by Yitzhak Arad
In the winter of 1942/43, with the outbreak of a typhus epidemic, Matthes took eight patients to the Lazarett and had them shot. During that same winter he shot the prisoner Ilik Weintraub because, while transferring bodies from the gas chambers to the pits, Weintraub had stopped for a moment to drink some water from the well.
Matthes’s particular fetish had to do with cleanliness: in the autumn of 1942 he shot two prisoners because at the end of the work day they did not clean to his satisfaction the stretcher on which they had carried the bodies.
Jerzy Rajgrodzki, a prisoner in the extermination area, writes about Matthes:
He used to beat the prisoners with a completely expressionless, apathetic look on his face, as if the beatings were part of his daily routine. He always saw to it that the roll-call area would always be extremely clean. One of the prisoners had to rake the sand in the square all day long, and he had to do it with Prussian exactness.24
In the autumn of 1943 Matthes was transferred to Sobibor. He was put on trial in 1962 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
SS Scharführer August Miete
August Miete was born in 1908 in Westphalia. He completed elementary school and worked as a grinder in a flour mill. At the beginning of 1940, he was attached to the euthanasia program, and at the end of June 1942 was transferred to Operation Reinhard and sent to Treblinka. He was one of the cruellest SS men; the prisoners nicknamed him the “Angel of Death.” Miete was in charge of the Lazarett, and it was he who carried out most of the killings. The old, the sick, and the children were taken directly from the transports to the Lazarett, and most were shot by him. As the Lazarett was close to the selection square, where most of the Jewish prisoners worked, Miete also supervised the work there. He would walk around, check the prisoners, and those who seemed to him too sick or too weak to work at the required pace would be taken straight from the selection area to the Lazarett. Miete would have each man stand near a pit in which a fire was always going, then he would calmly take out his gun and shoot. Sometimes he would tell his victim to undress first.
He would also stop prisoners, search them, and if he found money, food, or anything at all, would brutally beat them and march them to the Lazarett. If a victim was stopped, even if nothing incriminating was found on him, Miete would still invent some reason to beat him and bring him to the Lazarett for extermination. He also used to visit the living barracks and hospital room of the prisoners, remove the sick, and shoot them.25
Miete would also look for Franz’s victims who had been injured by the hunting rifle or whose faces had been bashed in by his boxing, and remove them to the Lazarett as well. He would find additional victims among the prisoners who had been whipped for one reason or another, or for various “crimes”; after they had been weakened by the blows and injuries they had sustained, Miete would decide that they were no longer fit for work and shoot them, too.
Miete was tried in 1960 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Scharführer Paul Groth
One of the most dreadful SS men in Sobibor was Paul Groth. His name and deeds are mentioned time and again in testimonies of survivors. When he was in charge of the working group that cleaned the freight cars, after the work was done he used to ask the Jews who among them was tired, felt bad, or required medical attention. On occasion, when the working group was composed of Jews taken from the transport that had arrived that day, some responded to Groth’s “polite” question. He took them aside, hit them, and marched them to the Lazarett, where they were shot. In some cases he organized a flogging party and forced the Jews to run past Ukrainians with whips. Once he ordered a prisoner to gulp down vodka, and when he became drunk, Groth forced him to open his mouth and he urinated in it, roaring with laughter.26
But something happened to change Groth’s behavior toward the Jews. Three Jewish girls were taken from one of the transports, and among them was Ruth, aged sixteen or seventeen, from Vienna. Ada Lichtman testified:
After a short period Paul Groth fell in love with Ruth. She was a beautiful brunette. The love affair became serious, and Ruth influenced Groth’s behavior. He changed for the better. . . . Once Groth was sent out of the camp for three days That night Ruth was killed by Groth’s fellow SS men together with the two other girls, Berta and Lena. When Paul returned and found out what had happened, he changed. During work he did not beat and maltreat the prisoners. It was not the same Paul. . . .27
A short time later Groth was transferred to another camp. His love for a Jewess had been an insult to the Aryan race, and in violation of Nazi regulations.
SS Personnel of a Different Nature
The overwhelming majority of SS men in the camps were accessories to the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews and perpetrated acts of inhuman torture and cruelty on the Jews who were brought to the camps and exterminated there. An untold number of atrocities will never be known, because none of the victims lived to tell the tale and naturally the murderers themselves would not volunteer that sort of information.
Yet it should be noted that even in the hellhole of the camps there were isolated incidents of humane behavior toward the prisoners. Wiernik writes about one such SS man, Erwin Herman Lambert, who was in charge of a group of builders in Treblinka:
Urterscharführer Herman was humane and likeable. He understood us and was considerate of us. When he first entered Camp II and saw the piles [of bodies] that had been suffocated by the gas, he was stunned. He turned pale and a frightened look of suffering fell over his face. He quickly took me from the place so as not to see what was going on. With regard to us, the workers, he treated us very well. Frequently he would bring us food on the side from the German kitchen. In his eyes one could see his good-heartedness . . . but he feared his friends. All his deeds and movements expressed his gentle soul.28
Joe Siedlecki testified about another SS man in Treblinka who treated Jewish prisoners humanely:
There was a SS man, Karl Ludwig. He was a good man. If I would meet him today, I would give him everything he might need. I cannot even count the times he brought me all kinds of things and helped me, or the number of people he saved.29
Scharführer Karl Ludwig also served for a time in Sobibor. Ada Lichtman testifies:
When the German Jews were selected for work, Scharführer Ludwig was present. More than once he took people from the lines. In this way he saved two doctors. He brought bread to the shoe repair barrack and divided it among those there. It was said that he also helped people escape from Ossowa.30
Karl Ludwig was among those from the euthanasia program who remained alive at the end of the war.31
Another SS man in Sobibor who is favorably remembered in various testimonies is J. Kliehr, who was in charge of the bakery. He would try to cheer up the prisoners and brought them bread on the side.32 At his trial in Berlin in 1950, Kliehr was acquitted as a result of testimonies by survivors in his favor.
Ukrainians
The direct contact that the prisoners had with the Ukrainians in the camps was considerably less than the contact between prisoners and the SS. The Germans generally assigned the Ukrainians to guard duties and retained the supervision over the prisoners for themselves. There are few survivors’ testimonies that mention Ukrainians by name.
The Ukrainian Ivan Demaniuk and his deputy Nikolai, who were put to work near the gas chambers in Treblinka, supervised the Jews entering the gas chambers and worked the motor that supplied the gas to the gas chambers. These two Ukrainians were exceptional in that they did maintain daily contact with Jewish prisoners who worked in the extermination area. Eli Rozenberg writes about Ivan Demaniuk and his behavior:
This Ukrainian took special pleasure in harming other people, especially women. He stabbed the women’s naked thighs and genitals with a sword before they entered the gas chambers and also raped young women and girls. The ears and noses of old Jews which weren’t to his liking he used to cut off. When someone’s work wasn’t to his satisfaction, he used to beat the p
oor man with a metal pipe and break his skull. Or he would stab him with his knife. He especially enjoyed entwining people’s heads between two strands of barbed wire and then beating the head while it was caught between the wires. As the prisoner squirmed and jumped from the blows, he became strangled between the wires.33
In prisoners’ testimonies a Ukrainian by the name of Rogosa also appears. He is accused of beating Jews during roll call. Wiernik also writes of other Ukrainians’ cruel behavior, but does not cite specific names:
Between Camp I and II were the living quarters of the Ukrainians, who were always drunk. Everything they could get their hands on they stole from the camp and sold in exchange for vodka. . . . They would pick out the prettiest Jewish girls, drag them to their rooms, rape them, and then lead their victims to the gas chambers.34
And More
The SS personnel and others who have been described here were part of the upper command echelon in the Operation Reinhard camps and, as such, are mentioned repeatedly in survivors’ testimonies. They certainly were not the only ones involved, however. SS men like Untersturmführer Josef Niemann, the last commander of Sobibor, Oberscharführer Hubert Gomerski, who supervised the forest group there, and Oberscharführer Paul Bredow, in charge of the Lazarett, have also been singled out for their cruelty. The first commander of Treblinka, Untersturmführer Irmfried Eberl;Oberscharführer Otto Stadie, the sergeant-major of the camp;Scharführer Franz Suchomel, in charge of the “gold Jews”; and Scharführer Josef Hirtreiter are also names that survivors of Treblinka vividly recall for their beastly manner. Although we have not elaborated upon them here, these SS men—and many others—were all part of the group that determined life—and death—in the camps. As SS Scharführer Erich Bauer, who served in Sobibor, testified: “I cannot exclude any member of the Sobibor camp staff of taking part in the extermination operation. We were a ‘blood brotherhood gang’ in a foreign land. . . .”35
No study has been done on the social background of the German staff in the death camps of Operation Reinhard. The following brief analysis is based on data related at the trials of those SS men who served in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka camps who were brought to trial as war criminals.
Almost all of them came from the lower middle class; their fathers were factory workers, craftsmen, salesmen, or shop workers. Most of them had finished primary school, some lower high school, and a few had attended a secondary school. Some had gone to commercial schools or had received vocational training. Those who were former euthanasia program employees were mostly former nurses, craftsmen, farm workers, or salesmen. Almost all of the accused were members of either the Nazi party, the SS, or the SA. Some had joined these organizations before Hitler came to power, and others joined the party later. Their average age was between thirty and forty at the time they served in Belzec, Sobibor, or Treblinka. This applies to twenty-seven Germans who served in the death camps and who were brought to trial, but we may assume that the others were of a similar social background.
The SS personnel who ran the camps and supervised the extermination activities were absolutely “ordinary” people. They were not assigned their tasks because of any exceptional qualities or characteristics. The anti-Semitism that festered within them was no doubt part of their origin and was an accepted phenomenon among large segments of German society. Most were married, and most held no criminal record. They had either volunteered to serve in the SS or had been drafted to its ranks after having served in the euthanasia program. It was they who were to carry out the murder of hundreds of thousands of men, women, children, and old people. These SS men and Ukrainian guards carried out their duties loyally and unquestioningly. What is more, they constantly displayed initiative in trying to improve the extermination process. An integral aspect of their duties was that they were also to exhibit cruelty toward their victims, and many of them contributed their own “ideas” and innovations for various forms of torture that would “entertain” them all. Under the regime of Nazi Germany, these perfectly “ordinary” people were turned into something extraordinarily inhuman.
25
The Prisoners’ Daily Life
The routine of the prisoners’ daily life began early in the morning, usually at four o’clock. In the summer at this time it was already light, but in the winter it was still pitch dark. Rudolf Reder described the start of the day in Belzec:
At 3:30 in the morning the Askar [Ukrainian] who guarded the barrack during the night knocked on the door and shouted: “Get up! Get up!” Before we could even rise, the bully Schmidt burst in and rushed us out with a whip. We ran out with one shoe in our hand, and sometimes even barefoot. Usually we slept in our clothes and shoes because we had no time to get dressed in the morning. . . . We got up feeling miserable and tired. The same feeling we had gone to sleep with.1
As the prisoners got up, the entire area of the Jews’ living barracks came alive. The doors of huts were opened from the outside by the Ukrainians and the urination and excrement bowls were taken to the toilets. The huts were cleaned, the blankets were folded, and the prisoners were allowed to leave for their meager breakfast, which was followed by roll call.
During the roll call the prisoners were lined up in several rows in front of the huts. The “barrack elders” reviewed their people and reported the number to the “camp elder.” He, in turn, added up the total number of prisoners and submitted his report to the SS man who was reviewing the roll call. These statistics were then reported to the camp commander or his deputy.
After the morning roll call, the prisoners were divided into work groups. The capos escorted the work groups to the work sites and supervised the prisoners throughout the day. Throughout the workday the prisoners were exposed to the harsh treatment of the SS supervisors. Dov Freiberg testified about these cruelties in Sobibor:
I shall tell the story of one day, an ordinary day, much like any other. That day I worked at cleaning a shed full of belongings and transferring them to the sorting shed. An umbrella had gotten stuck in a roof beam, and the SS man Paul Groth ordered a boy to get it down. The boy climbed up, fell from the roof and was injured. Groth punished him with twenty-five lashes. Groth was pleased with what had happened and called over another German and told him he had found “parachutists” among the Jews. We were ordered to climb up to the roof, one after another. The agile—and I was one of them—succeeded in climbing up without falling. But the majority did not succeed; they fell down, broke legs, were whipped, bitten by Barry, and shot.
This game was not enough for Groth. There were many mice around, and each of us was ordered to catch two mice. He selected five prisoners, ordered them to pull down their trousers, and we dropped the mice inside. The people were ordered to remain at attention, but they could not without moving. They were whipped.
But this was not enough for Groth. He called over a Jew, forced him to drink alcohol until he felt dead. When the work was finished, we were ordered to lay the man on a board, pick him up and slowly march while singing a funeral march.
This is the description of one ordinary day. And many of them were even worse. . . .2
The workday usually lasted from six in the morning until six in the evening, with a short break for lunch. At twelve noon the signal for lunch would be given, and the prisoners, work group by work group, led by the capos, were taken in the direction of the kitchen, where they received their meal. Shortly after, the signal for the end of the lunch break was sounded, and the prisoners were returned to their work sites. On the way to and from work, the prisoners were made to sing, and whoever dared sing without “enthusiasm” was whipped. During periods when there was not much activity going on in the camps, work on Sunday would last only until the afternoon, and the rest of the day would be spent cleaning the living barracks, airing out the blankets, and performing various other cleaning jobs. At six in the evening, the signal for the end of the workday was given, and the prisoners were returned to Roll-Call Square for the evening roll call. This roll
call took much longer than the morning roll call and sometimes lasted as much as a few hours. After attendance was taken, the sick or weak-looking prisoners were taken from the ranks, brought to the Lazarett, and shot. Reder described a scene of this sort in Belzec:
Usually the doctor prepared the list of the feeble, or the Oberzugführer who was in charge of the prisoners prepared the list of the “transgressors” in order to execute thirty to forty prisoners. They were taken to the pit and shot. They were replaced by the same number of people, taken from the arriving transports. . . .3
At the evening roll call, punishment was meted out to those prisoners who had committed some “crime” during the workday. Any small infringement was an excuse for punishing a prisoner: if he did not work fast enough, or energetically enough; if he did not respond properly when an SS man passed him; or if, in a search of his belongings, food, money, a cigarette, or a picture or memento—the only tangible thing left him from his past—was found. Even those prisoners who had already received “treatment” during the workday and who still bore fresh whip lashes on their bodies were given additional “treatment” at the evening roll call.
The punishment at the evening roll call was generally whipping. In Treblinka, at Roll-Call Square, there was a special bench cemented into the ground for this purpose. The prisoner was tied to the bench with straps in a way that his torso rested on the bench while his feet dangled on the floor at a 90-degree angle to his body and his buttocks protruded exactly at the corner of the bench.
In the first months of the camp’s existence, they would whip the prisoners while they were dressed. But at one of the whipping sessions it seemed to Kurt Franz, who happened to be present, that there was something suspicious. He ordered the prisoner to take off his pants, and then they saw that the prisoner had stuck a towel in the seat of his pants to soften the blows. From then on the prisoners were ordered to lower their pants before they were strapped to the bench, and the blows were inflicted on the bare skin.