Already the sheer horror of their arrival at Auschwitz had seared itself into the survivors’ memories. While costing some lives, the hunger, thirst, and stench of the transport in cattle cars were only preparatory steps toward dehumanization. “When the train stopped and the doors were opened all hell broke loose,” with blinding lights, shouting guards, and barking dogs creating “terror and confusion.” Separated from her mother, Lucy Mandelstam remembered only fragmented images such as “standing naked in a shower,” then being “clothed in a striped dress with wooden clogs on my feet” and “getting a number tattooed on my arm” and finally ending up in a big barrack. Though “I was hungry, I was afraid,” she tried to push her threatening surroundings out of her mind. “How I did that I don’t know, it was impossible to ignore the smell of burning and the red sky, but I did not want to think of death.” Twelve-year-old Ruth Klüger similarly clung to her will to live: “I would not perish here, certainly not I.”45
The process that decided over life and death was called “selection.” An SS guard described the routine: When a transport arrived at the ramp, translators reassured “the people that they were coming into a work camp but would have to be inspected and cleaned up.” Separated by sex, the Jews were then “divided into those who could walk and those who would be driven to the camp.” Actually, “the first column really went into the camp for labor while the others came to extermination.” Though some people understood that they would be gassed, “there was never an attempt to break out or a rebellion. The deception was very good.” Those who passed the first test were later scrutinized again. Lucy Mandelstam remembered that “it was the most humiliating experience parading naked in front of everybody” and being separated from her mother. The sick and feeble, children under fourteen, and adults over forty continued to be weeded out. Ruth Klüger was lucky enough to have an inmate tell her to lie about her age before the examiner. The bald claim “I am fifteen” saved her life.46
18. German soldier killing a mother and child. Source: Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz.
Because mass shooting of helpless civilians was hard even on the executioners (image 18), the SS developed a semiautomatic procedure for killing in Auschwitz. The testimony of SS man Joachim Bässmann describes the truth of mass murder beyond a shadow of a doubt. During a night alarm, he witnessed that numerous Jews had been forced into a bunker-like structure. “A sergeant put on a gas mask” and went to an air vent. He “opened a can in his hand and poured the content into the opening.” Immediately the cries inside got louder, “because the powder in the can turned into a deadly gas through the oxygen in the bunker.” After a short while the shouts diminished and then ceased altogether. Then the noncom looked through a peephole to ascertain the effect of the gas. “The Jews in the bunker were all dead.” On his way home, Bässmann passed burning pits for reexhumed corpses, which seemed to come alive again in the heat. The teacher Marianne Busch was “deeply shocked and horrified” when she realized that the white-grey flakes she saw in the air were “human ash” from the crematoria.47
For inmates who had passed selection, the “real horror that was Auschwitz” was only beginning, for the camp itself constituted a slow but certain death. Lucy Mandelstam had difficulty in sleeping in the overcrowded bunks crawling with lice. “Once a day the food consisted of watery soup with some rotten vegetable leaves floating around,” inducing theft and starvation. Ruth Klüger found her thirst almost worse, and her body became covered with sores, since there was no water to wash. The unsanitary toilets also produced mass diarrhea, forcing people to stand in lines to take their turn to relieve themselves. Especially tiring were the endless roll calls in the morning, the evening, or the middle of the night to count the number of inmates. Moreover, the capos, prisoner police, were often cruel criminals who beat strangers and played favorites with their supporters. Hence many prisoners deteriorated into so-called Muselmänner, “people who had lost the drive to survive in the KZ.” On this “hostile planet,” only gratuitous acts of mutual help could keep the prisoners’ spirits up.48
Survival in these terrible conditions was possible through an exceptional combination of luck and fortitude. A prisoner had to be young and strong to begin with, and spend only a limited time in the KZ because health deteriorated quickly within the camp. Getting a special assignment helped to keep one alive. Irmgard Mueller was sent to the laundry, where she could stay clean, then moved to the kitchen, where food was a bit better, and finally dispatched to the camp administration, where she kept prisoner records in relative comfort. Lucy Mandelstam was dispatched to work on a farm and dig antitank ditches. Ruth Klüger was forced to do backbreaking labor in a satellite camp in the forest. Finding caring nurses in the sick bay could speed a recovery and help one avoid another round of selections. Fraternizing with other prisoners and shows of kindness such as sharing food or talking about the approaching defeat of the Wehrmacht restored hope.49 While most inmates rapidly succumbed, a fortunate few managed to cling to life by instinctively making the right decisions.
The inhumanity culminated in the medical experiments on helpless inmates, which violated the Hippocratic Oath. Their author Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the “angel of death,” was “a monster in human form.” One of his functions was “selection” in the family camp, where he decided on the fate of naked prisoners “with a frozen face.” Auschwitz was rife with rumors about his altitude, cold, twin, medicine, and other experiments, which resulted in unimaginable pain, disfigurement, and death to their hapless victims. Ruth Elias was terrified when she was highly pregnant and sent to the sick bay, “his domain.” After a midwife helped her give birth, Mengele forbade her to nurse the baby in order to find out how long it would live without food. The new mother was feverish from her blocked milk and desperate because she was unable to help her wailing infant. Finally, a Czech doctor took pity on her, slipped a morphine syringe into her hand, and entreated her, “Ruth you are young, you must live.” Distraught, she “committed the deed. Yes I killed my own child. Yes, Dr. Mengele made me a child murderer.”50 But thereby she saved her own life.
Attempts at active resistance also revived the spirit of prisoners; their heroism suggested that one did not have to give in. Ruth Elias participated in an “intellectual resistance” that kept the mind alive through discussions, music, and the like. Ruth Klüger even carried out small acts of sabotage that hindered the German war effort. Anna Fränkel hoped that a Belgian woman named Malah, who had herself smuggled out of the camp in an empty lime barrel, would get away and “everywhere spread the terrible truth about Auschwitz.” But when the escapee was caught at the Czech border, and about to be hanged, she cut her veins and hit the commandant with her bloody hand, crying, “You murderer! The day of judgment is approaching! Then you will have to pay for every drop of blood!” Some weeks later there was suddenly a loud detonation and the inmates thought, “now the crematorium itself is being burned.” A courageous Jewish work detail had blown a hole in the fence so that fifteen youths could escape. Unfortunately, thirteen of them were caught and executed, leaving only the hope that the Red Army would liberate the camp soon.51
For the German guards, serving in Auschwitz was incomparably more tolerable than for the inmates but still so strenuous that some had to drown their qualms in liberal doses of alcohol. According to Bässmann, “camp life was a quite ordinary existence like in a small bourgeois town in Germany.” The well-to-do factory personnel of IG Farben were a society of their own, as were the civil administrators. The SS men “lived only in the camp, a few kilometers away from the town.” They had their quarters outside the fences, with their own store and “a big cafeteria where [they] would eat dinner and were able to shop.” To keep up morale, there was a stage where shows were put on and movies were shown. The sauna was also popular, as were the sports fields. Every Sunday a camp band played marches and operetta tunes. Theoretically the SS guards were supposed “to act correctly and non-violently,” but the apologetic
claim “there were no transgressions in the area of the Stammlager” was bound to be a face-saving exaggeration.52
Because he was trained as a bank employee, the SS man Joachim Bässmann participated in the despoliation of the Jews, which proceeded with frightening efficiency. Whenever a transport arrived, “great amounts of Jewish property were piled up in the open: clothes, watches, jewels, shoes, glasses and so on.” Anna Fränkel was ordered to sort these and “make packages with clothes” to be sent to Germany. The valuables were checked by SS jewelers and put into sealed boxes. Scrupulously registering the pilfered dollars, pounds, and marks, Bässmann was astounded that the collected money “contained all conceivable currencies of the world. And that in big amounts!” When enough coins and bills had been gathered, a special armed transport was organized to take them and the valuables to the Chief Economic and Administrative Office of the SS in Berlin, from which they were forwarded to the Reichsbank.53 With this plunder, the Nazis rewarded their own elite, forcing the Jews to pay for their destruction themselves.
As a schoolteacher, Marianne Busch had only an indirect contact with the machinery of death. In September 1943 the young instructor was assigned to the Gymnasium in Auschwitz and she accepted from a sense of adventure. There she had to instruct the children of the SS, the industrialists, and the ethnic Germans in high-school subjects such as English and history. She was shocked to hear from her charges on the first day, “This morning so many people arrived in cattle cars and were unloaded at the ramp.” Her sixth-graders knew about “this cruel process, called selection” and she was at a loss as to how to comfort them. Though she had access to the Stammlager library, the death camp Birkenau remained off-limits. But she refused to share her growing knowledge of mass murder with others so as neither “to besmirch the image of the leadership nor to weaken the fighting spirit.” Busch wrote that having “to live so close to proven inhumane crimes was a constant strain on my conscience.”54 But she admitted that she sympathized more with the SS than with its victims.
The perpetrators developed elaborate justifications for “accepting the incredible as a fact at that time.” In contrast to a colleague who pleaded, “I have to get away. I am a social democrat and hate this town,” Marianne Busch “knew that hardness was the price which had to be paid for our security.” Hence she considered her time in Auschwitz a “trial of perseverance under most difficult circumstances of physical as well as mental duress.” Similarly, “the SS men lived in the belief that they were the ‘most loyal of the loyal ones,’” who alone could be assigned “this terribly dirty job.” Joachim Bässmann silenced his conscience with the rationale that “world Jewry” was the chief enemy and was even willing to use Communism “in order to gain domination over the globe.” The current war was “a struggle which this time involves the very existence of the German people.” The Mauthausen SS guard F. W. claimed to his granddaughter that he “was forced to serve.”55 Such perpetrators and accomplices had a hard time explaining how a sense of duty and virulent nationalism could have misled them into participating in racist atrocities.
With the approach of the front, German control of conquered territory and order in the camps began to break down. Every day prisoners looked up into the sky for Allied planes and shared rumors of Wehrmacht defeats, only to be disappointed by how long liberation was taking. When the SS shut down a satellite camp, Lucy Mandelstam jumped off the truck taking her to Stutthof. This saved her life: the rest of the group was never seen again. “The situation in the camp was now completely different than before,” since it was less crowded and brutal, even if there was little food. “During the last days the Germans had become very nervous, not paying much attention to us.” Even fanatical Nazis began to realize “that the war could no longer be won and the situation was becoming more and more threatening.” When Marianne Busch’s school was closed, she volunteered as a nurses’ aide and returned to Auschwitz from a break to save her children. The desperate prisoners “only hoped that [their captors] would not kill us at the last moment.”’56
The unspeakable suffering of the KZ inmates culminated in “death marches” in the bitter cold, which sought to hide the evidence of mass murder from the advancing Red Army. On January 18, 1945, columns of prisoners left Auschwitz, closing “the door to a hell which was conceived, built and administered by the Germans.” Even Marianne Busch was shocked to see “the poor wretches sway and stumble forward” so as to “drag themselves along with their last energy, bent over, weak, emaciated, deathly pale, with hollow eyes and cheeks.” They appeared to the German teacher “as grey ghosts, transparent like spirits, even their worn clothes had turned as dreary as their collapsed faces.” In the back, she heard the shots with which SS guards killed those who could no longer keep up or tried to escape. Even years later Busch admitted, “Never have I seen such a picture of suffering and merciless cruelty.” The prisoners were trudging toward the train station, from which those who survived the horrendous march were sent to other concentration camps such as Ravensbrück in the Reich.57
The dissolution of the Third Reich provided daring Jewish youths with opportunities to escape by turning into German refugees, fleeing from the Russians. In early February Ruth Klüger persuaded her mother and sister to leave their death march by hiding in a stable. “Freedom meant [getting] away from” SS guards and enjoying their “bare life, because for the first time it really belonged to us.” They merged into the great trek westward, begging for food from farmers and shelter from the NSV, passing a checkpoint with the help of a friendly policeman—even persuading a pastor to issue them false papers. Lucy Mandelstam, meanwhile, spontaneously hid behind a tree and joined a group of Italian slave laborers, whom she helped to escape using her fluent German. “It is difficult to explain, but I felt like two different people, one the Jewish girl who had to hide her identity in order to survive, the other a German refugee.” She endured a bout with typhus in a hospital and made it onto a boat to safety in Flensburg.58
If they were unwilling to leave the death marches, other Jewish youths were freed by Allied forces. Ilse Polak refused to desert her column, arguing “No, I don’t want to be shot. I’ll go where I am supposed to.” One evening her group from Stutthof was penned into a barn and were “mortally afraid” that they all would be burned. But after the door opened, “Russian tanks stood in front of the shed” instead, and when the SS guards came out, it was they who were all shot. Stunned and relieved, Polak lost her speech for several months. Anna Fränkel was forced to leave Ravensbrück and moved to another camp where “the hunger tortured us terribly.” Finally, on May 5, there was no morning roll call and a strange silence. “Then the women began to push against the bars of the windows” and break open the doors. Excited, everyone shouted, “We are liberated—free—get out!” But the British soldiers would not enter the camp for fear of contracting typhus from the inmates. Ruth Elias remained behind at her camp and led a group to the American lines, where an officer received her with “Shalom aleichem, I am also a Yid.”59
The long wished-for liberation turned out to be both exhilarating and disappointing. Lucy Mandelstam “was the happiest person in the world, but I had to hide it—all around me the Germans were crying and wondering what would happen to them now.” Anna Fränkel “did not hold back [the] tears” flowing in streams down her face. She realized that this moment was “not like how I had pictured it thousands of times.” Being freed “left a feeling of emptiness which is difficult to describe.” Starving prisoners first stormed the food depot, gorging themselves with what had been denied them and often getting sick. Many of the survivors had to cope with diseases such as typhus and needed diligent nursing care to recover. Adding insult to injury, many of the young women who were liberated by Russian soldiers were then violated by them. And beyond all the practical problems loomed the psychological issue of their postwar identity: Who were they, what was their home, and how did they want to live?60
The ghastly evidence of piles
of corpses and living skeletons in the liberated camps made it difficult for Germans to deny their participation in mass murder. When Marianne Busch told her father about “the misery and horror of KZ Auschwitz,” he cried out, “that is not true, that cannot be right!” and asked her to tell no one since “that could cost your life.” Ruth Klüger caught most Germans looking away when “a column of KZ-prisoners marched” through a Bavarian town at the end of the war, not wanting to see what they did not wish to admit. In an ironic role reversal, panic-stricken perpetrators and accomplices were now themselves preoccupied with surviving the defeat of the Third Reich: “So that is the collapse! That is what it looks like when there is no more hope.” Stunned by the extent of the Nazi atrocities, Allied commanders forced the local populace to visit camps such as Buchenwald and recorded their reactions on film. In retrospect, Bässmann admitted that he “repressed everything which I find hard to explain today.”61
The autobiographies suggest that more ordinary Germans were involved in the Holocaust than apologists admit, but at the same time fewer participated than some critics claim. At the core of the mass murder were the direct killers in the SS, Einsatzgruppen, Wehrmacht, and ethnic auxiliaries who were helped by merciless bureaucratic organizers and cheered on by racial ideologues. Clustered around them were the indirect enablers in the police and railroad personnel who rounded up victims and shipped them to the East, supported by Nazi Party fanatics who justified the genocide and unscrupulous opportunists who were all too ready to profit from the removal of the Jews. The largest group was nonetheless composed of ordinary Germans who witnessed the persecution without intervening and did their duty while aiding the war effort. The only exceptions were a small number of people impervious to NS appeals or anti-fascist convictions, some of whom were active in the resistance. Almost all Germans were therefore in some way implicated, though many continued to claim not to have harmed anyone directly.62
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