Most Jews remained trapped in Bergen-Belsen, tormented by their receding hopes of freedom. Conditions varied across the different sectors. In 1943 they were worst in the so-called star camp, the largest compound of the exchange camp, named after the yellow stars the Jews had to wear. There was never enough food (official rations were identical to other concentration camps) and all adults, except for the elderly, had to work hard, often in camp maintenance. But even in this compound the authorities initially allowed privileges unheard of elsewhere in the KL system, except for Herzogenbusch, the other camp for “privileged” Jews. In the star camp, inmates wore civilian clothing and kept some of their belongings. Families met up during mealtimes and evenings (there were hundreds of children). As in ghettos, some of the internal administration was left to a Jewish Council and a camp police. And just like in Herzogenbusch, there was a Jewish prisoner court. As for SS guards, they were instructed to address prisoners by name, not number. There were some SS abuses, but nothing like the daily orgies of other KL. Overall, conditions were poor but sufferable, until they began to deteriorate from spring and summer 1944; over the following months, Fanny Heilbut’s husband and one of her sons perished, as did many thousands of others.200
Bergen-Belsen was an anomaly in the KL system during the middle of World War II. At the time, it was the only concentration camp inside Germany’s prewar borders that held large numbers of Jewish prisoners, and the only KL for Jews not geared toward their eventual death. Virtually all other Jewish concentration camp prisoners found themselves in eastern Europe, which meant likely death. This was true, above all, for Auschwitz, the largest of all the Holocaust camps. From summer 1942, most Jews deported to this camp were murdered within hours of their arrival, as we have seen. It is the fate of the others, those selected as SS slaves in Auschwitz and other KL in eastern Europe, to which we must turn next.
7
Anus Mundi
On September 5, 1942, a few SS men marched into block 27 of the Birkenau women’s infirmary to assist the camp doctor during a selection. For the SS, such selections were part of their working life. For the prisoners, they were the worst torment. The sick women knew their probable fate and some desperately tried to hide. But to no avail. That day, hundreds of Jewish women were condemned to death and herded onto trucks. Near the gas chambers, they had to undress in broad daylight. Unlike Jews who had just been deported to Auschwitz, these prisoners understood what would happen inside the converted farmhouses. Some silently stood or sat in the grass, others sobbed. Among the supervising SS officers was a physician, Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, who later testified that the women had “begged the SS men to spare their lives, cried, and yet all were driven inside the gas chamber and gassed.” Sitting in his car outside, Dr. Kremer listened as the screams died down. A few hours afterward, he recorded a conversation with another Auschwitz doctor in his diary: “[Dr. Heinz] Thilo was right, when he told me today that we are at the anus mundi (the anus of the world).”1
It is easy to picture the balding, fifty-eight-year-old Dr. Kremer smirking at this expression (the diaries reveal his crude sense of humor). But he recognized some deeper truth in Dr. Thilo’s words. After all, Kremer had never planned to be in Auschwitz. Nor was he keen to stay. A professor of anatomy at the University of Münster, he had joined the SS medical service during the summer break, and to his surprise was posted to Auschwitz in late August 1942 for a number of weeks to replace a sick colleague. “There is nothing to excite one here,” he wrote on the day of his conversation with Dr. Thilo. The selections and gassings—he participated in more than one per week—certainly gave him little satisfaction.2 What is more, Dr. Kremer struggled with the climate. He complained about the humidity and the “masses of vermin,” including fleas in his room at the SS hotel in town. Then there was the “Auschwitz illness.” Within days, Kremer was struck down by this gastric virus, not for the last time. But what he really feared were other diseases, and for good reason. Earlier that year, an Auschwitz SS doctor had died of typhus, and during a ten-day period in October 1942, when Kremer was stationed in the camp, the SS counted some thirteen more suspected cases of typhus among its men, while the officer in charge of agriculture, Joachim Cäsar, caught typhoid, which had just killed his wife (Cäsar recovered and remarried a year later, wedding his laboratory assistant in the SS registry office inside the camp).3 Conditions for the Camp SS elsewhere in the occupied east were no better. Female guards in Majdanek, too, were in and out of the hospital with infections. The frustrations felt by the SS staff—disgusted by the primitive sanitary conditions and afraid of catching diseases from inmates—only increased their proclivity for violence.4
At the same time, the Camp SS found much to like in the east. Dr. Kremer, for one, made the most of his inadvertent posting to Auschwitz. His grim tasks in the camp did not spoil his love of the outdoors. In his spare time, he joined other SS men on sun loungers at his hotel and took a bicycle tour across the vast SS-controlled territory, marveling at the “absolutely beautiful autumn weather.” A man with a big appetite, Kremer devoured the generous helpings in the SS officer mess, dutifully recording all the delicacies in his diary, from goose liver and roast rabbit to the “glorious vanilla ice cream.” And he liked the entertainment in the camp. One Sunday afternoon in September he listened to a concert by the prisoner orchestra, and he also enjoyed the regular variety shows for the Camp SS in the evenings, sometimes with free beer; Kremer was particularly smitten by a performance of dancing dogs and small hens who could crow on command. Other times, Kremer made social calls on colleagues. After he spent the afternoon of November 8, 1942, at the Birkenau gas chambers—supervising the murder of some one thousand Jewish men, women, and children who had just arrived from ghettos around Bialystok—he relaxed in the evening with Dr. Eduard Wirths, the chief SS garrison physician, sampling Bulgarian red wine and Croatian plum schnapps. In addition to fun and food, Kremer found time to boost his career. He was delighted to get his hands on “virtually alive material of human liver and spleen” for his studies of the effect of starvation on human organs. Kremer apparently later published a paper on the topic in a medical journal.5
But the biggest bonus of Dr. Kremer’s brief stay in Auschwitz was financial. The belongings of murdered Jews filled the camp, and corrupt SS men like Kremer freely helped themselves. After he was initiated into the tricks of the trade, he took as much as he could from a storeroom near the ramp. The five bulging parcels he sent back home for safekeeping included soap and toothpaste, glasses and pens, perfume and handbags, and much else besides, to a total value of 1,400 Reichsmark. In just five weeks, Untersturmführer Kremer stole goods worth more than half the annual salary of a full-time SS officer of his rank.6 Many other Camp SS officials were on the make, too, in Auschwitz and elsewhere. In the end, corruption became so endemic that a special police commission was sent to the KL. In Auschwitz, the investigation was triggered in 1943 by an unusually heavy package that an SS man had sent to his wife; when suspicious customs officials opened it, they found a huge lump of gold, as big as two fists, melted down from the dental fillings of murdered prisoners.7
By this time, Auschwitz had become the center of the KL system, just as Dachau had dominated the first period of Nazi rule, and Sachsenhausen the early war years. Not that Auschwitz was entirely different; in other KL, too, there was hunger and abuse, selection and mass murder. But everything was more extreme in Auschwitz. No other camp held more staff and prisoners. The mass deportations of Jews had quickly put Auschwitz into a league all its own. During September 1942, the average daily prisoner population across all the KL stood at one hundred and ten thousand. An estimated thirty-four thousand of these prisoners were held in Auschwitz alone, of whom around sixty percent were Jews. They were ruled by up to two thousand Auschwitz SS staff, and many of these officials, as we shall see, felt similar ambivalence about their lives in the east as Dr. Kremer.8
The shadow of Auschwitz looms even larger when we turn to p
risoner fatalities. According to secret SS figures, a total of 12,832 registered prisoners died across the KL system in August 1942; almost two-thirds of them—6,829 men and 1,525 women—perished in Auschwitz (excluding an estimated 35,000 unregistered Jews who were gassed that month after SS selections on arrival).9 In total, around 150,000 registered prisoners died in Auschwitz during 1942–43 (again excluding Jews murdered on arrival).10 Their deaths were recorded on various official papers, mostly giving fictitious causes, though rarely as blatant as in the case of the three-year-old Gerhard Pohl, who was recorded as having died in Auschwitz on May 10, 1943, of “old age.”11 Some of the forms ran to around twenty pages, with prisoner clerks typing day and night to keep up. Auschwitz SS doctors, meanwhile, complained about cramps in their hands from signing all the death certificates; to make their lives easier, they eventually commissioned special stamps with their signature.12
Heinrich Himmler and Oswald Pohl showed great interest in Auschwitz, as their largest death camp and greatest hub for forced labor. Back in 1940, when it was first set up, Commandant Höss had had to hunt for scraps of barbed wire. Now his superiors poured funds into the camp, diverting precious resources to their flagship in the east. “I was probably the only SS leader in the entire SS,” Höss later bragged, “who had such a comprehensive carte blanche for the procurement of all that was needed for Auschwitz.”13 Earlier KL had resembled small cities; Auschwitz turned into a metropolis. By August 1943, it held some seventy-four thousand prisoners, at a time when there were two hundred and twenty-four thousand registered KL prisoners across all the camps.14 In view of the size of the Auschwitz complex, Pohl divided it in November 1943 into three main camps, each with its own commandant. Auschwitz I was the old main camp, led by the most senior local SS officer (who retained overall responsibility for the camp complex); Auschwitz II was the camp in Birkenau (with the gas chambers); and Auschwitz III contained the satellite camps dotted around eastern Silesia (fourteen by spring 1944), above all Monowitz.15
Conditions varied greatly across the vast Auschwitz complex, as we will see, just as they differed in the other KL in occupied eastern Europe during 1942–43. One Auschwitz prisoner likened his summer 1943 transfer from the main camp to Birkenau to a move from a major city to the countryside where everyone wore shabbier clothes. Another prisoner put it more starkly: the Auschwitz main camp—with its brick buildings, washrooms, and drinking water—was like paradise compared to the hell of Birkenau.16 Despite all their differences, though, the ultimate aim of SS concentration camps in occupied eastern Europe was the same. None of their registered Jewish prisoners—those who had been selected for slave labor rather than immediate extermination—were supposed to survive in the long run.
JEWISH PRISONERS IN THE EAST
More than a year after her liberation from the Nazi camps, Nechamah Epstein-Kozlowski lived with her new husband in a Jewish cooperative in a castle near Lake Como in Italy, where they waited impatiently to move to Palestine. It was here, on August 31, 1946, that the twenty-three-year-old Polish woman, pregnant with her first child, talked to the American psychologist David Boder, who had recently arrived in Europe to interview displaced persons. Before their conversation, which was taped on a wire recorder, Boder noted that Epstein-Kozlowski seemed cheerful; but her story, which unfolded over the next ninety minutes, was one of unremitting horror.
Even before she was dragged to the concentration camps, Epstein-Kozlowski had cheated death several times, escaping from a train bound for a death camp and surviving the ghettos of Warsaw and Meseritz (Międzyrzec). In spring 1943, by which time her whole family had been killed, she was taken to Majdanek and began a two-year odyssey through the KL system, which led her to Auschwitz, back to Majdanek, to Plaszow, back to Auschwitz, to Bergen-Belsen, to the Buchenwald satellite camp of Aschersleben, and finally, following a two-week death march, to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where she was liberated on May 8, 1945.
When Epstein-Kozlowski had first arrived in Birkenau, on June 26, 1943, on a transport with 625 other women from Majdanek, they were forced into a road construction commando known as the Death Detail; within a month, she recalled, 150 of the women were dead. Many of those who survived were later murdered. Epstein-Kozlowski herself lived through several selections, including three in the Birkenau infirmary, where, delirious with malaria, she hid in the bunks of non-Jewish prisoners. Jewish children were most vulnerable to such selections, but for several months during 1944, Epstein-Kozlowski helped to protect an eight-year-old orphan called Chaykele Wasserman: “That child was very dear to me. I loved it very much. That child could not go anyplace without me.” Chaykele survived a selection in Plaszow by hiding in the latrine, and she also survived the later move to Auschwitz. But after Epstein-Kozlowski was chosen for a transport to Bergen-Belsen, they were finally separated: “And that child cried very much. When she saw that I was being taken, she cried very much and screamed, ‘You are leaving me. Who will be my mother now?’ But, alas, I could not help any … I cried very much. And the child was crying. And I parted from the child and left.”17 Chaykele probably died before the war ended, just like most other children in Auschwitz. Similarly, Nechamah Epstein-Kozlowski’s experience was shared by most other Jewish adults registered as KL prisoners in eastern Europe during the Holocaust, who faced destructive labor, violence, and constant selections. In one respect, though, her fate was unusual—she survived.
Slaves for IG Farben
Historians have long argued that the Holocaust highlights a sharp contradiction at the heart of Nazism: despite the desperate need for forced labor to feed the German war machine, the regime still went ahead with the mass extermination of European Jewry.18 But for Nazi hard-liners there was no contradiction. Economics and extermination were two sides of the same coin; both were needed for victory. Winning the war required the ruthless destruction of all perceived threats and the mobilization of all remaining resources for the war effort. In the case of Jews judged capable of work, the authorities fused both of these aims into the policy of “annihilation through labor.” Forced labor meant temporary survival for the selected Jews; but almost all of them were dead men and women walking, as far as the SS was concerned.19
KL labor in occupied eastern Europe varied enormously. At times, most notably in Majdanek, it was designed only for suffering.20 More often, the authorities pursued aims that included, but also went beyond, the desire to inflict pain. Typically, Jewish prisoners were exploited during the deadly construction phase of new camps, as well as during their extension and maintenance; in Auschwitz, around half of all employed female prisoners worked in the service of the camp itself.21 Beyond that, prisoners worked for SS enterprises, private companies, and the Nazi state. The experience of slave labor depended on many variables, such as the type, size, and supervision of the work details (few prisoners stayed for long in the same detail, moving frequently and often randomly elsewhere). Still, most Jewish KL laborers faced the same overall threat—labor and death.
This policy was pursued most consistently, perhaps, at the IG Farben site near Dwory. The only living things here, Primo Levi wrote, “are machines and slaves—and the former are more alive than the latter.” Auschwitz prisoners had worked on the construction of the factory since spring 1941. Initially, they still slept in the main camp, so they had to march every day for several hours along muddy roads to and from the building site, around four miles away (later, trains were used, too). IG Farben managers blamed these exhausting transports for the prisoners’ poor output and lobbied for a satellite camp right next to the factory grounds. SS officials agreed after some hesitation, swayed by the WVHA’s growing emphasis on productivity. Construction of the Monowitz concentration camp (or Buna camp) began in summer 1942, using the standard SS barrack model, and it opened in late October 1942. Built on the ruins of Monowitz village, the new camp cost some five million Reichsmark to construct; the sum was paid by IG Farben, which agreed to provide supplies and medical care as well
. The SS, meanwhile, was in charge of prisoners inside the camp and outside.
The new KL Monowitz belonged to a bigger complex on the grounds. It was one of eight compounds on the huge IG Farben construction site, which together provided around twenty thousand workers by November 1942. Some of them, like German civilians, enjoyed comparatively good conditions, while others, like forced workers from the Soviet Union (both POWs and others), suffered deprivation. But the KL, the only compound around Dwory run by the Camp SS, was the worst. “We are the slaves of the slaves,” Primo Levi wrote, “whom all can give orders to.” The new concentration camp quickly grew in size, following mass arrivals from the Auschwitz main camp. At the beginning of 1943, there were already 3,750 prisoners, increasing to around 7,000 a year later. The great majority of them—around nine out of ten—were Jews.22
Initiated by IG Farben, the KL Monowitz aimed to feed the industrial giant’s appetite for labor. Work inside the compound itself was reduced to the bare minimum, so around four out of five prisoners toiled on the factory’s building site outside, a “huge entanglement of iron, concrete, mud and smoke,” as Levi described it. The great majority of prisoners ended up in large construction gangs. These commandos were all about unrelenting labor, largely performed without gloves, coats, or any other protection, even in winter. Prisoners erected huge concrete slabs and carried bricks, trees, and iron pipes across the site. Among the worst details was the cement commando—“a veritable murder commando,” one survivor called it—where prisoners had to run from trains to warehouses with bulging cement sacks on their backs; weighing 110 pounds, the load was heavier than many of the prisoners. In the eyes of the authorities, the men in these labor details were easily replaceable and counted for almost nothing. Only a few trained prisoners in sought-after positions fared better: Bully Schott, for example, survived until his escape in August 1944, because of his abilities as a mechanic. But even skilled inmates like him often faced ruinous labor in Monowitz. After Primo Levi joined a small commando of trained chemists, he had to carry heavy phenylbeta sacks: “our strength,” he feared at the time, “will not last out.” Only in the final weeks of Auschwitz did he actually work inside the sheltered laboratory.23
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 48