General disdain for the prisoners shaped conditions inside Monowitz. Overcrowding was endemic—around 250 men were crammed into barracks originally designed for fifty-five civilian workers—as was dirt and disease. The SS aggravated the suffering at almost any opportunity. For example, Jewish prisoners—and only Jewish prisoners—had to exchange their leather shoes for ill-fitting wooden clogs, which soon cut gaping wounds into their feet. Worst of all was the slow starvation, “that chronic hunger unknown to free men,” Levi wrote, “which makes one dream at night, and settles in all the limbs of one’s body.” The daily rations from the SS were pitiful and the additional Buna soup, which prisoners received courtesy of IG Farben, contained dirt and “plants which I have never seen growing before,” according to another inmate. Starvation and strenuous work led to extreme weight loss, on average between four and nine pounds per week. After three or four months at the IG Farben site, the former prisoner doctor Berthold Epstein testified in April 1945, “most people died as a result of exhaustion and overexertion.” Overall, around twenty-five thousand of all the thirty-five thousand prisoners sent to Monowitz lost their lives.24
Violent excesses hastened their deaths. One of the leading guards in Monowitz was report leader Bernhard Rakers, a brutal Camp SS veteran (he had signed up back in 1934). His violent record was long and he added to it every day, even though inmates tried hard to stay clear of the man they called the “Buna lion.”25 Then there were the Monowitz Kapos. Among the most notorious was the camp elder Josef (“Jupp”) Windeck, a German petty criminal in his early forties. On the day Monowitz was first opened, he gave a speech to the assembled prisoners. According to one survivor, he said: “You’re not here for fun, you’ll all get wrecked anyway, and you’ll all go through the chimney.” True to his word, Windeck—who used to parade around in riding boots, brandishing a dog whip—frequently beat other prisoners to a pulp.26
SS guards and Kapos were the usual suspects when it came to tormenting prisoners at work. But in Monowitz, the IG Farben paymasters had their say, too. Keen to wring as much labor power from prisoners as they could, company officials demanded strenuous efforts and strict discipline from the frail prisoners. While chief engineer Max Faust opposed some SS excesses—such as “shooting prisoners on the building site or pounding them half-dead,” as he put it in 1943—he still insisted on “punishment of a moderate kind,” which in practice often meant more violence, either beatings by Kapos and company officials or official whippings by the SS.27
IG Farben was an active partner in the policy of “annihilation through labor.” Instead of improving prisoner provisions and the treatment of the sick, the company received an assurance from the WVHA that “all weak prisoners can be deported” to be replaced by others fit for work. This was the basis for constant selections in Monowitz. They were most frequent in the camp’s infirmary, where an SS doctor came about once a week to “empty the beds,” as the SS called it. Walking briskly through the rooms—individual decisions often took no more than a few seconds—the physician picked out those who had already spent two or three weeks inside and others who were not expected to return to work anytime soon. In this way, thousands of prisoners—almost all of them Jews—were selected in the Monowitz infirmary and transported to Birkenau.28 Here, most were driven straight to the crematoria complex; as a former Birkenau block leader put it after the war, the doomed prisoners were “practically no longer alive” even before they were gassed.29
The Selection
“To relieve the camp, it is necessary to remove simpletons, idiots, cripples, and sick people as quickly as possible through liquidation.”30 This is how an SS officer summed up, in late 1942, the purpose of selections in a concentration camp like Auschwitz. By then, such prisoner selections had become routine. But things were about to change. As economic imperatives became more pressing, the SS made half-hearted efforts to curb the enormous death rates in the KL system (chapter 8). This included restrictions on selections, at least in some camps.31 As early as December 1942, the Auschwitz camp compound leader Hans Aumeier complained to a colleague about a ban on gassing Polish invalids, who were supposed to die a “natural death” (as he put it) instead.32 This did not apply to registered Jewish prisoners, however. Murderous selections remained a hallmark of the KL for Jews in occupied eastern Europe. In mixed camps like Auschwitz and Majdanek, which held both Jewish and non-Jewish inmates, the SS now introduced a two-tier system. Whereas most registered prisoners were spared the lethal injections and the gas chambers, countless ill, injured, and emaciated Jews were still murdered after selections.33
There was no set pattern, as the Camp SS conducted routine selections and impromptu ones, mass selections and individual ones. In general, the period immediately after arrival was particularly perilous. In Auschwitz, some Jewish prisoners had only just survived the initial selection at the ramp when they, too, were condemned: as they stripped naked inside the camp baths, their clothes no longer concealed injuries and illnesses.34 Many more Jews followed over the coming days, picked out from the quarantine sectors that awaited most new inmates. Murders of selected new arrivals had slowly spread across the whole KL system during the early war years, as part of the wider SS assault on invalids. In summer 1942, the WVHA coordinated matters, ordering that new prisoners should be isolated in special blocks for four weeks after arrival; anyone who was sick would be removed and “treated separately.”35 Camp SS officials in eastern Europe understood this as an open invitation to mass murder in the quarantine sectors.36
Mass selections of Jews continued inside the main camp compounds. In the second half of 1943, for example, selections took place at least once a week during roll call in the Riga main camp. One survivor later described the SS man in charge: “He pulled women out of the ranks whose faces he somehow did not like, who wore glasses, had a spot on the face, even an injured finger, and gave orders for their extermination.” There were further actions during baths and before or after labor.37 Such SS selections often turned into grotesque spectacles. The Polish political prisoner Danuta Medryk, who witnessed several selections in Majdanek, described how the Jewish women had to hold up their skirts to expose their legs, as SS doctors picked out those with swollen and bleeding limbs; emaciated buttocks were also regarded as a sure sign of starvation. Those prisoners selected to die ripped off bandages and held their heads up as high as possible, even appearing to smile at their executioners, in the vain hope of a final reprieve.38
The conditions in eastern European KL often made it impossible to escape selection and death. Jewish prisoners everywhere were slowly starving to death; in Klooga, for example, the daily ration was thin soup with a piece of bread, partly baked with sand. Add maddening thirst, crippling labor, extreme violence, and the sanitary catastrophe, and it is clear why tens of thousands became Muselmänner within weeks of their arrival, and thus prime targets for the selections.39
Normally, the SS reflex was to blame prisoners for squalor and disease. But the state of the camps in the east was so appalling that even local officers called for improvements. In a meeting with SS construction boss Kammler, Auschwitz commandant Höss and his chief physician Wirths complained in May 1943 that the situation in Birkenau (still without central water supply) was woeful, lacking the most basic hygienic and medical standards. Höss had not suddenly turned into a humanitarian; he had more pragmatic concerns. From his point of view, too many prisoners died in the wrong way—that is, from illness, not economic exploitation—resulting in a “huge wastage of manpower.”40 Until conditions improved, local Camp SS leaders promoted murderous selections as the most effective defense against the danger of epidemics to themselves and their families. The gassing of sick and weak Jews, Höss assured his men, was necessary to prevent the spread of illness. In this way, local SS officials rationalized the slaughter of prisoners as an act of disease control and self-preservation, and contributed to the escalation of Nazi terror from below.41
In reality, SS selec
tions actually helped to spread epidemics, by making the sick even warier of reporting to doctors. Most Jewish prisoners knew about the selections among patients. In Auschwitz, the initial selection came right after a prisoner was admitted to the infirmary; those judged too weak or sick to recover soon were isolated and killed.42 As for the others, the infernal conditions in most infirmaries offered little hope for recovery. The French prisoner doctor Sima Vaisman later described her first impression of the infirmary at the Birkenau women’s camp in early 1944: “A smell of corpses, of excrement … And the sick, skeletal beings, covered almost entirely in scabies, in boils, bitten to pieces by lice, all completely naked, shivering with cold under their disgusting blankets.”43 The infirmaries meant death for most Jewish prisoners; reporting for admission was a last resort, an enormous risk, like a game of Russian roulette with an almost fully loaded gun.
Among the infirmary personnel, lower-ranking officials, so-called SS orderlies (Sanitätsdienstgrade), played a key role in selections and were often decorated for their murderous deeds.44 One of these men was Oberscharführer Heinz Wisner. An eager SS activist, born in Danzig in 1916, Wisner worked for several years as a shipping clerk before joining the SS full-time during the war as a medic. In summer 1943, he was transferred from Flossenbürg to the Riga main camp, where he dominated the small infirmaries for women and men.45 Unlike the elderly SS camp doctor Eduard Krebsbach, who only appeared occasionally, the pompous Wisner made his rounds more than once a week. Wearing a white coat over his uniform, the would-be doctor pushed military discipline to perverse extremes; even the dying had to lie straight on their backs as Wisner moved from bed to bed, inspecting each inmate. After he had made his decision, he frequently marked the bed frames of the doomed with a large “X.” These inmates were then either shot in nearby woods or murdered in their beds by lethal injection (there were no gas chambers in Riga). Although he often left these injections to prisoner doctors, it was Wisner who became known in the camp as “the man with the syringe.”46
Of course, death could come anywhere and anytime, not just after selections; it was the ever-present shadow of Jewish prisoners. One of the first things he was told as he entered Birkenau in late 1942, a Polish Jew wrote not long after, was that no one survived the camp for more than three weeks.47 The sight of dead bodies—in beds and latrines, on trucks and building sites—was familiar to all, as was the smoke from the crematoria; Renate Lasker-Allais, a young German Jew deported to Birkenau in late 1943, threw up constantly because of the nauseating stench of burning bodies.48 Even though most Jewish prisoners clung to faint hopes of survival, they knew that few, if any, would get out alive. They even speculated about the relative merits of the different deaths the SS had in store for them: How long before one suffocated in a gas chamber? How painful was death by injection? Better a swift blow to the head, or to waste away in the infirmary? 49
The Auschwitz Special Squad
In the eyes of Primo Levi, the creation of the Auschwitz Special Squad—the prisoner detail that led the doomed to the gas chambers, burned their bodies, and scattered their remains—was “National Socialism’s most demonic crime.”50 Forcing prisoners to assist SS terror was nothing new, and the more strenuous and disgusting the work, the keener the Camp SS usually was to leave it to prisoners. This rule applied, above all, to work in the crematoria. In Dachau, for example, the small cremation commando was made up of German, Russian, and Jewish prisoners. Some of them were expected to do more than burn bodies. Soon after the German prisoner Emil Mahl joined the Dachau commando in early 1944, he was forced to participate in executions. “As a walking corpse,” Mahl later testified, “I had to do horrible things here.”51
But nothing compared to the Special Squad in Auschwitz. Initially, just a handful of prisoners had worked in the old Auschwitz crematorium. But after Auschwitz turned into a death camp in 1942, the SS established a large, permanent prisoner commando at the Birkenau killing complex. Their work temporarily saved these inmates from extermination, though often not for long. While the SS did not murder all Special Squad members at regular intervals (as some survivors and historians suggest), there were selections just as elsewhere in the camp; weak and sick prisoners—sometimes as many as twenty or more a week—were killed with phenol injections in the infirmary. Moreover, the SS occasionally killed a proportion of the prisoners, to reduce the relative size of the Special Squad, during periods when fewer deportation trains arrived. In the end, only a few survived from 1942 through to 1945, among them the brothers Shlomo and Abraham Dragon, whom we encountered earlier.
Overall, more than 2,200 men were forced into the Auschwitz Special Squad during its existence. There were some Polish and German supervisors, like the chief Kapo August Brück. A German prisoner with a green triangle, Brück had worked in the Buchenwald crematorium from 1940, before the SS transferred him to Auschwitz in March 1943 to oversee the Special Squad at the newly built Birkenau crematoria; in contrast to some other supervisors, Kapo August, as the others called him, was regarded as decent (his privileges as a prominent prisoner could not protect him and he died of typhus in late December 1943). Almost all the rest of the Special Squad was made up of Jewish prisoners. They lived apart from the rest of the inmates, first in isolated blocks in Birkenau and later, from early summer 1944, on the grounds of the crematorium complex itself. Like other KL inmates thrown together as Jews, their backgrounds varied widely in terms of education, religion, and age; the oldest was in his fifties, the youngest not yet twenty. The men came from more than a dozen countries and often formed loose groups along national lines. Communication proved difficult across cultural and linguistic barriers, especially for those, like Greek Jews, who spoke neither Yiddish nor German, the two main languages used by the Special Squad prisoners.52
In a morbid twist of fate, it was the Jewish prisoners closest to the inferno of the Holocaust who enjoyed the best living conditions. Looking back in early November 1944 on his life in the Special Squad, in a secret letter to his wife and daughter that never reached them, the forty-three-year-old Chaim Herman, a Polish Jew, wrote that prisoners like him had everything but freedom: “I am very well dressed, housed and fed, I am in the best of health” (he was murdered by the SS three weeks later).53 The prisoners could help themselves to possessions left behind by those who had gone to the gas. They were dressed in warm clothes and proper underwear, and rarely suffered hunger. Among the effects of the dead, they found not only coffee and cigarettes, but delicacies from all across Europe: olives from Greece, cheese from Holland, goose meat from Hungary.54 And unlike other Jewish inmates in Auschwitz, Special Squad prisoners could move rather freely around their quarters. After the transfer to their new sleeping quarters under the roof of crematoria II and III, they had heated rooms, running water, and proper toilets—unimaginable luxuries for any other Jewish prisoners in the camp. Their quarters were furnished with the goods of the dead: tables covered with porcelain plates and tablecloths, and comfortable bedding and blankets on the bunks.55
The Special Squad prisoners also shared an unusual relationship with the SS, as working side by side inside the “death factory” created a certain bond. Prisoners still greatly feared the SS, and with good reason. But they built up personal relationships, which tended to lessen arbitrary violence. These prisoners were not part of a faceless mass but familiar to SS men by name. On some Sundays, when they were off-duty, the guards even played soccer against the prisoners, right by the crematorium. Other SS men and inmates watched, clapped, and shouted their support, Primo Levi wrote, “as if, rather than at the gates of hell, the game were taking place on the village green.”56
This close relationship with the SS only added to the loathing some other Jews in Auschwitz felt for the Special Squad. Its duties were widely known—details spread via the few non-Jewish Kapos, for example, who slept in regular barracks—and there was plenty of talk about its alleged brutality toward the doomed.57 There were also rumors that the SS selected on
ly the most violent criminals for the Special Squad. Such hostile feelings were summed up by two Slovakian Jews in 1944: the men of the Special Squad were shunned by others, they wrote, because they “stink terribly” and were “completely degenerate and incredibly brutal and ruthless.”58 Even some of the doomed, on their way to the gas chamber, called the Special Squad “Jewish murderer[s].”59 The indicted prisoners knew that they were infamous. When Filip Müller met his father in the Birkenau compound, he was too ashamed to admit that he was part of the Special Squad.60 The stigma remained after liberation and has not vanished even today.61
But we must remember that the Special Squad members were caught in a hell made by the SS. None of them had volunteered and many felt, at first, that they would be unable to adapt. “I thought I was going insane,” one survivor recalled. Initially, they often worked in a trance, like robots. In secret papers buried in a jar near crematorium III in autumn 1944, Salmen Lewental, a Polish student who had arrived in Auschwitz in December 1942 with his family, wrote that during his first day in the Special Squad “none of us were fully conscious.”62
The men selected for the Special Squad soon realized that their only options were obedience or death. A few committed suicide. Others were murdered for insubordination; when five Jewish inmates reported sick after their first day in the crematorium, sometime in 1943, the SS killed them straightaway. Even small mistakes could prove lethal; at least one prisoner “dentist” was burned alive by the SS for sabotage because he had overlooked a gold tooth inside a corpse’s mouth.63 Most prisoners chose to comply and to live, at least for the moment. In his secret notes, Salmen Lewental captured the anguish of the Special Squad in an existential cry: “And the truth is that one wants to live at any cost, one wishes to live, because one is alive, because the whole world is alive.”64
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 49