tions were common, and could lead to time in the hospital. Fritz was at least spared half the shaving ordeal—although twenty years old now, his beard had still not developed.
There was a camp dental station, but prisoners didn’t go there if they could help it—only if a toothache became so bad that it had to be pulled.
Loose fillings led to caries and gum diseases, exacerbated by scurvy brought on by lack of fruit or vegetables. Fortunately, neither Fritz nor Gustav had any problems with their teeth.5 Gold teeth could be lifesavers or a deadly danger. Prisoners were murdered for them by certain kapos. But if the owner of a gold tooth possessed the strength of will to pull it out himself, it could be traded for luxuries. There was a fixed exchange rate among the civilian black marketeers at the Buna Werke: one gold tooth equalled one bottle of Wyborowa, a quality brand of Polish vodka. Within the camp, the tooth could buy five big loaves of Kommisbrot* and a stick of margarine.
Any of these could be traded onward for other things. In a world where each week, each day, or even each hour might be one’s last, there was little point in storing up riches for some better or higher purpose. Anything that brought solace or comfort or a full stomach in the living moment was worth the price.
For the managers and board of IG Farben, on the rare occasions when they took any notice of how their slave workers were treated, the sacrifice was deemed worth it for the sake of their profits. Some of the staff felt guilt, but it was little and ineffective. Meanwhile, the company’s accountants and direc‑
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tors were conveniently blind to the huge quantities of their delousing chemical Zyklon B purchased by the SS, especially at Auschwitz.6
Fritz Kleinmann was in no doubt where the evil came from: “Let no one conclude that the prisoner hierarchy bears the blame for bringing about this state of affairs. Some of the functionary prisoners adapted themselves to SS practices for their own profit, but the sole responsibility belongs to the SS killing machinery, which achieved its perfection in Auschwitz.”7 Each prisoner who passed in through the gate could expect to survive, on average, for three to four months.8 Fritz and his father had so far survived more than eight, along with less than a quarter of the comrades who had come with them from Buchenwald.
In the business of murder Auschwitz had achieved a kind of industrial perfection, but as a machine the system was flawed, inefficient, and subject to failure. Its very brutality created in some a will to resist, and its corruption produced the cracks and flaws that allowed resistance to thrive.
During his first summer in Auschwitz‑Monowitz, when Jupp Windeck’s dominance was at its height, the resilience and moral indignation that were defining parts of Fritz’s character led him to become involved in the camp’s underground resistance. In doing so he was putting his life in severe jeopardy.
But he did that every day just by existing; every little scrape or misplaced glance or bout of freezing weather or contact with disease could start a chain reaction leading to incapacity and death. By resisting, it was at least possible to risk everything for something.
It began with a conversation in a quiet corner of the barrack and ended in a new job.
Construction work in the camp itself was more or less complete by the summer of 1943, and the need for construction workers at the Buna Werke was declining. Fritz was at risk of outliving his usefulness. Certain friends of his decided that he could both be preserved and be of service to them.
They took Fritz aside and spoke to him in utmost secrecy, all of them Buchenwalders he’d known for years—men who had helped him to grow to manhood. There was Stefan Heymann, Jewish intellectual, war veteran, and 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 202
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communist, who’d been in the camps since 1933. In Buchenwald he’d been like a second father to Fritz and the other young boys, teaching them to survive, reading to them in the evenings inspiring passages from Road to Life. Also pres‑
ent was his other old friend Gustl Herzog, along with Erich Eisler, the Austrian antifascist. They had a task for him—a vital and potentially dangerous one.
Despite having known them for so long in Buchenwald, Fritz had only been partially aware of the covert side of their activities. Along with others, they had been involved in a Jewish‑communist resistance against the SS, acquir‑
ing positions of influence in order to gain information and help their fellow prisoners to survive. It was partly through the efforts of this network that Fritz and Gustav had been moved to less dangerous work details, that Robert Siewert’s builders’ school had been set up, and it was through prisoners in the administration offices that Fritz had learned of the content of his mother’s last letter and had advance warning that his father was listed for Auschwitz.
Since arriving here, these same Buchenwalders had worked their way into positions where they could resume their activities. The spur in their sides was the news of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto in January 1943, when the Jews heroical y but vainly fought back against the SS. The men in Monowitz discussed whether they ought to do something similar. Intel igence‑gathering and sabotage were all very well—Fritz himself participated in such acts on the construction sites; a bag of cement might be dropped heavily so that it burst, or a hose sur‑
reptitiously hooked over the side of a truck loaded with cement bags and the spigot turned on full—but the organized resistance wanted to do more. They settled on a continuation of the work they had previously done in Buchenwald: saving as many lives as possible. While Gustl Herzog worked in the prisoner records office, Felix “Jupp” Rausch, who’d been a businessman in Vienna and had become a good friend of Fritz’s father in Buchenwald, had a clerical job in the prisoner hospital; between them they were able to obtain all manner of intelligence about the other Auschwitz satellite camps, prisoner movements, selections, and special actions, as well as ensuring decent rations, acquiring medicines for the hospital, and educating the younger prisoners.9 Other mem‑
bers of their group held similar positions or were kapos or block seniors. Most of the resisters were communists, who had long experience of acting covertly.
Now they wanted Fritz to join them. The role they had in mind was simple; they would arrange to have him transferred to one of the labor details in the Buna Werke, where he would come into contact with civilian workers. He’d 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 203
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shown himself good at making friends with civilians, and in the factories there were thousands of them. A place was found for him in Schlosserkommando 90—the locksmith section of the construction command. One morning after roll call, for the first time since arriving in Monowitz, he marched with the other prisoners and their SS guards out of the camp, across the main road, and along the lane leading to the Buna Werke.
It was only upon entering the site that one realized just how vast it was. The whole complex—a grid of streets and rail spurs—was divided into sections: the synthetic oil plant with all its supporting workshops, the Buna rubber factory, the power plant, and smaller subsections to manufacture and process chemicals.
A person could stand on one of the main east‑west streets and scarcely be able to make out its far end in the haze nearly three kilometers away. The cross streets, running north‑south, were more than a kilometer long. The rectangular lots were packed with factory buildings, chimneys, workshops, depots, oil and chemical storage tanks, and weird structures of pipework looking like truncated sections of fairground rides. Most of it was still dormant—the structures built but the internal workings far from complete. Only the methanol plant was fully operational, while the rubber factory was reckoned to be at least a year away f
rom production.
The place wasn’t as busy as it would later become, but there were already several thousand men and women working in the factories. About a third of them were prisoners, the rest civilians. The locksmith section—which in fact undertook a variety of metalworking jobs in its workshop and around the factories—turned out to be a friendly, easygoing environment to work in. The prisoners were treated kindly by most of their kapos and encouraged to “work with the eyes,” taking it slow and easy while keeping a sharp eye out for the slavedriver kapos.10 Fritz’s kapo was a sympathetic political prisoner, a former Dachau man, who had helped arrange his work placement.
Rather than being placed in a workshop, Fritz was put in a subsection on one of the main factory floors as a general assistant.11 The German civilians here were mostly engineers, technical workers, and foremen, and the majority of their laborers were Polish and Russian prisoners, who found it hard to fol‑
low instructions in German and were treated abominably by their kapos. If the civilian foremen weren’t satisfied with the workers’ performance, IG Farben had them sent to Auschwitz I for “reeducation.” By contrast, the German‑speaking 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 204
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prisoners had it much easier; Fritz became known to the civilian foremen and was trusted by them.
He developed a friendly relationship with one German in particular. Again it started with discreet gifts of bread and cigarettes, or occasionally a newspaper.
From time to time the man stopped by and chatted briefly. This was what Fritz was here for, and he listened eagerly to the man’s news about the progress of the war, which flatly contradicted the propaganda dished out by the SS. It was going badly for Germany on all fronts; having lost Stalingrad, they were being battered ferociously by the Soviets. And in the Mediterranean German forces had been kicked out of North Africa by the British and Americans, who would soon be in Italy and driving north toward Germany.
It was clear to Fritz that this German was no Nazi; he hoped fervently that the war would end soon and that Germany would lose. Fritz cultivated the relationship, carrying back his news each day to his friends in the camp (along with the valuable gifts of bread and newspaper). Pleased with himself, he had little notion of the scale of the operation he’d become a part of, and although he knew it was hazardous, he couldn’t have guessed just how quickly it would turn and bite him.
There was resistance in all the concentration camps, but the sheer malevo‑
lence and huge scale of the Auschwitz complex caused resistance to rise to a new level. At its most passive it gathered intelligence that could help prison‑
ers survive; at its most militant it involved sabotage, escapes, and even vio‑
lent revolt against the SS. But it was all uncoordinated, haphazard. What was needed was an organized network. On May 1, 1943—which besides being the international workers’ day was a Nazi holiday when the SS operated a skel‑
eton staff—a secret meeting had been convened in Auschwitz I, at which two groups of like‑minded men of different nationalities agreed to cooperate and coordinate their resistance activities. They were dominated by a Polish group, including a number of former army officers, under the leadership of Jósef Cyrankiewicz, an educated and charismatic socialist from Galicia. Overcoming the anti‑German and anti‑Semitic objections from some of the Poles present at the meeting, Cyrankiewicz persuaded them to open up to cooperation with the Jews and with German and Austrian politicals. This would allow them to exploit all their various advantages—the Germans’ language and understanding of Germany and the Nazis, which was vital in intelligence, combined with the 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 205
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fact that Polish prisoners were allowed to receive mail, which enabled them to bring in supplies and communicate with Polish partisans.
The newly formed international group chose to call themselves Kampf‑
gruppe Auschwitz—Battle Group Auschwitz—a measure of their militancy.12
Battle Group Auschwitz soon established contact with Stefan Heymann and the other Monowitz resisters. Their connection was aided by the con‑
stant shuffling of prisoners and labor details around the camps. The Monow‑
itz group’s main value was its ability to cultivate relationships with civilians.
But the resistance also carried out more active tasks. Sabotage in the Buna Werke had been extensive and constant. Prisoners in the electricians’ detail had managed to short‑circuit a turbine in the power plant. Another group, taking advantage of the reduced guard on May 1, had caused an explosion in the half‑complete synthetic fuel plant, while others destroyed fifty vehicles.13 Such acts of sabotage—together with constant smaller acts and a general go‑slow principle of work—had contributed greatly to delaying the start of production in the various factories.
While Fritz Kleinmann went back and forth between factory and camp each day, carrying his little snippets of intelligence, he was only dimly aware of his connection with this network. Battle Group Auschwitz and its allies were wary of all contacts—the camp Gestapo was constantly endeavoring to penetrate it and discover who its leaders and members were, and the work of spotting and weeding out informers was unending. This was especially vital when it came to the most sensitive resistance operation: the planning and execution of escapes.
It was Saturday in June 1943, and the working day was over. At evening roll call, the prisoners in Monowitz stood to attention in the knowledge that tomorrow, although not a day of rest exactly, was at least a day of less toil and less danger.
Fritz stood in his place, uniform buttoned neatly, cap on straight and pulled to one side in the approved beret style, ready to whip it off mechanically at the “Caps off!” order. Everything was normal, the same slow, monotonous, grinding, day‑in, day‑out repetition he had known twice daily since October 1939, almost without variation.
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The trained clock in his mind was anticipating the dismissal from the Rap‑
portführer when he noticed a small knot of figures entering the square—two SS sergeants force‑marching a man who limped and stumbled. They shoved and hit him like a prisoner, but he wasn’t dressed as one. As they came closer, with a sickening jolt Fritz recognized his friend, the civilian from the factory.
He’d been violently worked over, his face bloodied and swollen. Fritz also recognized the SS men; one was SS‑Staff Sergeant Johann Taute, head of the Monowitz subdivision of the political department: the camp Gestapo. The other was Taute’s subordinate SS‑Sergeant Josef Hofer.
To Fritz’s horror, they ordered the civilian to identify which prisoners he’d had contact with at the factory. He surveyed the thousands of faces before him, but Fritz, buried deep in the mass, was well out of sight. With the two SS men pushing him, the civilian walked along between the ranks, back and forth, studying the faces. He came along Fritz’s row. Fritz stared straight ahead, heart thumping. The bruised, bloodshot eyes looked at him reluctantly, and a hand rose and pointed.
Fritz’s father and friends watched in helpless dismay as he was seized and marched out of the ranks. Together with the civilian, he was shoved along, past his comrades, and out of the square.
Stefan Heymann and the other resisters were doubly anxious; how long did they have before Fritz was broken and the Gestapo came back for the rest of them? The roll call was dismissed and they went back to their blocks to wait and talk and try to plan for what was coming. As for why the Gestapo had singled out that particular civilian, they could only speculate.
Fritz was put under guard in a truck and driven out of the camp. I
t traveled the few kilometers to Auschwitz I, but instead of entering the camp compound Fritz was taken to the political department, which stood outside the fence oppo‑
site the SS hospital and adjacent to a small underground gas chamber. Inside the Gestapo building, Fritz was force‑marched along a corridor by Sergeants Taute and Hofer and shoved into a large room.
Inside was a table with straps attached to it, and there were hooks embed‑
ded in the ceiling. Fritz contemplated these things in terror. He’d been long enough in the camps to guess what they were used for.
After a while an SS officer entered the room. He looked Fritz up and down with lively, smiling eyes in a gentle, patrician face. Prematurely bald and gray‑
ing, on looks alone he might be a university professor or a genial clergyman.
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Rarely can a man’s appearance have been more at odds with his character; this affable‑looking gentleman was SS‑Lieutenant Maximilian Grabner, head of the Auschwitz Gestapo, and his reputation for cold, pitiless murder was unsurpassed in this or any other camp. When Grabner spoke, Fritz recognized his accent as that of the rural region near Vienna, but although his voice was eerily soft, his manner of speech was rough and uneducated. Those prisoners who had much contact with Grabner imagined him having been a cowherd in some Alpine farm. In fact he’d been an officer in the anti‑communist arm of Chancellor Schuschnigg’s security police, and after the Anschluss he had transitioned smoothly into the Gestapo.14 The prisoners in Auschwitz were terrified of Maximilian Grabner, as were the SS who served under him. He regularly purged the hospital and the block 11 bunker—“dusting off” he called it—sending the inmates to the gas chambers or the Black Wall. He’d instituted a program of exterminating pregnant Polish women, and by the time Fritz encountered him he was reckoned personally responsible for over two thousand murders. One member of the Auschwitz resistance said of him at the time:
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