That first summer of 1941, when he was still finding his feet, Kurt went away to camp. Avoda was a camp for Jewish boys, founded in 1927 by Sam and Phil Barnet through the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. It ran on an ethos of taking boys from deprived urban environments and giving them a grounding in traditional Jewish family and social values. But in every other respect Camp Avoda was a typical boys’ summer camp, set among the trees on the shore of Tispaquin Pond, near Middleborough, halfway between New Bedford and Boston. It was a simple environment: a group of utilitarian dorm huts surrounding a baseball field. Kurt had the time of his life, playing sports and swimming in the warm, shallow waters of the lake. In Vienna he had floundered in the Danube Canal with a rope tied around his waist and a friend on the bank holding the other end; here he learned to swim properly. Had Fritz been able to see this place, he might have been reminded of the paradise of the camp in Makarenko’s Road to Life.
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Normally Kurt didn’t like to write letters, but now he wrote profusely to his mother, telling her all about this wonderful new world he had found.
Tini was heartened to hear that at least two of her children were now safe. But she couldn’t shed her anxiety that something would go wrong, that somehow Kurt’s idyll would be destroyed. “Please be obedient,” she wrote back,
“be a joy for your uncle, so that the counselors have good things to say about you . . . Darling, please be well‑behaved.” A photograph he sent her with the other Barnet children filled her with pleasure: “You look so nice . . . so hand‑
some and radiant. I almost didn’t recognize you.”23
Kurt was losing his old life in the brightness of the new. Looking back on this later, he might have hardly recognized himself.
“Every day the roar of the radio,” Gustav wrote despairingly. The camp loudspeakers, which had always been an intermittent source of unwelcome noise—regularly blaring out Nazi propaganda, German martial music, terri‑
fying commands, and morale‑grinding announcements—were now set to an almost constant stream of Berlin radio, crowing with triumphal news from the Eastern Front. The glorious crushing of Bolshevik defenses by the might of German arms, the encirclement of this division or that corps, the seizing of city after city, the crossing of rivers, the triumph of some Waffen‑SS divi‑
sion, the glory of a victorious Wehrmacht general, the surrender of hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers. Germany was devouring the lethargic Russian bear like a wolf disemboweling a sheep.
For the Jews under Nazi rule—especially those in the Polish ghettos—the news had been received as a glimmer of hope; Russia might win, after all, and liberate them from this miserable existence. But to the political prisoners in the concentration camps, most of whom were communists, the news was depressing and stirred up resentment. “The Politicals hang their heads,” Gustav noted. The unrest that had been felt in the camp throughout the year—with the Dutch arrivals and over the Hamber murder—was stirring again, and there were disturbances in the labor details, incidents of disobedience, minor acts of resistance. The SS dealt with it in their usual way. “Each day the shot and slain are brought into the camp,” wrote Gustav. Each day, more grist for the crematorium, more smoke from the chimney.
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In July 1941, a new horror came to Buchenwald. It was supposed to be veiled in secrecy, but the veil was thin and full of holes. The previous Sep‑
tember, the American journalist William L. Shirer, based in Germany, had reported a “weird story” told to him by an anonymous source who “says the Gestapo is now systematically bumping off the mentally deficient people of the Reich. The Nazis call them ‘mercy deaths.’”24 The program, codenamed T4, involved a number of specialized asylum facilities equipped with gas cham‑
bers, together with mobile gas vans that traveled from hospital to hospital, collecting and exterminating mentally handicapped and physically disabled patients—those deemed by the regime as “unworthy of life.” The scheme had drawn some negative public attention, particularly from the church, and this, together with the demands of the war in the Soviet Union, had led to the T4
program being suspended. However, the Nazis did not terminate it altogether; instead, they began to experiment with using the techniques on concentration camp inmates, specifically those judged mentally or physically deficient. This new program, given the codename Action 14f13, was to focus particularly on disabled Jewish prisoners.25
Sometime in April or May 1941, Commandant Koch summoned his camp doctors and senior SS officers to a meeting, and informed them that a secret order had been received from Himmler: all “imbecile and crippled” inmates, especially Jews, were to be exterminated.26
The first the inmates of Buchenwald knew of Action 14f13 was in June, when a small team of doctors arrived in the camp to inspect the prisoners. “We got orders to present ourselves at the infirmary,” Gustav Kleinmann wrote. “I smell a rat; I’m fit for work.”27 The doctors selected 187 prisoners, variously classed as mentally handicapped, blind, deaf‑mute, and disabled, including some who had been injured by accidents or abuse in the camp. They were told that they would be going to a special recuperation camp, where they would be properly looked after, and in due course they would be allotted easy work in textile factories. The prisoners were suspicious, but many—especially those most in need of care—chose to believe the hopeful lies. A month later, on July 13 and 14, transports came to the camp and took away the 187 men.
They were taken to an asylum at Sonnenstein and murdered. “One morning, their effects came back,” wrote Gustav. The grim delivery included clothing, prosthetic limbs, and eyeglasses. “Now we know what game is being played: all 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 124
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of them gassed.” They were the first of six transports of predominantly Jewish prisoners murdered under Action 14f13.
At the same time, Commandant Koch began an ancil ary program: the elimination of prisoners carrying tuberculosis. SS‑Doctor Hanns Eisele was in charge. It was for his part in this program that Eisele earned his sobriquets as the Injection Doctor and the White Death. In July, a few days before the first transports left for Sonnenstein, two transports arrived from Dachau carrying 2,008 transferred prisoners. Those identified as having tuberculosis—around five hundred, diagnosed on the basis of general appearance rather than a proper medical examination—were sent to the infirmary. There they were immediately killed by Dr. Eisele with lethal injections of the sedative hexobarbital.28
Within a handful of months, the character of Buchenwald had altered irrevocably, and with it what it meant to live as a prisoner. From now on, sickness or injury or anything that incapacitated a man was as good as a death sentence. Such things had always carried a severe risk of death here, but now it became a stone certainty that being rated unfit for work or “unworthy of life” was enough to put a man’s name on a list to be exterminated.
And then the first Soviet prisoners of war arrived, and a door opened into a new department of hell.
In the Nazi mind, Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same—Jews, they claimed, had created Bolshevism, had spread it and now ran it (along with the global capitalist conspiracy they were also, contradictorily, alleged to be running). It was true that many of the leading Bolshevik revolutionaries of 1917 had been Jews, and it was also true that the Soviet regime had liberated Russian Jews from the repression they had suffered under the tsars. But the hopeful dawn of the early revolution had turned to gloom under Lenin and Stalin, and the alleged connection between Jewishness and communism was just a fantasy in the minds of Nazi ideologues, a banal modern equivalent of the blood libel. But it was a mythology potent enough to inspire the invasion of the
USSR and breed a campaign of murder across the conquered Soviet territories, with death squads following behind the army and slaughtering Jews in tens of thousands. Captured Red Army soldiers, meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of whom had been rounded up in the first weeks of the invasion, were regarded as subhuman—if not Jews, then the thralls of Jews: degenerate, dangerous Bolsheviks and Slavs who were not fit to live. At the same time, their 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 125
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own leader, Josef Stalin, was labeling them cowards and traitors; beset from all sides, Soviet prisoners of war were among the most wretched men on Earth.
Within this mass of the despised, some were more hated and feared by the Nazis than others—political commissars, fanatical communists, intellectuals, and Jews. These were singled out for immediate disposal. The task couldn’t be accomplished in the POW camps because of the risk of spreading panic among the bulk of the prisoners; thus the SS decided to use the concentration camps. The program was codenamed Action 14f14.29
The first small group of fifteen Soviet POWs arrived in Buchenwald in Sep‑
tember 1941 and were dispatched immediately.30 During roll call, the Russians were marched off by SS‑Sergeant Abraham and four other guards toward the eastern sector of the main camp. On the roll‑call square, the other prisoners were ordered to give a loud, spirited rendition of the “Buchenwald Song.” Their thousands of voices filled the camp. As they sang, from the corners of their eyes they glanced in the direction the Russians had been taken. That area was occupied by a small factory—the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke (DAW), whose prisoner workforce manufactured military equipment for the Germany army.
Behind the factory was an SS shooting range. Under cover of the singing, the Russians were lined up there and shot.
A couple of days later, another thirty‑six Russians were brought to the camp, and again the prisoners at roll call had to sing to drown out the gunshots as the Russians were dispatched in the same way.
“They say they were commissars,” Gustav wrote, “but we know every‑
thing . . . How we feel is not to be described—now shock is piled upon shock.”
This method of execution was an improvisation; in the long term it would be far too inefficient. Therefore, while these small groups of Russians were being murdered on the shooting range, a new facility was being prepared. In the woods a little way off the road to the quarry, the SS had a riding hall. Its stable building was no longer required, and a team of carpenters from the construction detail was hard at work inside building interior walls, dividing the building into rooms. The facility was officially code‑named Commando 99, a reference to the telephone number of the stables.31
The work was completed in mid‑October, and a few days later a contingent of around two thousand Soviet POWs arrived from Stalag X‑D, near Hamburg.
Barrack blocks 1, 7, and 13, in the southwest corner of the main camp, were fenced off with barbed wire, forming a special camp for them. They had been 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 126
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brought in primarily as laborers; with around three million Russians now in captivity, they were both plentiful and, in the Nazis’ eyes, eminently expend‑
able.32 But they also served to test the new facility.
Each day, the Russians selected for liquidation were taken in groups to Commando 99, where they were told they would undergo a medical inspection.
They were greeted by blaring music from loudspeakers outside the building.
Inside, they were shepherded into a reception room under SS guard. Men in white coats took them, one at a time, along a corridor to the far end of the building. There the prisoner passed through a series of small rooms filled with medical paraphernalia and staffed by more men in white coats. His teeth were examined, his heart and lungs listened to with a stethoscope, his eyesight tested.
Finally, he was led into a room with a measuring scale marked on the wall. He was ordered to stand with his back against it to have his height measured. What was not apparent, unless the prisoner was exceptionally perceptive, was that the men in white coats were not doctors but disguised SS guards; also that there was a narrow slit in the wall at neck‑height, obscured by the measuring scale.
Behind it was a tiny cubicle in which stood an SS man armed with a pistol.
While the prisoner was being measured, the white‑coated attendant tapped on the partition, and the concealed guard shot the prisoner in the back of the neck.33 The body was removed through the back door into a truck. Outside and in the waiting room, the loud music drowned out the sounds of the shots.
While the next victim was being brought through, the previous man’s blood was hosed off the floor of the measuring room.
Some of the Soviet victims were taken from the Russian enclosure within the main camp, but the majority were driven in from POW camps for the sole purpose of extermination. Despite the cloak of secrecy, the prisoners of Buchenwald knew perfectly well what was going on. The carpenters who con‑
verted the stable were prisoners, and the others saw the truckloads of Russians arriving daily. And even without this clear evidence, most were astute enough to guess the nature of the “adjustments” (as the SS officially called the execu‑
tions) being carried out in the former stable.34
Before long, the SS ceased even attempting to be discreet about Action 14f14, especially when the camp crematorium became unable to cope with the number of corpses coming out of Commando 99—sometimes several hundred in a day. Mobile ovens had to be brought up from Weimar to cope with the 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 127
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overload. They were parked outside the crematorium, on the very edge of the roll‑call square, incinerating the bodies right in front of the other prisoners.35
“In the meantime the shootings continue,” Gustav recorded. The closed truck that carried the bodies from Commando 99 dribbled trails of blood along the road, all the way up the hill to the gate and across the square to the crematorium. After a while, the truck was fitted with a metal‑lined container to prevent leakage and keep the camp tidy.
Surely one must finally lose one’s ability to be appalled? It must get worn down like a stone with the passage of use, blunted like a tool, numbed like a limb. One’s moral sense must scar and harden under an unending series of lacerations and concussions.
For some, perhaps that was so; for others, the opposite was true. Even some of the butchers of the SS could only withstand so much. The effect of murdering thousands of Soviet prisoners of war produced varied effects on the camp guards, who all had to take turns handling the victims in the execution room and wielding the pistol behind the killing slot. Continuous, orchestrated shootings, every single day—this was not the same as the sporadic, random murders they were accustomed to. Many of them reveled in it; they saw them‑
selves as fighting soldiers, and these killings were their contribution to the war against Bolshevik Jewry. Others were shaken and even broken by it and tried to avoid duty in Commando 99; some fainted when faced with the carnage or suffered mental breakdowns after prolonged exposure; a few worried that if word got out, as it inevitably would, it could lead to retaliatory murders of captured German troops by the NKVD, the Soviet Gestapo.36
For the other prisoners, all of whom were witnesses to the open secret of Action 14f14 and some of whom were forced participants in the cleaning‑up, the effect was corrosive and traumatic. And it was far from being the end. The new demon introduced to Buchenwald at the end of 1941 was of a different kind, and was once again perpetrated by the camp’s medical officers. There was no limit to the depths to which the Nazis would go in thinking up new monstrosities. That same year, prisoners began to be subjected to lethal medical experiments designed to develop vaccines for German troops.
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Everyone knew that something was afoot when they fenced off block 46—
one of the two‑story stone‑built barracks that stood down the hill near the vegetable gardens. The block’s inmates were moved to other barracks, and the building surrounded by a double cordon of barbed wire. It was hardly the first time such a thing had happened, usual y indicating the arrival of some new contingent of prisoners. But this time there was no such intake.
After roll call one winter’s day, the adjutant produced a list and stood sur‑
veying the massed ranks of prisoners before beginning to call out numbers. The hearts of Fritz, Gustav, and every man there beat a little faster; whenever the SS
compiled a list, or singled out any prisoner, it was almost never for anything good, and nearly always for something dreadful. The drone of numbers went on and on, dozens of them, and each selected man turned pale as his was called.
It was doubly unnerving that among the SS officers stood SS‑Major Dr.
Erwin Ding,* a trim, nervous‑looking little man who had served with the Waffen‑SS (and wore his hat in the crumpled style of a fighting soldier). Ding had been camp physician and was known for his incompetence, but although he was unfit to be a doctor, his skills were adequate for the task now assigned to him.37 The same could be said for his deputy, SS‑Captain Waldemar Hoven; a remarkably handsome fellow, Hoven had spent a few years in Hollywood working as a movie extra before returning to Germany to work in his fam‑
ily’s sanatorium. He was even more medically incompetent than Ding; still unqualified, Hoven had pressed two prisoners into service to write his doctoral dissertation for him. But he was very handy with a needle, and he killed many hundreds of prisoners with lethal injections of phenol.38
The prisoners whose numbers were called—a mixture of Jews, Roma, and Aryan political prisoners and green‑triangle men—were ordered to the gate, and from there they were marched to block 46 and disappeared inside.
The Stone Crusher Page 17