the most beastly description, and it would be impossible to put into print some of the things which I was told about his cruelty to the prisoners under his charge. His son had been killed in some street fight between Nazis and Communists, and from this was said to arise his intense hatred of all such opponents of the party as had the mischance to come under the lash of his power in the camp. His hatred found its practical expression in devising means to render the lives of the prisoners entrusted to his care as intolerable as possible; acts of cruelty on the part of warders and guards were rewarded, any leniency shown by them severely punished. Towards the end of his term he became dangerously insane, and died shortly after his removal to an asylum from some kidney complaint. In November 1939, Oberführer Lohritz was appointed his successor as commandant.
Lohritz must have served in the First World War, for he frequently told me that he had been a prisoner of the French and had been very badly treated. According to one of my guards who had known him previously, he had served his apprenticeship as a butcher, but in 1920 had joined the police at Nuremberg. During the early stages of the Nazi movement, like many other members of the Bavarian police, he had been a sympathizer, and had given practical expression to his sentiments by turning a blind eye to Nazi acts of aggression, and by intervening on their behalf when their adversaries retaliated. His association with the Nazis was so blatant that he became the victim of a purge intended to encourage a certain degree of impartiality among the members of the Nuremberg police. He had already succeeded in getting in Himmler’s good books, and having joined the SA and shown himself a doughty fighter in the war against the disturbers of Nazi tranquillity, he had been given such swift promotion that, by 1939, he had reached the rank of Oberführer (brigadier).
I never liked Lohritz, but to give the devil his due, I don’t think that he was in any way a cruel man, or at all likely to initiate anything in the nature of a reign of terror in the camp. His sins were more those of omission than of commission; when he first reached the camp it was run on lines laid down by Baranowski, and Lohritz just took it that this was how it should be, and left it at that. As a matter of fact, he just hadn’t time to bother about prisoners, for his appointment was a God-given opportunity for graft on the largest possible scale, and he devoted all his attention to getting while the going was good. He stole the coal and provisions provided for the prisoners and sold them on the black market; he sold the personal effects of the living and the gold crowns from the mouths of the dead. Within a few months of his appointment he had managed to acquire an estate in Upper Austria, and with materials stolen from the camp, and by prison labour, had built himself a country house and laid out a park. His furniture was made for him at the camp, and so was his yacht, in which he hoped to take his pleasures on the beautiful Mond See.
A human weakness of his was love of animals, and so he started a small menagerie at the camp where, for his bears alone, he was reluctantly compelled to dock the human prisoners of one and a half hundredweight of their sugar ration weekly. It was his ambition, too, to induce storks and herons to make their home in the camp, and a fatigue, popular with both prisoners and guards alike, was catching frogs to feed a mother stork who had shown the bad taste to st
art her nursery there. He did not do anything to promote cruelty, but he did nothing to prevent it, and left all power over the prisoners in the hands of the regular Waffen-SS officials and they, like him, were all eagerly engaged in making hay while the sun shone. The prisoners were underfed, overworked, and bullied by both warders and room bosses.
These room bosses were one of the worst features of existence in a concentration camp. Prisoners were of all classes, the vast majority being ordinary decent people who normally would never have seen the inside of a prison. A small minority was made up of the worst dregs of German prisons, habitual criminals, murderers and sexual perverts, whose death sentences had been reprieved under the lax criminal legislation of pre-Hitler days; these were the old lags, men experienced in all the tricks by which prison can be made a home from home. It is of course not surprising that these men managed to ingratiate themselves with the warders, and also, by strong-arm methods, succeeded in getting themselves appointed as freely elected room bosses in their respective hutments. According to official regulations, the warders, or block leaders, as they were called, were not themselves permitted to take any violent action for the maintenance of discipline but must leave such matters to the room boss who was to be held responsible for the men under him; if the methods adopted were rough, the attitude of the SS men was: “What else can you expect from prisoners, after all, the creatures are scarcely human.”
It should never be forgotten that the worst cruelties were inflicted by Germans on Germans; later, when most of the prisoners were foreigners they were far better treated, at all events in the camps in Germany. It is true that thousands were murdered, but even death in a gas chamber was kindness compared to the slow extinction through brutality and starvation, which was the fate of tens of thousands of Germans whose only offence was that they were not Nazis. During this first, it might be called German phase, the death rate in the camp from these causes must have been simply appalling; all my informants agreed that the prisoners died like flies and that the crematorium never ceased smoking. At the beginning of 1940 though, there was a marked change, for the question of manpower having come under closer review, it was decided that the policy hitherto adopted at concentration camps was wasteful of a valuable asset; in June of that year new directives were issued, and orders given, that prisoners were to be so treated and fed that their capacity to work remained unimpaired. All the prisoners with whom I had opportunity to talk agreed in saying that from this time life in the camp became tolerable, and that the food showed great improvement both in quantity and quality.
Even so, the camp must still have remained a most horrible place, and even on my brief passages to and from the dentist (after the first couple of visits I was allowed to walk instead of being taken by ambulance) I saw heart-rending sights. Miserable fragments of humanity, mere skin, rags and bone, rendered ludicrous by their shaven pates and blue grey-striped pyjama-like garb. Many were covered with the sores, or had the steeply bulging stomachs of the starving. They wore clumsy wooden-soled mules and always had to move at the double.
As I walked along the main camp square I saw the punishment squad marching or running in the closest possible formation; generally, some fifty or sixty men. In the winter they were surrounded by a cloud of steam from their heated bodies, and if one passed close by them the stench made one sick. I was told that they had to march twenty-five miles a day, carrying packs weighing from twenty to forty pounds on their backs. This was a recognized and clement punishment. Far worse was the lot of the group of men standing to attention or squatting on their heels with outstretched arms, who had to remain in these positions for twelve hours at a stretch, or the men whose punishment consisted in lying full length on the ground and rolling, ten yards one way and ten yards back; if a man stopped, he was kicked and trampled on by the prisoner supervising the operation; the men vomited, they fainted, but throughout the day the order was, roll. Men who had experienced this punishment told me that it was the worst torture imaginable and far worse than any flogging.
Several times I saw, lying near the main entrance of the camp, the blood-stained body of some unfortunate prisoner who had attempted escape, left to lie there for two days as a warning to the others. In the spring there were always many such, for then some strange madness attacked the camp and not a night passed without the sound of shots, often followed by shrieks of agony; men would often just stand in the middle of the so-called neutral zone and wait quietly as a target for the machine-guns on the watch towers. Yes, life in the camp must have been very horrible.
In comparison my cell was a sheltered haven of peace, and the small inconveniences and annoyances which I suffered became mere futile absurdities at which I could laugh. It is, I think, a salutary lesson to live cheek by jowl with the hard verities of utter misery, and no man can have such an experience without realizing how little divides him from such a fate, and how hollow are the pretences on which all ideas of superior social station are based. It is perhaps a salutary lesson to live for a time under the terror of a police state, and many people who believe that such things as made life dreadful in Nazi Germany, could never happen here, would learn to know better. There are vicious and ruthless criminals in every land, and enrolled in the police force they are willing tools by means of which a dictator can strike terror in the hearts of all who seek to oppose him. We talk about war criminals, but forget that these criminals committed some of their worst crimes at the behest of Hitler and his gang, long before we in England would believe that war with Germany was inevitable, or indeed, even probable. I have met these men of the so-called Security Service, known them in the days when they were at the height of their power, so perhaps my impressions of them are clearer than those of the courts which tried them and saw them only as humble, broken, prisoners.
The vast majority of Germans under Hitler were, as they have always been, as harmless as a flock of sheep; good-natured, sentimental, hard-working. Unfortunately, unlike sheep they can be trained to kill and destroy, and with their sheep-like instinct blindly to follow their leader, they can become very dangerous. For six years before the war the mass of Germans had been deprived of all news from abroad, and even about their own country heard only what suited the Nazi policy. When war started they were told of an unprovoked attack by France and England, and the cry that the Fatherland was in danger brought all men to the colours. Yet there was never any general outburst of war-like spirit, and I can imagine that hardly ever has a country entered into a long and disastrous war with so little enthusiasm. A dictator armed with the modern weapon of his secret police can descend on any country, almost out of the blue, and in these days only continual watchfulness on the part, not only of the government, but of every single man and woman in the country, can ensure safety from this evil. The German propagandists called allied air attacks ‘terror raids’, but they terrified only for as long as they were in progress. The Gestapo terror was always there, it encompassed every minute of people’s lives, whether waking or sleeping, and never let up for a moment. At the root of it was the informer.
Two friends got talking, both anti-Nazis and one would make some remark criticizing the regime. After they separated the other would start thinking: ‘Of course I know Müller quite well and I feel quite sure that he is safe. Still, I wish he had not said that about Goering. After all, what do I really know about the man. Just look at the case of the Schulzes, denounced by their own daughter. Müller did not seem quite the same as usual today, seemed a bit strange in his manner. Supposing that the Gestapo have got something against him and have set him to spy on his friends. This is happening all the time. If he tells them what he said to me, and I do nothing, they may come and fetch me tonight—I like Müller, we have always been good friends—but—no, I daren’t risk it’. Off he goes to the nearest police station and faithfully reports what Müller said to him. Müller goes to Dachau, Sachsenhausen, or Buchenwald, and the next thing that happens is that the screw is put on our friend and almost before
he knows where he is, he has been roped in to spy on and denounce his friends.
Deprive people of news, destroy the liberty of thought and discussion, and the population of any country is indeed as helpless as a flock of sheep attacked by wolves.
CHAPTER V
ALTHOUGH it had seemed that winter would never end, by the beginning of April the walls of snow which had confined my walks had dwindled away to a few dingy mounds under the shade of the north wall, and there were days when the sun was really warm and it was a pleasure to sit on the bench in the sheltered angle of the two wings of the prison. The 2nd April was such a day, and as I halted my march near the bench I saw what looked like writing scratched in the sand before it. Yes, it was:
P.B.
Have you heard anything from home
I nothing
R.S.
Of course I already knew that Stevens was in the Bunker, for Paul Becker had told me very soon after I arrived that both he and Jan Lemmens were there. Then, on New Year’s Day, when the warder called me in the morning to go to the lavatory, I walked in to find Jan standing by the fountain wiping his head and face. Of course he was at once shooed out by my guard, but we were able to grin at each other and I was glad to see that he looked fit, fat and cheerful. Poor chap, until he was released in the autumn of 1940 he never once left his cell except to visit the lavatory, he had nothing to read, was not allowed to write letters, and like me, had no news from home. When we met after the war and I asked him how he had managed to kill time and what he did with himself all day, his answer was “Holding up my trousers”—he had been deprived of his braces.
