Once in the courtyard of the building, Groening and his comrades were split into smaller groups, given their individual destinations, and then transported to various Berlin stations where they boarded trains. “We went south,” says Oskar Groening, “in the direction of Katowice. And our troop leader, who had the papers, said we had to report to the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. I’d never heard of Auschwitz before.”
Groening and his group arrived late in the evening and were directed by military police to the main camp, where they reported to the central administrative building and were allocated “provisional” bunks in the SS barracks. The other members of the SS they met in the barracks that night were friendly and welcoming. “We were accepted by the people who were there and they said, ‘Have you eaten anything yet?’ We hadn’t, and so they got us something.” Groening was surprised that in addition to the basic SS rations of bread and sausage there was also extra food available, consisting of tins of herring and sardines. Their new friends also had rum and vodka, which they put on the table and said, “Help yourself.”
We did this, and so we were quite happy. We asked, “What kind of place is this?” and they said we should find out for ourselves—that it’s a special kind of concentration camp. Suddenly, the door opened and somebody said, “Transport!” which caused three or four people to jump up and vanish.
After a good night’s sleep, Groening reported once more with the other new arrivals to the central SS administrative building. They were quizzed by a number of senior SS officers about their background before the war:We had to say what we’d been doing, what kind of job, what level of education. I said that I was a bank clerk and that I wanted to work in administration and one of the officers said, “Oh, I can use someone like that.” So I was taken with him and went to a barracks where the prisoners’ money was kept. I was told that when they got their prison number their money was registered here, and when they left they got it back again.
So far Oskar Groening’s personal experience of Auschwitz was that it was a “normal” concentration camp, albeit one where the rations for the SS members were particularly good. But, as he began his task of registering the prisoners’ money, he learned for the first time about the additional, “unusual” function of Auschwitz. “The people there [working in the barracks] let us know that this money didn’t all go back to the prisoners—Jews were taken to the camp who were treated differently. The money was taken off them without them getting it back.” Groening asked, “Is this to do with the ‘transport’ that arrived during the night?” His colleagues replied, “Well, don’t you know? That’s the way it is here. Jewish transports arrive, and as far as they’re not able to work they’re got rid of.” Groening pressed them on what “got rid of ” actually meant, and, having been told, says that his reaction was one of astonishment.
You cannot imagine it really. I could only accept it fully when I was guarding the valuables and the suitcases at the selection. If you ask me about it—it was a shock, that you cannot take in at the first moment. But you mustn’t forget that not only from 1933 [Hitler’s acquisition of power], but even from before that, the propaganda I got as a boy in the press, the media, the general society I lived in made us aware that the Jews were the cause of the First World War, and had also “stabbed Germany in the back” at the end. And that the Jews were actually the cause of the misery in which Germany found herself. We were convinced by our worldview that there was a great conspiracy of Jewishness against us, and that thought was expressed in Auschwitz—that it must be avoided, what happened in the First World War must be avoided, namely that the Jews put us into misery. The enemies who are within Germany are being killed—exterminated if necessary. And between these two fights, openly at the front line and then on the home front, there’s absolutely no difference—so we exterminated nothing but enemies.
To meet Oskar Groening today, and listen to his attempt to explain his time at Auschwitz, is a strange experience. Now in his eighties, he talks almost as if there was another Oskar Groening who worked at Auschwitz sixty years ago—and about that “other” Groening he can be brutally honest. Crucially, he shields himself from taking full responsibility for playing a part in the extermination process by constantly referring to the power of the propaganda to which he was exposed, and the effect on him of the ultra-nationalistic family atmosphere in which he grew up. Only after the war, once he was exposed to another worldview—one that questioned the Nazis’ assumptions about the “international Jewish conspiracy” and the role of the Jews in World War I—was the “new” Oskar Groening able to emerge, fit to face life as a useful citizen in the modern, democratic Germany.
This is not to say that Groening attempts to hide behind the “acting under orders” defense. He does not present himself as a mindless automaton who would have followed any command given to him. When the suggestion is put to him that he would have accepted Aryan children being murdered at Auschwitz, he rejects it absolutely. He makes a lie of the notion, prevalent among some historians, that the SS men were so brutalized by their training that they would have killed anyone they were asked to. No, Groening’s decision-making process operated at a much less simplistic level. Yes, he claims that he was massively influenced by the propaganda of the times, but during the war he nevertheless made a series of personal choices. He carried on working at Auschwitz not just because he was ordered to but because, having weighed the evidence put before him, he thought that the extermination program was right. Once the war was over he disputed the accuracy of the evidence put before him, but he did not claim that he acted as he did because he was some kind of robot. Throughout his life he believes he did what he thought was “right”; it’s just that what was “right” then turns out not to be “right” today.
We should not be unduly cynical about such a coping mechanism. Of course he could have chosen differently—he could have rejected the values of his community and resisted. He could have deserted from Auschwitz (although there is no record of any member of the SS doing so as a result of refusing on moral grounds to work in the camp). It would have taken an exceptional human being to act in such a way, however, and the essential—almost frightening—point about Oskar Groening is that he is one of the least exceptional human beings you are ever likely to meet. After a few years as a prisoner of war, he got a job as a personnel manager in a glassmaking factory where he worked quietly until he reached retirement. The only abnormality in Groening’s otherwise ultra-normal life is the time he spent working in Auschwitz.
A study of the historical-sociological profile of the SS in Auschwitz, based on statistical records, found that “the SS camp force was not exceptional in its occupation structure or in its levels of education. The camp staff was very much like the society from which it was drawn.”20 Oskar Groening perfectly illustrates this conclusion. He was also typical in that he was a rank-and-file member of the SS—the highest rank he attained was Rottenführer (corporal).
About 70 percent of SS men in Auschwitz fell into this category; 26 percent were non-commissioned officers (non-commissioned ranks above Rottenführer); and just 4 percent of the total SS complement were officers. There were around 3,000 members of the SS serving in Auschwitz I and the related sub-camps at any one time.21 The SS administration of the camp was divided into five main departments—the headquarters department (personnel, legal, and other related functions), the medical unit (doctors and dentists), the political department (the Gestapo and the criminal police, the Kripo), the economic administration (including the registration and disposal of property stolen from the murdered prisoners), and the camp administration (responsible for security within the camp). By far, the biggest department was the last—about 75 percent of the SS members who worked at Auschwitz performed some kind of security function. Oskar Groening was unusual only in that he had a comparatively “easy” job as part of the economic administration.
By the summer of 1942, Auschwitz was receiving transports of Jews from all
over Europe, including Slovakia, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In operation since the autumn of 1941, the policy of sending Jews from the West to holding ghettos (such as Łódź) where further selection could take place before those Jews “unfit for work” were murdered, was abolished. Once Auschwitz developed selection on arrival, the whole extermination process was streamlined.
The camp’s corrosive influence now even reached part of the United Kingdom—the holiday island of Guernsey in the Channel Islands. For those people—and there are still many—who partly define “Britishness” by the United Kingdom’s resistance to Hitler, and who are certain that no one in England, Scotland, or Wales would have collaborated with the Nazis had they arrived on British shores, this is a profoundly disturbing story.
The Channel Islands, a small archipelago off the northwest coast of France whose biggest and principal islands are Jersey and Guernsey, were never capable of being defended by the British. Loyal to the British Crown, but fiercely independent of the British government, the islands were occupied by the Germans without a struggle in June and July 1940. Just as in France, the Germans preferred to run their occupation as much as possible through the existing government infrastructure—this was to be a very different kind of occupation from that practiced in Poland or the Soviet Union. Nonetheless the Nazis were, in principle, as intolerant of the presence of Jews in the Channel Islands as they were in Minsk or Warsaw. In October 1941 a notice was published in the Jersey Evening Post calling on Jews to register with Clifford Orange, chief aliens officer in Jersey. That same month a similar notice appeared in the Guernsey Evening Post, calling on all Jews to come forward and make themselves known to the police.
Knowing of the imminent arrival of the Germans, the majority of the Jewish population had already escaped to the British mainland. Only a small number of Jews unable—or unwilling—to leave were left behind. As a result, twelve Jews registered on Jersey and four on Guernsey. The registration process, as throughout the Nazi state, was the beginning of systemized persecution. Jewish businesses had first to display a sign in the window announcing “Jewish undertaking,” and then the businesses were “Aryanized” and compulsorily sold to non-Jews. The Channel Island authorities cooperated in this process—indeed, it was administered by them. A typical, and heartrending, letter from one of the Jersey Jews, Nathan Davidson, to the Attorney General on Jersey dated January 23, 1941, reads: “In accordance with your instructions I beg to inform you that I have finished the winding up of my business ... the blind on the window pulled down and a notice CLOSED displayed.”22 Clifford Orange was able in June 1941 to confirm to the Bailiff (the leader of the island’s government) on Jersey, and through him to the German authorities, that “there are no Jews, registered as such, in the island who are carrying on businesses.”23
Subsequent orders restricted the hours during which the Jews on the Channel Islands could go shopping and imposed a curfew on them. The only discriminatory order the authorities on Jersey balked at was one stating that Jews should wear the yellow star. In this one case the Bailiff and Attorney General appealed to the German authorities and asked them to reconsider. But despite their protests Dr. Casper, the German commandant, still requested that special stars be sent to the island with the English word “Jew” instead of “Jude” printed in the middle. The stars appear to have never arrived. Subjected to curfew as they were, few Channel Islands Jews could earn a living. Nathan Davidson, having shut down his shop, simply collapsed under the weight of the persecution heaped upon him. He was admitted to a Jersey mental hospital in February 1943 and died the following year. Another Jersey Jew, Victor Emmanuel, committed suicide.
But it was on nearby Guernsey that the actual physical deportation of Jews began. Three women—Auguste Spitz, Marianne Grunfeld, and Therese Steiner—were transported from the island in April 1942. All three were foreign nationals, Spitz and Steiner Austrian, Grunfeld Polish. They all therefore knew only too well the Nazis’ hatred of Jews. Therese Steiner, for example, had left her native Austria as the country grew ever more anti-Semitic. Eventually she had found work as a nanny, working for an English family who came to the Channel Islands in 1939. They returned to the British mainland in the spring of 1940, but Therese was prevented by the Channel Islands authorities from leaving and, following British Home Office guidelines, was interned as a “foreign alien.” She thus ended up in the hands of the very people she had come to the United Kingdom to escape. Therese managed to find work as a nurse at a hospital in Guernsey, where Barbara Newman24 knew her well.
She was quite good-looking and had very nice curly waving hair and a Jewish nose—that was the only thing. She used to talk very quickly—with an accent, of course. She was a bit dogmatic about things, which makes it difficult sometimes. But we were quite good friends, really.
Barbara Newman also was very clear about Therese’s attitude to the Nazis: “I was under the impression that she’d spit on them if she could—that’s the way she felt about them.”
In the spring of 1942 the German authorities ordered the Guernsey government to deliver the three foreign Jews for deportation. Sergeant Ernest Plevin of the Guernsey police recalled ordering Therese Steiner to pack her bags and report to the Germans, “I do remember—well—Therese coming into the office, where I conveyed to her the instructions given to the Guernsey police by the German military authorities. Therese became extremely distressed, bursting into tears, and exclaiming that I would never see her again.”25
Barbara Newman accompanied Therese on her last walk on Guernsey, down to St. Peter Port on Tuesday, April 21, 1942.
I’ve still got a picture in my mind—think we must have taken her suitcase on a bike. Wheeled it, you know, as one does. And we stood there, saying goodbye and seeing her go through the gateway in the barrier and waving as she went.... Everything was out of our control. You couldn’t worry because you couldn’t have carried on if you’d worried too much about it. You just had to accept orders and get used to it. And I used to think to myself, “How is everyone going to manage after the war’s finished? We won’t have anyone telling us what to do.”
The idea that Therese was leaving Guernsey to be transported to her death was inconceivable to Barbara Newman: “It was all outside our experience, really, wasn’t it? Things like that don’t happen in England.”
Auguste Spitz, Marianne Grunfeld, and Therese Steiner all placed themselves into the hands of the Germans at St. Peter Port and boarded a boat that took them to the French mainland. Once in France, they registered as Jews and Therese Steiner found temporary employment as a nurse. In July, they all became caught up in the mass deportation of foreign Jews from France. On July 20th they began their journey to Auschwitz, arriving there three days later. It is not known whether any of the three survived initial selection. What is known with certainty is that none of them survived the war. Therese had been right—the citizens of Guernsey would never see her again.
The remaining Jews on the Channel Islands were deported the following year, in February 1943, but they were sent to an altogether different fate. Their deportation—together with others taken from a broad spectrum of Channel Islanders, including “Freemasons,” “former officers of the armed forces,” and “suspected Communists”26—had been ordered in retaliation for the British commando raid on Sark, one of the smallest of the inhabited Channel Islands, five months before. Only one of the deported Channel Island Jews was singled out by the Germans for “special treatment”—John Max Finkelstein, originally from Romania, who was eventually sent to Buchenwald concentration camp and then the special ghetto at Theresienstadt. He survived the war.
The other deportees, including the Jews, were sent to internment camps in France and Germany where their treatment, though extremely unpleasant, was not comparable with the suffering imposed on the inmates of Buchenwald or Auschwitz. Significantly, the Jews (with the exception of Finkelstein) were not separated from the other Channel Islanders. We can only speculate as to wh
y they were treated this way by the Nazis—there were always anomalies in the implementation of the “Final Solution.” In this case, it is perhaps significant both that they were deported along with other categories of people who would have been considered less “dangerous” by the Germans, and also that they were Jewish nationals from a country that the Nazis considered “civilized” and perhaps still did not wish to alienate overtly (along the same lines, Jews transported in the autumn of 1943 from Denmark were sent to Theresienstadt and not to Auschwitz).
Of course, while the authorities in the Channel Islands helped the Germans deport the Jews, they could not have known for certain the fate of the Jews. They were aware that the Nazis had singled out the Jews for persecution, however, and that they were almost certainly about to transport their victims to a worse life than the one, already full of suffering, that they had left behind. Yet, the authorities did nothing to prevent the deportations. On the contrary, the police and civil servants cooperated promptly with the Germans.
It is true that the authorities on Jersey protested at the implementation of the Yellow Star order (although those on Guernsey did not). It is also hugely significant, however, as Frederick Cohen points out in his pioneering study of the treatment of Channel Island Jews during the occupation,27 that much more effort was made by the authorities to protect Masons who were living on the islands. A British intelligence report from August 1945 states,When the Germans proposed to put their anti-Jewish measures into force, no protest whatever was raised by any of the Guernsey officials and they hastened to give the Germans every assistance. By contrast, when it was proposed to take steps against the Freemasons, of which there are many in Guernsey, the Bailiff made considerable protests and did everything possible to protect the Masons.28
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