Scheisshaus Luck

by Pierre Berg

  BOCHE/BOCHES (French/slang) A derogatory term for a German citizen/s.

  BUNA Acronym for butadiene natrium, or synthetic rubber. The I.G. Farben plant was called “Buna” by the inmates. The plant was built to produce synthetic rubber and fuel. When the Nazis abandoned Auschwitz, not an ounce of synthetic rubber had yet been produced.

  CROIX DE FEU Literally, Cross of Fire. A right-wing organization founded in 1915 by a group of French officers. Original members were all holders of the Military Cross. Many conservative Catholics joined the nationalist, monarchist, and revanchist (“revenge”) organization in the 1920s. Membership peaked at 750,000 in 1937. Widely regarded as the counterpart of Germany’s and Italy’s fascist organizations.

  DER STÜRMER Literally “The Attacker.” An anti-Semitic Nazi weekly newspaper first published on April 20, 1923. Based in Nuremberg, its publisher and editor, Julius Streicher, used the paper to spread Hitler’s doctrine of hatred with crude, simply written articles and “Jew-baiting” cartoons. The final edition of Der Stürmer was published on February 1, 1945. After the war, Streicher was tried at the Nurem-burg trials for inciting hate and was hanged on October 16, 1946.

  DORA, MITTLEBAU-DORA (Also known as Dora-Nordhausen) Established in August 1943 near the southern Harz Mountains and north of the town of Nordhausan, Dora was originally a subcamp of Buchenwald. The first Häftlinge were forced to build the underground factory for the production of the V-1 and V-2 rockets. In November 1944, the camp was renamed Mittelbau. About 60,000 men were used as forced or slave laborers, and more than 20,000 died there. Mittelbau-Dora was liberated on April 11, 1945, by the U.S. 33rd Armored Regiment.

  DRANCY A transit camp located in the suburbs of Paris. Almost all Jews rounded up in France passed through Drancy before being shipped to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. It wasn’t until 1995 that the French government acknowledged the culpability of the Vichy regime in the Nazis’ “Final Solution.”

  FLIC (French/slang) Policeman.

  FRONT POPULAIRE A broad coalition of leftist French political parties and major trade unions formed in July 1935. The three main parties were the French Socialist Party (SFIO), the French Communist Party (PCF), and the le Parti Radical. The head of the Front Populaire was Leon Blum, leader of the SFIO. The coalition headed the French government from June 1935 to March 1940.

  FUSSLAPAN (German) Foot rags.

  GARDES-MOBLES French Federal Police.

  GENDARMES French Military Police.

  GESTAPO Short for Geheime Staatspolizei, or Secret State Police. Allowed to work above the law, the Gestapo was the tool of terror in Germany and all Nazi-occupied countries. Its primary task was to round up Jews and other “undesirables.” At the Nuremberg trials, the entire organization was charged with crimes against humanity.

  GRAND GUIGNOL (French) Used to describe any dramatic entertainment designed to shock, horrify, and sicken and usually featuring the violently gruesome and gory. The phrase comes from the Theatre du Grand Guignol in Montmarte, Paris, which specialized in “shock theatre.”

  HÄFTLING/E (German) Inmate/s.

  HIMMLER, HEINRICH The man responsible for the implementa-tion of the “Final Solution.” Hitler appointed him Reichsführer-SS (Reich SS leader) in 1929. In Aprir 1934, Hermann Göring, the president of the Reichstag, gave Himmler power over the Gestapo. All the concentration camps were under his command. In the summer of 1942, he ordered the Warsaw Ghetto to be emptied because the Jews were dying too slowly in the confined area. In 1943, he was named Minister of the Interior, then in 1944, was appointed the chief of the Replacement Army. On May 23, 1945, Himmler was captured by British forces and committed suicide.

  HKB/HÄFTLINGSKRANKENBAU (German) Inmates’ infirmary.

  I. G. FARBEN A German conglomerate formed in 1925. Major companies included Bayer, Agfa, and BASF. Seeing great postwar potential, I.G. Farben funded I.G. Auschwitz without any government money. It was their largest plant and cost more than 900 million Reichsmark (over $250 million). Zyklon B was produced by the I.G. Farben company Degesch. After the war, the Allies disbanded the conglomerate, but allowed the original companies to continue doing business.

  JUDE (German) Jew, a “yellow triangle.” The only group of human beings the Nazis wanted to annihilate completely. When Hitler took power on January 30, 1933, German Jews were systematically stripped of all political, economic, and social rights. On September 15, 1935, the Nuremberg Racial Laws were decreed, which banned Jews from being German citizens. On February 21, 1939, German Jews were forced to hand over all their gold and silver items. With the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II, the Nazis rounded up the Jews in all the countries they occupied, putting them into ghettos or concentration camps. As Nazi forces tore into the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen (Special Forces under the control of Heinrich Himmler) began the mass killing of Jews (along with Gypsies and Communist leaders). On January 20, 1942, the Wannsee Conference was held and the “Final Solution”(Endlösung der Judenfrage) was set in motion. In the Shoah (Hebrew term for “calamity”), over 6 million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered by the Nazis.

  KANADA KOMMANDO (German) The work detail that gathered and sorted the belongings of the new arrivals to Auschwitz. Anything of value was earmarked for shipment to Germany, but some items found their way to Auschwitz’s black market. The inmates nicknamed the Kommando “Kanada” because Canada was seen as a country of wealth and prosperity.

  KIPP LORE (German) A coal car with a container that can be tilted to easily empty the load.

  KOMMANDO (German) Work detail.

  KAPO (German) Inmate supervisor of a Kommando. Assigned by the SS and usually a German convict.

  KRÄTZEBLOCK (German) Barracks for inmates with scabies, skin mange, or contagious itch.

  K.L. Abbreviation of Konzentrationslager, the German word for “concentration camp.”

  LAGER (German) Camp.

  LAGERÄLTESTER (German) Camp elder, most of the time a German convict in charge of discipline in the camp.

  LAGERFÜRHER (German) A warden, usually an SS officer who oversaw discipline in the camp

  LANDSTURM (German) German reserve forces that are called on last, composed of men not in the armed forces (mainly elderly veterans and teenagers).

  LEBENSRAUM (German) Literally, “living space.” One of Hitler’s excuses for invading Poland and the Soviet Union was to acquire land to be colonized by Germans.

  LEICHENWAGEN (German) Hearse.

  MAKHORKA (Russian) A harsh Russian tobacco composed of tobacco leaf stems.

  MALHEURE (French) Horrible or bad luck.

  MAQUIS (French) Literally “sage brush,” the name for the French Resistance. The resistance was given that name because most of the men and women lived or hid in the French mountainsides.

  MAQUISARDS (French) French Resistance fighters.

  MAUTHAUSEN A concentration camp 20 kilometers from Linz, Austria, which was opened in August 1938. The total number of Häftlinge who passed through the camp is estimated at 199,404, and of that number, 119,000 died. The camp was liberated by the U.S. 11th Armored Division on May 5, 1945.

  MESSERSCHMITT The Messerschmitt BF-109 was the standard German fighter plane. It had a water-cooled Daimler-Benz 12-cylinder engine with over 1,000 horsepower.

  MON AMI (French) My friend/buddy.

  MONOWITZ Auschwitz III, operational in May 1942. A slave labor camp built in the town of Monowice, Poland, whose name was Germanized into Monowitz. The camp supplied workers for the I.G. Farben plant. At the roll call before the death march out of Auschwitz, there were 10,244 inmates.

  MUZHIK (Russian) A term for a Russian peasant, especially before the 1917 Revolution.

  MUSELMANN/MUSELMÄNNER (German) Literally, Muslim/s, but camp slang for an inmate near death, who has given up on life.

  ORGANIZE Camp slang for stealing anything from the Nazis that could help in one’s survival or for illicit trade in stolen items. If a prisoner
was caught with an “organized” item, it could mean a beating, the Stehbunker, or execution.

  PAJAMAS Camp slang for the thin gray-and-blue striped uniforms given to Häftlinge.

  PÈRE LACHAISE The oldest and largest cemetery in Paris. Named after Père François de la Chaise, the confessor of Louis XIV, the cemetery was built on an old quarry. Père Lachaise holds the remains of many famous people, including Molière, Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, Chopin, Proust, Oscar Wilde, Isadora Duncan, and Jim Morrison.

  PIEPEL (German) Errand boy, although in the K.L., it also implied a juvenile prostitute.

  PITCHI Poi A legendary village in Yiddish song, used by Jews and other inmates of Drancy as the name of the secret destination the Nazis were shipping them to.

  PUFF (German/slang) Bordello, whorehouse.

  RAVENSBRÜCK The Nazi’s only major women’s camp, located 56 miles north of Berlin. The camp was built in 1938, and was liberated by the Soviets on April 30, 1945. About 92,000 women died at Ravensbrück.

  REICHSFLUCHTSTEUER A German “flight” tax that was established on December 8, 1931. For anti-Semitic reasons, the Nazis perverted the laws passed before the Seizure of Power, which were originally designed to prevent large amounts of capital from leaving the country during the Great Depression. By 1933, there were a number of laws with the sole purpose of eliminating the Jews from the German economy.

  ROMANI An ethnic group, commonly known as Gypsies, whose roots can be traced to India. About 23,000 Romani from eleven countries were shipped to Birkenau, where a special Romani family camp had been built. About 21,000 were either gassed or died from malnutrition, disease (especially typhus), or mistreatment. It is estimated that between 20 and 50 percent of European Romani were murdered by the Nazis. Gypsy is a pejorative term.

  SCHREIBSTUBE (German) Administration office.

  SELECTION Euphemism (Selektion in German) for being chosen for work or, more commonly, death.

  SONDERKOMMANDO (German) Special work team. In Auschwitz, the Sonderkommando was responsible for leading people into the gas chambers, extracting their bodies, and burning them in the crematoriums. Members of the Sonderkommando usually worked in the crematoriums for a few months before being sent to their deaths, as part of the Nazis’ attempts to leave no witnesses to their crimes.

  SPECKJÄGER (German/slang) Bacon hunter, or someone who chases lard, a scavenger.

  SS (SCHUTZSTAFFEL) (German) Security Detail. Originally formed to protect Hitler and other Nazi officials. Under Heinrich Himmler, the SS became military units, the Waffen-SS. By 1944, nearly 40,000 SS were assigned to concentration camps.

  STEHBUNKER (German) Standing bunker, or very small cell. One of the Nazis’ forms of punishment for Häftlinge who broke their arbitrary rules and regulations. A narrow cell, 90 cm by 90 cm, in which a man couldn’t turn around or move his hands. Häftlinge were kept in these cells from 10 to over 24 hours at a time.

  STUBENDIENST/E (German) Barracks foreman/men.

  SUDETENDEUTSCH, SUDETEN GERMAN (German) A German national living in the Sudetenland, which became part of Czechoslovakia after World War I. There were 3,2 million Germans living in this area, which bordered Germany (11,000 square miles). In September 1938, the Munich Agreement, which was signed by Hitler, Britain’s Neville Chamberlin, France’s Edouard Daladier, and Italy’s Mussolini, permitted Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland. Czechoslovakia was given no say in the matter. In March 1939, Germany annexed the rest of the country.

  UNTERMENSCH/UNTERMENSCHEN (German) Subhuman/s, used generally to refer to prisoners and Jews.

  VERBOTEN (German) Forbidden.

  VORARBEITER (German) Foreman.

  WEHRMACHT German Armed Forces.

  ZYKLON-B Crystalline hydrogen cyanide, used in the Nazi gas chambers. Originally developed as a pesticide, and first used in September 1941 on Soviet POWs.

  Copyright

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Berg, Pierre.

  Scheisshaus luck : surviving the unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora / Pierre Berg with Brian Brock.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-8144-1299-2

  1. Berg, Pierre. 2. Auschwitz (Concentration camp) 3. Political prisoners—France—Biography. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Personal narratives, French. I. Brock, Brian. II. Title.

  D805.5.A96B465

  2008

  940.53’18092—dc22

  [B]

  2008003779

  © 2008 Pierre Berg.

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of AMACOM, a division of American Management Association, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

  Printing Hole Number

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Footnotes

  1

  SS Captain Alois Brunner was the Commandant of Drancy from June 1943 until August 1944. When the Germans took over the Italian zone of France, he was sent to Nice to oversee the roundup of Jews. Brunner was responsible for deporting 24,000 people from Drancy to the extermination camps.

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  2

  The name of the Man from the HKB is Siegfried Halbreich, a Polish Jew who was incarcerated at Sachsenhausen and Grossrossen before being shipped to Auschwitz. Before-During-After (Schor Press) is Mr. Halbreich’s autobiography chronicling his Holocaust survival. Mr. Halbreich has lived across the street from me in Beverly Hills, California, for the past thirty years.

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  3

  Once the Nazis occupied France in 1940, Pierre Laval used his media empire of newspapers and radio stations to support Philippe Pétain and the Vichy government. For his effort, Laval became the head of the French government. He enabled the Gestapo to hunt down members of the French Resistance in unoccupied France (southern France). He also created the Vichy Milice, a paramilitary force, which in conjunction with the French police rounded up many French Jews and left-wing activists and had them shipped to concentration camps.

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  4

  Vidkun Quisling was the leader of Norway’s Nasjonal Samling (National Socialist) Party, which the Nazis declared the only legal party after their invasion in 1940. In 1942, Quisling was installed as prime minister.

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  5

  The camp referred to, E715, wasn’t a Stalag but a subcamp of Stalag VIIB, the largest POW camp in Germany. E715 housed British and British Commonwealth soldiers.

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  6

  There is no official record of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler visiting the I.G. Farben plant or Auschwitz in the spring of 1944; it is possible this was one of his doubles.

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  7

  On August 2, 1944, 2,897 Roma (Gypsy) men, women, and children were taken from their camp in Birkenau and gassed. Th
eir bodies were incinerated in pits because the crematoriums weren’t functioning at the time.

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  8

  Werwolf was a Nazi guerilla/terrorist movement formed by Heinrich Himmler in 1944 to harass Allied troops in occupied parts of Germany.

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  Notes

  1

  1. Andre Śellier, A History of the Dora Camp: The Story of the Nazi Slave Labor Camp That Secretly Manufactured V-2 Rockets, foreword by Michael J. Neufeld, afterword by Jens-Christian Wagner, trans. Stephen Wright and Susan Taponier (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, published in associated with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2003); Yves Beón, Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age, introduction by Michael J. Neufeld, trans. Yves Beón and Richard L. Fague (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); Georges Wellers, De Drancy aÀuschwitz (Paris: E´ditions du Centre, 1946); reissued under the title of L’étoile jaune à l’heure de Vichy: De Drancy aÀuschwitz (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1973); Paul Steinberg, Speak You Also: A Survivor’s Reckoning, trans. Linda Coverdale with Bill Ford (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2000), originally published as Chronique d’ailleurs (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1996); Antoni Makowski, “Organization, Growth and Activity of the Prisoners’ Hospital at Monowitz (KL Auschwitz III),” in From the History of KL Auschwitz, vol. II, ed. Kasimierz Smolen, trans. Kryztyna Michalik (Kraków: Panstwowe Muzeum w Oswiecimiu, 1976), pp. 121–195.