“We arrived and there were German Kapos and they yelled at us and struck us with short batons,” says Wilhelm Brasse,32 who arrived at about the same time. “When someone was slow in coming down from the cattle truck he was beaten, or in several instances they were killed on the spot. So I was terrified—everyone was terrified.”
These earliest Polish prisoners at Auschwitz had been sent to the camp for a variety of reasons—they might be suspected of working in the Polish underground, or be members of a group the Nazis specially targeted, like priests or the intelligentsia, or simply be someone to whom a German had taken exception. Indeed, many of the first group of Polish prisoners, who were transferred from Tarnów prison and arrived at the camp on June 14, 1940, were simply university students.
The immediate task for these new arrivals was simple—they had to build the camp themselves. “We used very primitive tools,” recalls Wilhelm Brasse. “The prisoners had to carry stones. It was very difficult, hard labor. And we were beaten.” But not enough construction materials had been provided to complete the task, so a typical Nazi solution was found—theft. “I worked at demolishing houses that used to belong to Polish families,” Brasse continues. “There was an order to take building materials such as bricks, planks and all kinds of other wood. We were surprised the Germans wanted to build so rapidly and they did not have the material.”
The camp quickly developed a culture of theft, not just from the local population, but from within the institution itself. “The German Kapos would send us inmates off and say, ‘Go and steal cement from another work commando—we don’t care about the other guys,’” says Brasse. “And that is what we did. Planks or cement would be stolen from another commando. In the camp lingo that was called ‘organizing.’ But we had to be very careful not to be caught.”
Nor was this culture of “organizing” confined to the inmates. In those early days Höss too stole what he needed:Since I could expect no help from the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, I had to make do as best I could and help myself. I had to scrounge up cars and trucks and the necessary petrol. I had to drive as far as 100 kilometers to Zakopane and Rabka just to get some kettles for the prisoners’ kitchen, and I had to go all the way to the Sudetenland for bed frames and straw sacks.33 Whenever I found depots of material that was needed urgently I simply carted it away without worrying about the formalities.34 I didn’t even know where I could get a hundred metros of barbed wire. So I just had to pilfer the badly needed barbed wire.35
While Höss was “organizing” what he considered necessary to make Auschwitz into a “useful” camp, behind the newly pilfered barbed wire it soon became clear to the Poles that their chances of survival depended chiefly on one factor—which Kapo they worked for. “I very quickly understood that in the ‘good’ work commandos the prisoners would usually have full, round faces,” says Wilhelm Brasse. “They behaved differently from the ones who had the hard jobs and looked haggard—like skeletons wearing uniforms. And immediately I would notice that with this Kapo it’s better because the prisoners look better.”
Roman Trojanowski struggled under the command of one of the cruelest Kapos, who once punished him for a minor transgression by smashing him in the face and then making him squat for two hours holding a stool in front of him. The harshness of life in this work commando was breaking him. “I had no strength to run around with wheelbarrows every day,” he says. “After one hour the wheelbarrow would fall out of your hands. You just fell on the wheelbarrow and you would hurt your leg. I had to save my skin.” Like many inmates, before and after him at Auschwitz, Roman Trojanowski knew he had to find a way out of his current work commando or perish.
One morning an announcement was made at roll-call—experienced carpenters were required. So Trojanowski volunteered and, even though he had never been a carpenter in his life, said that he had “seven years of practice.” But the plan backfired: it was obvious once he began work in the carpentry shop that he could not do the job.
The Kapo called me, took me to his room and stood there with a big stick. When I saw that stick I felt weak. And he said that for damaging material I’d get twenty-five hits. He told me to bend over and he hit me. He did it especially slow so that I would taste every blow. He was a big guy. He had a heavy hand and it was a heavy stick. I wanted to yell but I bit my lips and I managed not to shout, not even once. And it paid off, because on the fifteenth blow he stopped. “You’re behaving nicely,” he said, “and so I’ll pardon you the last ten.” Out of twenty-five blows I got only fifteen—but fifteen sufficed. My arse was in colors from black to violet to yellow for two weeks and I couldn’t sit down for a long time.”
Thrown out of the carpentry shop, Trojanowski still sought a job indoors. “That was decisive,” he says. “To survive you had to be under a roof.” He spoke to a friend who knew a relatively benign Kapo called Otto Küsel. Together with his friend he approached Küsel, exaggerated the amount of German he knew, and managed to get a job working in the kitchen preparing food for the Germans. “That’s how I saved my life,” he says.
In this struggle for survival within the camp, two groups of people were singled out from the moment of their arrival for particularly sadistic treatment—priests and Jews. Although, at this stage of its evolution, Auschwitz was not a place where large numbers of Jews were sent—the policy of ghettoization was still in full swing—some of the intelligentsia, members of the resistance, and political prisoners who were sent to the camp were also Jews. They, together with Polish Catholic priests, were more likely than the other inmates to fall into the hands of the penal commando unit run by one of the most notorious Kapos of all, Ernst Krankemann.
Krankemann arrived at the camp in the second batch of German criminals, transferred from Sachsenhausen on August 29, 1940. Many in the SS disliked him, but he had two powerful SS supporters in Karl Fritzsch, the Lagerführer (and Höss’s deputy), and Palitzsch, the Rapportführer (commandant’s chief assistant). Krankemann, who was enormously fat, would sit on top of the harness of a giant roller that was used for flattening the roll-call square in the center of the camp. “First time I saw him,” says Jerzy Bielecki,36 one of the earliest prisoners to arrive in Auschwitz, “they were rolling the square between the two blocks, and because it was a very heavy roller the twenty or twenty-five people in the unit were unable to pull it. Krankemann had a whip and would hit them. ‘Faster, you dogs!’ he said.”
Bielecki saw these prisoners forced to work without a break all day leveling the square. As evening fell, one of them collapsed on his knees and could not get up. Then Krankemann ordered the rest of the penal commando to pull the giant roller over their prostrate comrade. “I had got used to seeing death and beatings,” says Bielecki. “But what I saw then just made me cold. I just froze.”
Far from being indifferent spectators to this kind of brutality, the SS actively encouraged it. As Wilhelm Brasse, and indeed all the Auschwitz survivors, testify, it was the SS that created the culture of murderous brutality in the camp (and often these men committed murder themselves). “Those Kapos that were especially cruel,” says Brasse, “were given prizes by the SS—an additional portion of soup or bread or cigarettes. I saw it myself. The SS would urge them on. I frequently heard an SS man say, ‘Beat him well.’”
Notwithstanding the appalling brutality prevalent in the camp, Auschwitz was, from the Nazi perspective, still something of a backwater in the maelstrom of the brutal reorganization of Poland. The first sign that all this was to change came in the autumn of 1940. In September, Oswald Pohl, head of the SS Main Administration and Economic Office, inspected the camp and told Höss to increase its capacity. Pohl believed that the sand and gravel pits nearby meant that the camp could be integrated into the SSOWNED German Earth and Stone Works (DESt). Economic considerations had been growing in importance for Himmler and the SS ever since 1937 when, with the concentration camp population in Germany down to 10,000 from more than 20,000 in 1933, he had hit on an inno
vative solution to protect the future of the camps—the SS would go into business.
From the beginning, this was business of an unusual kind. Himmler did not want to form a capitalist enterprise, but more a series of companies that would operate according to Nazi philosophical ideas in the service of the state. The concentration camps would provide the raw materials for the new Germany—like the vast quantities of granite that were needed for Hitler’s gigantic new Reich Chancellery in Berlin. In pursuit of this goal, after the Anschluss with Austria in 1938, the SS opened a new concentration camp at Mauthausen specifically to be near a granite quarry. It was thought particularly apt that the opponents of the regime should contribute to its growth. As Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect, put it: “After all, the Jews were already making bricks under the Pharaohs.”37
Himmler’s enthusiasm for industrial production did not stop at providing building materials for the Reich. He gave his blessing to a whole host of other projects as well—an experimental unit was established to look into natural medicines and new forms of agricultural production (two subjects close to Himmler’s heart), and soon the SS also was involved in the production of clothing, vitamin drinks, and even porcelain (making figurines of goatherds and other racially suitable subjects). As recent research has shown,38 the SS managers of many of these enterprises were incompetent—almost comically so, were the subject not so bleak.
No sooner had Pohl demanded that Auschwitz produce sand and gravel for the Nazi state than the camp gained another function. In November 1940, Rudolf Höss had a meeting with Himmler, and the plans for Auschwitz that Höss produced during this encounter caught his boss’s imagination. Suddenly, their shared interest in agriculture forged a bond between them. Höss recalled Himmler’s new vision for the camp:Every necessary agricultural experiment was to be attempted there. Massive laboratories and plant cultivation departments had to be built. Cattle breeding of all types was to become important.... The marshlands were to be drained and developed.... He continued with his talk of agricultural planning even down to the smallest details, and ceased only when his adjutant called his attention to the fact that a very important person had been waiting a long time to see him.39
This meeting between Höss and Himmler, long eclipsed by the even greater horror that was to develop at Auschwitz, gives an insight into the mentality of the two key figures in the history of the camp. It is too easy—and simply wrong—to dismiss them as “madmen” motivated by irrational feelings that we can never understand. Here, at this meeting, we can see them as two enthusiasts—almost cranks—who, in the context of war, were able to pursue visions that in peacetime would only be pipe dreams. As a result of Nazi aggression, however, Himmler, as he sat there poring over the plans of Auschwitz with Höss, was a man who had already had direct experience of turning his dreams into reality. He had swept his hand across a map and reordered the lives of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans and Poles. In the process, he had pronounced judgments in the most sweeping terms imaginable.
It is vital to remember that all the time Himmler was speaking in such grandiloquent terms of his desire for Auschwitz to become a center of agricultural research, he was doing so in pursuit of a coherent vision—a repulsive vision, of course, but nonetheless a coherent one. At this November 1940 meeting he was enthused by the vision of Silesia as a German agricultural utopia—almost a paradise. Gone would be the tawdry Polish homesteads of the south; in their place would rise solid, well-managed German farms. Höss and Himmler had been farmers themselves; both had an emotional—almost mystical—attachment to nurturing the land. The idea that Auschwitz could be developed in a way that could further agricultural knowledge therefore must have been hugely attractive to both of them.
In the pursuit of this sudden enthusiasm it was a matter of little consequence to Himmler that Auschwitz concentration camp was in precisely the wrong place for such an enterprise. Sited at the confluence of the Sola and Vistula rivers, the camp lay in an area notorious for flooding. Nevertheless, from that meeting until the day the camp closed, Auschwitz prisoners would labor in pursuit of Himmler’s vision, digging ditches, draining ponds, shoring up riverbanks—all because it was much more exciting for the Reichsführer SS to dream a dream than to discuss practicalities. Thousands would die in the process, a thought that would scarcely have flitted across Himmler’s mind as he enthusiastically outlined his fantasy in front of his faithful subordinate Rudolf Höss.
By the end of 1940, Höss had established many of the basic structures and principles under which the camp would function for the next four years: the Kapos who effectively controlled the prisoners from moment to moment; the absolute brutality of a regime that could inflict punishment arbitrarily; and a pervasive sense within the camp that if an intimate did not learn quickly how to manipulate himself out of a dangerous work commando, he risked a swift and sudden death. But there was one final creation in those early months that symbolized the culture of the camp even more appropriately—Block 11.
From the outside, Block 11 (at first called Block 13, then renumbered in 1941) looked like any of the other red brick barrack-like buildings that ran in straight rows throughout the camp. But it served a unique purpose—and everyone in the camp knew it. “I personally was scared to pass by Block 11,” says Józef Paczyński.40 “I was really afraid.” Inmates felt this way because Block 11 was a prison within a prison—a place of torture and murder.
Jerzy Bielecki was one of the few who experienced what happened in Block 11 and lived to tell the story. He was sent there because one morning he woke up so sick and exhausted that he felt unable to work. In Auschwitz there was no possibility of asking for a day’s rest to recover, so he tried to conceal himself in the camp and hope his absence would not be noticed. He first hid in the latrines, but he knew there was a strong risk of capture if he spent the whole day there, so he left and tried to pretend he was cleaning up around the camp. Unfortunately he was caught by a guard and sent to Block 11 for punishment.
He was led up the stairs to the attic. “I walked in and the [roof] tiles were hot,” he says. “It was a beautiful day in August. And there was this stench and I could hear someone moaning, ‘Jesus, oh Jesus!’ It was dark—the only light came through the tiles.” He looked up and saw a man hanging from the roof beam by his hands, which were tied behind his back. “The SS man brought a stool and said, ‘Climb on it.’ I put my hands behind my back and he took a chain and tied them.” Once the SS man had attached Bielecki to the beam by a chain he suddenly kicked away the stool. “I just felt—Jesus Mary—it was terrible pain! I was moaning and he told me, ‘Shut up, you! You dog! You deserve to suffer!’” Then the SS man left.
The pain as he hung suspended with his hands and arms pulled behind him was appalling, Bielecki said,And of course the sweat was pouring down my nose and it’s very hot and I’m saying, “Mummy!” And after an hour my shoulders were breaking out from their joints. The other guy wasn’t saying anything. Then another SS guard came. He went to the other guy and released him. My eyes were closed. I’d been hanging without a spirit—without a soul. But what reached me was something the SS man was saying. He said, “Just fifteen more minutes.”
Jerzy Bielecki remembers little more until the same SS man returned.
“Lift your legs,” he said. But I couldn’t do it. He took my legs, put one on the stool and then another one. He let the chain loose and I fell from the stool on to my knees and he helped me. He raised my right hand up and said, “Hold it.” But I didn’t feel my arms. He said, “This will pass after an hour.” And I walked down, barely, with the SS man. He was a very compassionate guard.
Jerzy Bielecki’s story is remarkable for a number of reasons, not least his own personal courage under torture. But perhaps what is most surprising is the contrast between the two SS guards—the one who without warning sadistically kicked away the stool he was standing on, and the “compassionate” guard who helped him down after the torture was over. It
is an important reminder that, just as the Kapos could vary widely in temperament, so could the SS. A common theme among the reminiscences of camp survivors is that there was no typical, generic captor. Crucial to surviving in the camp was the ability to read the different characters, not just of the Kapos but of the SS as well. On such a talent could rest your life.
Even though Jerzy Bielecki emerged crippled from Block 11 he was still fortunate, because it was very likely that whoever walked up those concrete steps and in through the front door would never emerge alive. During interrogations the Nazis tortured the inmates of Block 11 in a variety of horrific ways—not just using the back-breaking method of hanging suffered by Bielecki, but also by whipping prisoners, practicing water torture, putting needles under their fingernails, searing them with a red-hot iron, and pouring petrol over them and setting them on fire.
The SS at Auschwitz also used its initiative to devise new tortures, as former prisoner Boleslaw Zbozień observed when an inmate was brought to the camp hospital from Block 11.
A favorite method, particularly in wintertime, was holding the prisoner’s head on the coke heating stove as a way of extracting testimony. The face would be completely fried.... That man [brought from Block 11 to the hospital] was completely fried and his eyes were burned out, but he could not die. ... The Politische Abteilung [Political Department] staff still needed him ... that prisoner died after several days, without ever having lost consciousness.41
In those days, Block 11 was the empire of SS Untersturmführer (2nd lieutenant) Max Grabner, one of the most notorious of the camp personnel. Before joining the SS Grabner had been a cowherd; but now he had the power of life and death over the prisoners in his block. Every week he would “dust out the bunker”—a process which consisted of Grabner and his colleagues deciding the fate of each of the prisoners in Block 11. Some would be left in their cells, others sentenced to “Penal Report 1” or “Penal Report 2.” Penal Report 1 meant a flogging or some other torture. Penal Report 2 meant immediate execution.
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