by Rudolf Hoess
The camp was a picture of wretchedness. The barracks and the storerooms and even the guards’ quarters were completely neglected. Sanitary conditions were far worse than at Auschwitz.
By the end of 1944 it was no longer possible to do much in the way of building, although I managed to extract a most capable architect from Kammler. We could only patch up and improvise. Despite all his efforts, Kramer was not able to rectify the results of Haas’s negligence. Thus when Auschwitz was evacuated, and a large proportion of the prisoners came to Bergen-Belsen, the camp was at once filled to overflowing and a situation arose which even I, accustomed as I was to Auschwitz, could only describe as dreadful. Kramer was powerless to cope with it. Even Pohl was shocked when he saw the conditions, during our lightning tour of all the concentration camps which the Reichsführer SS had ordered us to undertake. He at once commandeered a neighboring camp from the army so that there would at least be room to breathe, but conditions there were no better. There was hardly any water, and the drains simply emptied into the adjoining fields. Typhus and spotted typhus were rampant. A start was immediately made on the building of mud huts, to provide additional accommodation.[91]
But it was all too little and too late. A few weeks after our visit the prisoners from Mittelbau began to arrive, so it was little wonder that the British found only dead or dying or persons stricken with disease, and scarcely a handful of healthy prisoners in a camp that was in an unimaginably disgusting condition.[92]
The war, and above all the war in the air, produced a cumulative effect on all the camps. Each new shortage as it appeared caused a further deterioration in their general condition. The building of work camps in connection with important armaments projects—always rush jobs—suffered particularly on account of such shortages and dislocations.
The air war and the bombing attacks on the armaments factories caused countless deaths among the prisoners. Although the Allies did not attack any concentration carnp, as such, that is to say the actual protective custody camp, yet prisoners were employed in all the more important war factories. They thus shared the fate of the civilian population.
From the beginning of the intensified air offensive in 1944, not a day passed without casualty reports being received from the camps as a result of air raids. I cannot give a rough estimate of the total number, but it must have run into many thousands. I myself lived through plenty of air attacks, usually not in the safety of a “hero’s cellar.” Attacks of unprecedented fury were made on factories where prisoners were employed. I saw how the prisoners behaved, how guards and prisoners cowered together and died together in the same improvised shelters, and how the prisoners helped the wounded guards.
During such heavy raids, all else was forgotten. They were no longer guards or prisoners, but only human beings trying to escape from the hail of bombs.
I myself have passed unscathed, though often badly shaken, through countless raids. I have seen the bombs rain down on Hamburg and Dresden and often on Berlin. I once escaped certain death during an accident in Vienna. On the journeys which formed part of my duties, my train was often subjected to low-level air attack. The Economic Administration Head Office and the Reich Security Head Office were repeatedly hit with bombs, but were always patched up again. Neither Müller nor Pohl would let themselves be driven out of their offices. The homeland too, or at any rate the larger towns, had become the front line. The total number of lives lost as a result of the air war can certainly never be calculated. In my estimate it must be several millions.[93]
The casualty figures were never made known, and were always kept strictly secret.
I am constantly reproached for not having refused to carry out the Extermination Order, this gruesome murder of women and children. I have given my answer at Nuremberg: what would have happened to a group captain who refused to lead an air attack on a town which he knew for certain contained no arms factory, no industrial plant of value to the war effort, and no military installations? An attack in which he knew for sure that his bombs must kill principally women and children? He would surely have been court-martialed. People say that this is no comparison. But in my opinion the two situations are comparable. I was a soldier and an officer, just as was that group captain. Some say that the Waffen-SS was not a military organization, but a kind of party militia. However, we were just as much soldiers as were the members of the other three armed services.
These perpetual air attacks were a heavy burden on the civilian population and especially on the women. The children were evacuated to remote districts, free from the threat of air raids. The effect was not only physical—the whole life in the big towns was thrown into confusion—but also and to a very great extent psychological.
Careful observation of the faces and the demeanor of the people in the public shelters or in the cellars of their homes revealed their mounting nervousness and fear of death, as the onslaught approached and the bomb carpet came closer. How they clung to each other, wives seeking the protection of husbands, as whole buildings shook or began to collapse.
Even Berliners, who are not so easily got down, were in the end worn out. Day after day and night after night their nerves were strained in the cellars and shelters.
This war of nerves, this psychological battering, could not have been borne by the German people for very much longer.
I have sufficiently described the activities of Department DI, the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, in my description of the departmental heads and of the various officials.[94]
I have nothing to add to these portraits.
Would the concentration camps have been organized differently under another inspector? I think probably not. For nobody, however energetic and strong-willed, could have dealt with the conditions created by the war, and none could have successfully opposed the inflexible will of the Reichsführer SS. No SS officer would have dared to act against, or to circumvent, the intentions of the Reichsführer SS. Even when the concentration camps were being created and set up by a man as strong-willed as Eicke, the voice of the Reichsführer SS was always the real and decisive power behind him.
The concentration camps became what they were during the war entirely and solely because such was the intention of the Reichsführer SS. It was he who issued the directives to the Reich Security Head Office, and he alone could do so. The Reich Security Head Office was a purely executive body. I firmly believe that not a single important large-scale action by the Security Police was inaugurated without the prior approval of the Reichsführer SS. In most cases he was both the proposer and the instigator of such actions. The entire SS was the tool which Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS, used in order to realize his will.
The fact that from 1944 on he had to compete with a force stronger than himself, namely the war, in no way affects the truth of this statement.
During my official tours of the arms factories where prisoners were employed, I obtained an insight into our armaments production. I saw, and also heard from the works managers, a great deal that truly astounded me. Especially in the airplane industry. From Maurer, who often had to deal with the Armaments Ministry, I heard of delays that could never be made good, of large-scale failures, of mistakes in planning which took months to put right. I knew of cases where well-known and important figures in the armaments industry were imprisoned and even executed, because of failure. This gave me a lot to think about.
Although our leaders were continually talking about new inventions and new weapons, these produced no visible results in the actual conduct of the war. In spite of our new jet fighters, the weight of the enemy air offensive continued to increase. A few dozen fighter squadrons were all we had to send up against streams of bombers consisting of anything up to two and a half thousand heavy machines.
Our new weapons were in production and had even been tested in action. But to win the war, a new system of armaments production must be created. Whenever a factory was mass-producing a finished article at full speed, it was likely
to be leveled to the ground in the space of a few minutes. The transfer underground of the factories manufacturing the “decisive” weapons was not envisaged before 1946 at the earliest. Even then nothing would be accomplished, because the supply of raw materials and the removal of the finished product would, as before, be at the mercy of the enemy air force.
The best example of this was the manufacture of V-weapons at Mittelbau. The bombers destroyed the whole of the permanent system of roads within miles of the workshops hidden in the mountains. Months of painstaking work were thus rendered vain. The heavy V-1s and V-2s were immobilized in the hillsides. No sooner were temporary tracks laid than they, too, were destroyed.
By the end of 1944 it was the same story everywhere.
The Eastern front was continuously being “withdrawn” and the German soldier in the East no longer stood firm. The Western front, too, was being forced back.
Yet the Führer spoke of holding firm at all costs. Goebbels spoke and wrote about believing in miracles. Germany will conquer!
For my part I had grave doubts whether we could win the war. I had seen and heard too much. Certainly we could not win this way. But I dared not doubt our final victory, I must believe in it. Even though sturdy common sense told me plainly and unambiguously that we must lose. My heart clung to the Führer and his ideals, for those must not perish.
My wife often asked me during the spring of 1945, when everyone saw that the end was coming: “How on earth can we win the war? Have we really got some decisive weapon in reserve?” With a heavy heart I could only say that she must have faith, for I did not dare tell what I knew. I could not discuss with anyone what I knew, and what I had seen and heard. I am convinced that Pohl and Maurer, who both saw more than I did, had the same thoughts as I. But no one dared talk about this to anyone else. This was not so much because they feared being charged with spreading despondency, as because nobody wished to believe what he knew was in fact the truth. It was impossible that our world should perish. We bad to win.
Each of us worked on with bitter determination, as though victory depended on our labors. And when, in April, the Oder front collapsed, we devoted the greatest effort to keeping the prisoners at full pitch in the war factories that still remained to us. We used every means in our power. We even considered turning out emergency war materials in our extremely primitive substitute camps. Any man in our sphere who neglected his work on the grounds that it did not matter any more was roughly dealt with. Maurer wished a member of his staff brought before an SS court-martial on this account, even though Berlin was already encircled and we were preparing to pull out.
I have referred on many occasions to the mad evacuation of the concentration camps.
The scenes I saw, and which resulted from the evacuation order, made such an impression on me that I shall never forget them.
When Pohl received no further reports from Baer during the evacuation of Auschwitz, he sent me posthaste to Silesia to put matters in order. I first found Baer at Gross-Rosen, where he was making preparations for the reception of the prisoners.[95]
He had no idea where his camp might be wandering. The original plan had had to be scrapped because of the Russian push to the south. I immediately drove on, in the hope of reaching Auschwitz in time to make sure that the order for the destruction of everything important had been properly carried out. But I was only able to get as far as the Oder, near Ratïbor, for the Russian armored spearheads were already fanning out on the far side of that river.
On all the roads and tracks in Upper Silesia west of the Oder I now met columns of prisoners, struggling through the deep snow. They had no food. Most of the noncommissioned officers in charge of these stumbling columns of corpses had no idea where they were supposed to be going. They only knew that their final destination was Gross-Rosen. But how to get there was a mystery. On their own authority they requisitioned food from the villages through which they passed, rested for a few hours, then trudged on again. There was no question of spending the night in barns or schools, since these were all crammed with refugees. The route taken by these miserable columns was easy to follow, since every few hundred yards lay the bodies of prisoners who had collapsed or been shot. I directed all the columns I could reach to go westward, into the Sudetenland, so as to avoid the, incredibly chaotic bottleneck near Neisse. I gave strict orders to the men in charge of all these columns that they were not to shoot prisoners incapable of further marching. They were to hand them over in the villages to the Volkssturm.[96]
During the first night, on the road near Leobschütz, I constantly came upon the bodies of prisoners who had just been shot, and which were therefore still bleeding. On one occasion, as I stopped my car by a dead body, I heard revolver shots quite near. I ran toward the sound, and saw a soldier in the act of stopping his motorcycle and shooting a prisoner leaning against a tree. I shouted at him, asking him what he thought he was doing, and what harm the prisoner had done him. He laughed impertinently in my face, and asked me what I proposed to do about it. I drew my pistol and shot him forthwith. He was a sergeant major in the air force.
Every now and then I also met officers from Auschwitz, who had managed somehow or other to get hold of a vehicle, I posted them at crossroads to collect these wandering columns of prisoners, and move them westward, eventually perhaps by train. I saw open coal trucks, loaded with frozen corpses, whole trainloads of prisoners who had been shunted onto open sidings and left there without food or shelter. Then again there were groups of prisoners, often without guards, who had escaped or whose guards had simply vanished. They too were making their way peacefully westward. I also met unaccompanied British prisoners of war doing the same: they were determined on no account to fall into the hands of the Russians. I saw SS men and prisoners huddled together on the refugees’ vehicles. I came upon columns of construction workers and agricultural laborers. No one knew where he was trying to go. Gross-Rosen was the final destination of them all. There was deep snow at the time and it was very cold. The roads were blocked by army and air force columns, and by the crowds of refugees. The slippery surface caused innumerable car accidents.
Beside the roads were not only dead prisoners, but also refugees, women and children. Outside one village I saw a woman sitting on a tree stump and singing to her child as she rocked it in her arms. The child had been dead for a long time and the. woman was mad. Many women struggled through the snow pushing baby carriages stacked high with their belongings. They had only one aim, to get away and not fall into the hands of the Russians.
Gross-Rosen was crammed to overflowing. Schmauser had already arranged for it to be evacuated.[97]
I traveled to Breslau to tell him what was happening and to urge him to stop the evacuation. He showed me the radio message from the Reichsführer SS which made him responsible for seeing that not a single healthy prisoner remained in any camp under his authority.
At the railroad station in Gross-Rosen the transports coming in were immediately sent on. Only the smallest ones could be fed. Gross-Rosen itself had no more food.
Dead SS men lay peacefully in the open cars between dead prisoners. Those still alive sat on top of them, chewing their piece of bread. Terrible scenes, best not described.
I lived through the evacuation of Sachsenhausen and of Ravensbrück. The scenes were the same here. By good fortune it was warmer and dry, so the columns could sleep in the open. But after two or three days there was no food left. The Red Cross helped by distributing food parcels. There was no more food to be found in the villages, through which columns of refugees had been passing for weeks on end. In addition there was the constant menace of low-flying planes, which systematically shot up every road.
Until the very end I tried my utmost to bring some order into this chaos. But it was all in vain. We ourselves had to flee. Since the end of 1944 my family had been living in the immediate neighborhood of Ravensbrück. I was therefore able to take them with me when the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps move
d himself. We went first of all toward the Darss,[98] then after two days we headed for Schleswig-Holstein. All this was in accordance with the orders of the Reichführer SS. What we were supposed to do for him, or what duties we were still intended to perform, we could not imagine. I had to look after Frau Eicke and her daughter and children, and several other families too, and see that they did not fall into the hands of the enemy. Our flight was a gruesome journey. We traveled by night, without lights, along roads crowded with vehicles moving bumper to bumper. I had to be constantly on the lookout to see that all our trucks remained together, for I was responsible for the whole column. Glücks and Maurer took another route, via Warnemunde. In Rostock two of my large trucks containing all the radio equipment broke down, and by the time they were repaired the enemy tanks had nabbed them. For days on end we scurried from one clump of trees to the next, for the enemy’s low-flying planes were continually machine-gunning this principal escape route.
In Wismar Keitel himself stood in the street, arresting deserters from the front. On the way we heard in a farmhouse that the Führer was dead.
When we heard this, my wife and I were simultaneously struck by the same thought: now we, too, must go! With the Führer gone, our world had gone. Was there any point in going on living? We would be pursued and persecuted wherever we went. We wanted to take poison. I had obtained some for my wife, lest she and the children fall alive into the hands of the Russians in the event of their making an unexpected advance.
Nevertheless, because of the children, we did not do this. For their sake we wanted to take on our own shoulders all that was coming. But we should have done it. I have always regretted it since. We would all have been spared a great deal, especially my wife and the children. How much more suffering will they have to endure? We were bound and fettered to that other world, and we should have disappeared with it.