Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora
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shortly after the war, when his memory of events was most vivid.
An atheist like Levi, he therefore did not situate his traumatic experience in terms of theodicy, as did Wiesel. Like Levi’s The Reawakening, Mr. Berg recounts his odyssey back to civilization and his not-altogether-pleasant encounters with Soviet troops. One strik-ing feature of this account absent in Levi’s and Wiesel’s writings is Mr. Berg’s unmistakable cynicism. 9
In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess one reservation about this account. Mr. Berg insists that he saw Reichsfu¨hrer SS Heinrich Himmler at I.G. Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. No known primary source verifies this claim. Himmler’s recorded visits took place on 1 March 1941 and 17 July 1942. Himmler’s first visit concerned the expansion of Auschwitz, in order to meet the labor needs of the I.G. Farben plant, which had yet to break ground. The second combined an inspection of the I.G. construction site with a tour of the Birkenau killing center, then not yet the center of industrial mass murder it was to become in 1943 and 1944. It is likely that in 1944 Mr. Berg saw one of Himmler’s many doppelga¨ngers.10
The following comments are intended to set Mr. Berg’s memoirs in the context of the Nazi concentration camp system and the I.G. Farben project at Auschwitz.
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When Pierre Berg entered Auschwitz-Monowitz in January 1944, the Nazi concentration camps had been operational for almost eleven years. The history of the concentration camps can be divided into six phases, each tied to the Nazi regime’s changing political or military fortunes. Mr. Berg entered the camps during their fifth phase (1942–1944). In the first (1933–1934), the concentration and
‘‘protective custody’’ ( Schutzhaft) camps contributed to the Nazi Seizure of Power, and to the subsequent ‘‘synchronization’’ ( Gleich-schaltung) of German society. The Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS or Protective Corps) established one of the first concentration camps at Dachau in March 1933 and the Storm Troopers ( Sturmabteilungen, 284
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or SA) created ad hoc camps in many localities. After 1933 the total camp population declined drastically because of amnesties. It consisted mainly of political prisoners, especially communists and socialists. Career criminals newly released from prison also appeared in the early camps. During the first phase, Dachau became the model camp when its second commandant, Theodor Eicke, established severe regulations for the permanent SS camps. In July 1934, Eicke became the first Inspector of Concentration Camps (IKL), after playing a key role in the purge of leading SA members during the ‘‘Night of the Long Knives.’’ The IKL’s establishment ushered in the camps’ second phase, 1934 to 1936, when most remaining early camps were closed and Eicke practiced what historian Michael Thad Allen terms ‘‘the primacy of policing’’: camp labor was supposed to be torture that served no rational end.11
The third phase of Nazi concentration camps took place from 1936 to 1939. This period saw first the limited and then mass expansion of the camps, with the establishment of Sachsenhausen (1936), near the site of the former early camp of Oranienburg, Buchenwald (1937), Mauthausen (1938), Flossenbu¨rg (1938), and finally Ravensbru¨ck women’s camp (1939). The last early camps, including Esterwegen and Sachsenburg, closed at this time. ‘‘Asocials,’’ who allegedly avoided work, engaged in prostitution, or whose behavior otherwise fell short of the ideal ‘‘national comrade,’’ were targeted for mass arrest in 1937. Also in 1937, the camp authorities established a standardized triangle system for the entire camp system, which indicated the reason for arrest on the prisoner’s striped uniform. As described by Buchenwalder and sociologist Eugen Kogon, this system fueled bitter prisoner rivalries and thus served the SS objective of divide et impera. A red triangle symbolized political detainees; green, career criminals; purple, Jehovah’s Witnesses; black, ‘‘asocials’’; blue, Jewish emigrants; and pink, homosexuals. Jewish detainees were identified by combining a yellow triangle with an above-listed arrest category in the form of a Star of David. The first mass influx of Jews into the camps occurred in the second phase, with the temporary arrests of tens of thousands of AFTERWORD
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Jewish men following the November 1938 pogrom, misleadingly known as ‘‘The Night of Broken Glass’’ ( Kristallnacht).12
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-Brigadefu¨hrer Richard Glu¨cks became the new Inspector. An ineffectual, colorless individual, Glu¨cks did little to stamp an imprint upon IKL. With war’s outbreak, the Gestapo immediately dispatched political oppo-nents 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 prote´geś 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, Reichsfu¨hrer-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 Ho¨ss, transferred a small 286
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number of hardened German criminals from his previous assignment at Sachsenhausen to serve as camp trusties. An ‘‘Eicke School’’ commandant, Ho¨ss 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 counteroffen-sives 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 mo-bilization of foreign workers under Fritz Sauckel, and the deploy-ment of camp labor in private German industry under the SS
Business Administration Main Office (SS- Wirtschafts Verwaltungs-hauptamt, 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 un-tapped 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
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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 Hu¨ls 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 288
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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 Go¨ring, ordered the firm to utilize Auschwitz prisoners in the construction of the war plant. Go¨ring’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 Fu¨hrer’s decisions AFTERWORD
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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 Go¨ring, 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 Ausru¨stungswerke), 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, Ho¨ss responded by quarantining the camps and murdering the infected. The epidemics were directly attribut-able 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 290
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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 Muselma¨nner, 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 c
amp 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 AFTERWORD
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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.