Scheisshaus Luck
Page 27
During the fourth phase, 1939 to 1941, the SS extended the camp system and the accompanying terror to the conquered territories. The new camps included Auschwitz (1940), Neuengamme (1940), Gross Rosen (inside Germany, 1941), and Natzweiler (1941). With Eicke’s appointment to command the SS Death’s Head Division (Totenkopfsdivision) in wartime, SS-Brigadeführer Richard Glücks became the new Inspector. An ineffectual, colorless individual, Glücks did little to stamp an imprint upon IKL. With war’s outbreak, the Gestapo immediately dispatched political opponents to the camps, like Sachsenhausen, for execution, without a judicial sentence. At this time, tensions began to surface between administrators who saw the camps as intended exclusively for breaking the regime’s enemies and those who desired to exploit captive labor for the economy. In this period, Eicke’s protégeś held the upper hand: SS overseers employed what was euphemistically termed “sport” for the purpose of killing or demoralizing prisoners, including purposeless labor conducted at breakneck pace as a form of torture. In the mid-1930s, at a time of high unemployment, Reichsführer-SS Himmler led German industrialists on a tour of Dachau, with the aim of both justifying the necessity of unlimited detention and eliciting interest in his captive labor supply. Only the civilian worker shortages produced by Nazi rearmament (1936–1939) altered the situation, however, when the SS created an enterprise to prepare building stone for Adolf Hitler’s numerous monumental projects and then developed other businesses connected to the its far-flung missions. As Allen convincingly shows, the SS were disastrous managers, which when combined with “sport” meant that these new enterprises foundered.{13}
Among the fourth-phase camps, Auschwitz was originally intended to hold Polish political enemies. Founded in June 1940, over a thousand Poles were detained there less than six months later.
The first Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss, transferred a small number of hardened German criminals from his previous assignment at Sachsenhausen to serve as camp trusties. An “Eicke School” commandant, Höss oversaw Auschwitz’s transformation from political prison to industrial complex and, most infamously, killing center.{14}
The camp’s fifth phase took place when the war that Hitler unleashed turned decisively against him, with Allied counteroffensives in the Soviet Union, North Africa, Italy, and, ultimately, northwestern France. The German war economy thereupon entered the so-called total war phase, with the rationalization of war production under Armaments Minister Albert Speer, the mass mobilization of foreign workers under Fritz Sauckel, and the deployment of camp labor in private German industry under the SS Business Administration Main Office (SS-Wirtschafts Verwaltungshauptamt, or WVHA). In connection with the latter, I.G. Farben’s erection of the Monowitz camp, discussed in detail below, furnished a model for other subcamps, with the location adjacent to, or inside, factory grounds. By late 1944, camp labor was the principal untapped workforce remaining to the German war economy, with hundreds of thousands of prisoners dispatched to work in construction, bomb disposal, and manufacturing. In the name of economic efficiency, the SS-WVHA attempted to militate against the effects of SS “sport” as practiced by Eicke commandants. The results were mixed and the WVHA did nothing about the annihilation of physically exhausted prisoners or the mass murder of able-bodied Jews during Operation Reinhard. In order to exploit their labor more extensively, private industry modestly improved detainee treatment.
The camps’ last phase, 1944 to 1945, witnessed the disastrous evacuations or “death marches” of malnourished and weakened prisoners from territories adjacent to front-line areas. As Mr. Berg’s account demonstrates, these marches often assumed an inertia of their own, as the SS marched their exhausted victims with little sense of direction, except to get away from the Allies. Lest the proximity of Allied planes and troops raise morale, the SS warned more than once that their last bullets were reserved for the prisoners.{15}
♦ ♦ ♦
The Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft (Community of Interests, Dye Industry, Public Corporation, or I.G. Farben) inaugurated its Auschwitz project during the camp system’s fourth phase. Preparations for the chemical plant began during the critical nine months between Germany’s frustration in the Battle of Britain in September 1940 and Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which started on 22 June 1941. It is easy to lose sight of these two strategic facts, which are significant for understanding how rapidly the conditions for planning this complicated project changed in wartime Germany. With the Luftwaffe’ s defeat in the Battle of Britain, the Reich demanded that I.G. Farben expand synthetic rubber (Buna) and oil production in the expectation of a prolonged war, despite the firm’s well-known concern about the construction of excessive production capacity. Royal Air Force Bomber Command’s raid on the second I.G. Buna plant at Hüls in the fall of 1940 reinforced government fears of an aerial threat against Germany’s small but strategically vital synthetic rubber supply, which led to more insistent calls for the construction of an eastern Buna plant, at relatively safe remove from Allied bombers.{16}
Careful surveys by Buna expert and I.G. Vorstand (managing board) member Dr. Otto Ambros in December 1940 revealed a huge stretch of land in the village of Dwoŕy, at the nexus of the Vistula, Sola, and Przemsza Rivers as the optimal site. Its location five kilometers from the new Auschwitz concentration camp nursed unproven allegations, at Nuremberg and later, that the firm selected the site exclusively or partly because of its proximity to “slave” labor. The executives did not discuss the labor issue, however, until convinced of the site’s long-term viability, which included access to essential raw materials, electrical power, excellent rail communications, and space for future growth. An oil firm’s previous bid for the same property led Farben to graft oil production onto the synthetic rubber project. For the German chemical industry, this decision amounted to an unprecedented amalgamation of low-temperature polymerization with high-temperature/high-pressure hydrogenation. The Nazi Four-Year Plan (VJP) chief, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, ordered the firm to utilize Auschwitz prisoners in the construction of the war plant. Göring’s assistant, Dr. Carl Krauch, VJP’s authority on chemical questions and titular head of the I.G. Farben Supervisory Board (Aufsichtsrat), later boasted that he had secured camp labor on the firm’s behalf.
As historian Peter Hayes points out, evidence has not emerged to date to demonstrate that the initiative for requesting slave labor rested with I.G. Farben.{17}
However, once committed to working with the Nazi SS, I.G. quickly adjusted to the exploitation of Auschwitz labor. The project broke ground in April 1941, when the first prisoners trudged five kilometers to the building site under armed guard. The managers and German workers increasingly viewed the prisoners in SS terms, well before the first Jewish detainees arrived at the I.G. building site in July 1942. A comment by construction chief Max Faust about Polish civilian workers, in December 1941, indicated the pernicious effect of the SS on I.G.’s thinking:
Also outrageous is the lack of work discipline on the part of Polish workers. Numerous laborers work at the most 3–4 days in the week. All forms of pressure, even admission into the KL [concentration camp], remain fruitless. Unfortunately, always doing this leaves the construction leadership with no disciplinary powers at its disposal. According to our previous experience only brute force bears fruit with these men. [Emphasis added.]{18}
Much as I.G. Auschwitz was problematic without Germany’s reversals of fortune in the summer of 1940, it would never have been undertaken if agreements had not been made before the launching of Operation Barbarossa. Contrary to certain postwar claims, I.G. executives did not know about the Führer’s decisions for aggressive war. Operation Barbarossa disrupted their timetables because the German army’s monopoly on the railways in the summer of 1941 cost almost four months of irreplaceable construction time when the start date for oil and rubber production was scheduled for the spring of 1943. With every passing month, the target slipped further
away. Unrealistic timetables and frustration over the Krauch Office’s lack of empathy for local conditions contributed to I.G.’s willingness to resort to barbaric SS methods. The failure of Barbarossa in December 1941 led the Nazi regime to reassess its construction priorities, with the closure of projects in the early stages unlikely to contribute to “Final Victory.” Although the Auschwitz project had not progressed very far, it received strong endorsement from Göring, Himmler, and Albert Speer.{19}
For purely utilitarian reasons, I.G. managers alleviated some of the worst working conditions. In order to curtail the ten-kilometer daily march, a short railway line was built between the camp and the building site. To place some distance between sadistic SS guards and the prisoners, the building site was enclosed with a fence while the guards remained along the periphery outside the plant. The latter project took much longer to complete than anticipated because the Auschwitz-based SS Company, German Equipment Works (Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke), was unable to deliver the fence in timely fashion. Shortly after the fence was erected, and only weeks after the first Jewish prisoners started to work on the job site, typhus and typhoid epidemics broke out in Auschwitz concentration camp. In late July 1942, Höss responded by quarantining the camps and murdering the infected. The epidemics were directly attributable to the SS and I.G. because prisoners were forced to endure inhuman conditions with vicious treatment, starvation diet, exhaustive labor, and unrelieved stress. In coping with the temporary loss of unskilled camp labor, I.G. allocated a fourth work camp, intended originally for civilian workers, to serve as a new Auschwitz satellite, Monowitz.{20}
Erected on the building site’s periphery in what had been the demolished Polish village of Monowice, the new camp opened in late October 1942. From beginning to end, Monowitz’s population was overwhelmingly Jewish. The camp prominents included German criminals and a small number of German Jewish political prisoners removed from camps in the Old Reich. The latter prisoners were transferred on Himmler’s order to make “Judenfrei” (free of Jews) the older concentration camps like Dachau and Buchenwald.
Consisting mostly of Communist Party members, these Jewish prisoners formed the nucleus of the resistance and their actions made Monowitz far less deadly for the prisoners than it otherwise would have been.{21}
Nevertheless conditions were lethal at Monowitz. Between November 1942 and January 1945, the death toll reached between 23,000 and 25,000 prisoners. This estimate excludes the losses of early Auschwitz prisoners in 1941 and 1942—that is, before Monowitz’s establishment. At Monowitz, the SS undertook periodic “selections” of weakened prisoners, known as Muselmänner, during camp marches. I.G. managers attended some of these selections.
The SS dispatched the selected to Birkenau for gassing or to Auschwitz for killing by lethal injection. On a smaller scale the selections continued in the infirmary, where SS doctors ordered the transfer for killing of those prisoners whose recovery would occupy bedding space for an indefinite period. Because Monowitz was built partly in response to Auschwitz epidemics, the firm took steps to ensure that new detainees had not been exposed to typhus. These measures were not always benign. After selection at Birkenau, new prisoners were taken to Monowitz and held in a quarantine camp for several weeks. While there they worked as a segregated labor detail at the construction site. The manifestation of typhus symptoms among any new arrivals led to the murder of the entire detachment.{22}
By the time Mr. Berg arrived at Monowitz, the I.G. building site had assumed recognizable shape as a chemical plant, in spite of war-economy frictions and SS incompetence. In the fall of 1943, the plant began producing synthetic methanol, an alcohol derived from coal under immense pressure. Methanol was useful in the production of rocket fuel and explosives and constituted I.G. Auschwitz’s principal contribution to the German war economy. The plant also produced the explosives component, diglycol, and in the summer of 1944 was contracted to produce phosgene, a chemical weapon used in combat during World War I, but not World War II.{23}
With increasing need for skilled laborers to outfit the partially finished buildings, many unskilled prisoners were redeployed from the autumn of 1943 in the construction of makeshift and permanent air-raid shelters. Previously, the firm had given air-raid protection low priority, but abruptly changed course with the Allied advances in Sicily and Italy in the summer of 1943. (The capture of southern Italy brought Poland within the theoretical bombing range of the U.S. Army Air Force.) The air campaign in the summer and fall of 1944 magnified the horrors of the prisoners’ daily existence, even as these attacks underscored that the Nazi regime’s days were numbered. At least 158 Monowitz prisoners were killed in the course of four U.S. daylight bombing raids between August and December 1944. The Soviets also attacked the plant at least twice in December 1944 and January 1945. The number of detainees killed in the December and January attacks is unknown, but all the air attacks disrupted water, food, and electrical power, even as they also raised morale.{24}
By December 1944, the I.G. Auschwitz labor force included almost every European nationality. Its “paper” strength was 31,000, with 29,000 effectives at work. These workers included Italian civilians and Italian military internees, British POWs, Belgian and French contract workers, numerous Poles and Ukrainians (both forced and “free”), and other non-Jewish Eastern Europeans. The status of workers, free or forced, depended upon the regime’s dictates and I.G. Farben’s assessment of their labor productivity. Theoretically, Monowitz comprised one-third of the total I.G. Auschwitz workforce (just over 10,000 prisoners), but the number of forced laborers at the plant was smaller. In November 1944 the WVHA listed Monowitz as a new main camp, with responsibility for the almost forty Auschwitz satellites. The establishment of the Monowitz and Mittelbau (Dora) main camps was part of the last reorganization of the SS camp system.{25}
For Monowitz’s prisoners, horrible days lay ahead. In January 1945, the Soviets began the Vistula-Oder Offensive and the timing caught the German army by surprise. The Red Army consequently captured the still unfinished plant with little damage. The SS evacuated Monowitz on 18 January, as part of the larger evacuation of the Auschwitz satellite camps. The “death march” that Mr. Berg describes so vividly had begun.{26}
After four years of construction, I.G. Auschwitz remained unfinished. Under the Germans at least, it never produced synthetic oil or rubber, but wasted tens of thousands of human lives. The plant was a monument to a totalitarian dictatorship that enlisted private industry in the service of refashioning humanity along “racial” lines.
GLOSSARY
APPELPLATZ (German) The place for roll call (Appel) in the camps.
AUSCHWITZ The original Auschwitz camp (Auschwitz I) was built in 1940 in the suburbs of the Polish city of Oswiecim. On June 14, 1940, the first convoy of Polish political prisoners—728 men—arrived at the camp. By 1943, Auschwitz was the largest Nazi camp complex, with three main camps—Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz—and some forty subcamps. Over 50 percent of the registered Häftlinge in the Auschwitz complex died; 70 to 75 percent of each transport was sent straight to the gas chambers. Untold numbers of victims of the gas chambers were never registered. The total number of Jews murdered in Auschwitz will never be known, but estimates range from 1 million and 2.5 million. The next highest groups were Poles and Russian POWs, most of them dying in the construction of the I.G. Farben plant and as gas chamber “guinea pigs,” and Gypsies. Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army on January 27, 1945.
BIBELFORSCHER (German) A Jehovah’s Witness, a purple triangle. German Jehovah’s Witnesses, because of their beliefs, refused to use the Hitler salute, salute the Nazi flag, bear arms as soldiers, or participate in affairs of the government. Viewed as enemies of the state, many Jehovah’s Witnesses lost their jobs, homes, businesses, and pen-sions. If they renounced their faith, they could avoid persecution. Over 900 Jehovah’s Witness children who refused to join the Hitler Youth were thrown into pena
l institutions and juvenile homes. Jehovah’s Witness publications wrote many scathing articles on Hitler’s regime and on the concentration camps. In 1937, the magazine Consolation ran an article on poison-gas experiments in Dachau, and in June 1940, the magazine stated, “There were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland when Germany began its Blitzkrieg… and if reports are correct their destruction seems well under way.” Auschwitz camp commander Rudolf Franz Höss saw the Bibelforscher in his camp as “poor idiots who were quite happy in their own way.” Over 10,000 German and European Jehovah’s Witnesses were shipped to concentration camps. It’s estimated that between 4,000 and 5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses were murdered during the Nazis’ reign, more than 1,500 of them in the camps.
BIRKENAU (German) Literally “birch grove,” this was Auschwitz II, an extermination camp built in October 1941 and located near the Polish village of Brzezinka. In the spring of 1942, the “showers” and crematoriums were operational. On October 10, 1944, there was the uprising of the Sonderkommando, during which the prisoner crew of crematoria IV revolted and destroyed the crematories. In November 1944, Heinrich Himmler shut down the gas chambers and made efforts to conceal the mass murder that had taken place there.
BLOCK/BLOCKS (German) Barracks.
BLOCKAELTESTE/R (German) Barracks supervisor/s.
BLOKOWA (Polish) Female barracks supervisor.
BLOKOWY (Polish) Barracks supervisor.