The barracks was still frightfully overcrowded — 750 prisoners were jammed into a space appropriate for perhaps 150. The empty shelves were allocated by squad, with four men to a shelf. When Fred climbed in, he realized that there was no way to lie face-up or face-down. He had to lie on his side, and the others had to do the same. If he wanted to turn over, everyone else had to shift to allow it. But the thing Fred disliked most was having to get in and out of his shelf during the night to use the abort. Except for those on the bottom shelf, it meant climbing down or climbing up shelves packed with sleeping airmen. After a trip to the abort, anyone climbing slapped feet coated with wet, stinking goo across the limbs, bodies, or faces of sleeping comrades. Fred, on the second level, could usually avoid tracking across those on the bottom tier. But those on the racks above invariably stepped on someone on their way down and back. The only solution was to change shelf positions at regular intervals. The top tier took the most effort to reach, but nobody ever stepped on your face. Even without the mess imported from the abort, there was filth in abundance within the overcrowded barracks, and the entire building was infested with rats, fleas, and lice. It was an ideal breeding ground for disease. Other prisoners were dying each day, and the bodies dragged to appell for counting before they were left by the abort for eventual pickup.
While they were settling into the barracks and for a long time thereafter, the bomb damage continued to draw curious dignitaries, military officers, and government officials. Fred heard that Lamason and Larson had seen the uniformed chief of the Weimar Police walking in the appellplatz with his entourage, and decided on the spur of the moment to confront him. They marched in front of the officer, a tall, heavyset man in his mid-40s, made a precise turn and snapped out crisp salutes. Lamason quickly explained that there were 168 allied airmen being held at Buchenwald illegally, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, and asked him to intervene on their behalf. Through another officer who acted as his translator, the chief said that he had heard rumors about the airmen, and that their situation was being investigated. To Fred, that assurance was much more encouraging than promises made by Schmidt or Pister.
A few days after they moved into the barracks, Fred and the others were ordered to assemble in the small appellplatz of Little Camp. Once the men had assembled, SS guards entered the compound escorting an SS officer, accompanied by uniformed assistants and prison laborers. The airmen were then ordered to remove their shirts.
It was heavily overcast, but fortunately not raining as the men stood in the cold wind. Two of the laborers walked slowly down the line. The first had a small cloth pad on a short wooden handle. At each airman, he dipped the cloth in a bucket carried by the second prisoner, and painted an X across the man’s chest. The X was a bright yellow-orange, but unlike their original swabbing, it was painless.
The SS officer79 followed close behind, carrying a stainless steel syringe that was probably intended for veterinary use. It was quite large (roughly 300 ml) and attached to a stout hypodermic needle that was probably 18-gauge. When abreast of an airman, he stopped, turned, and pushed the needle into the left side of the chest, close to the sternum. When fully inserted, he injected a portion of the contents of the syringe. The needle was then withdrawn, and the officer shifted to the next airman in line.
When the syringe was empty, the officer handed it to an SS assistant who refilled it from a large container, whereupon the process was repeated. It was difficult to stand there in formation, knowing what was coming, but Fred didn’t see that he had any other options. When the shot was given, it burned briefly but then faded to a dull ache. Once all of the airmen had received their injections, the SS team left Little Camp, and the assembly dispersed. Speculation ran wild over what they had received, but the airmen never learned what they had been given.
In his first week in the barracks, Fred met several of the SOE agents who had been picked up in France and delivered to Buchenwald only a week before the airmen arrived. There were 37 of them housed in Barracks 17, located a short distance away from Little Camp. Over time, most of the SOE agents visited Little Camp to spend time with the airmen, swapping stories and making friends. Fred enjoyed meeting them, and thought they would have been much easier to get along with in close quarters than Alex had been.
That week, Fred also learned what had become of the young gypsies when Kolchat Salazar, an English speaking prisoner who worked in the crematorium, began visiting Little Camp. Salazar, who said he was from California, reported that the gypsies had been executed at the firing range, and that their bodies were now stacked outside the crematorium. There was, Kolchat told them, an execution detail that operated in the basement of the crematorium. Kolchat’s job was to remove the clothing from bodies and extract any teeth that were gold-crowned or had gold fillings. The gold was melted down and added to the Reich’s coffers. He also checked the skin for any tattoos that might make interesting additions to the anatomy museum.
This was done in a satellite building, called the pathology lab, where death certificates were signed by the SS doctor on duty. The death certificates were often filled out without a glance at the corpse. “Shot while trying to escape” or “By order of the RSHA”80 were often listed as the cause of death. In a few instances, an SS doctor took the heads off the prisoners for preservation. In such cases, the doctor filled out a special form indicating what had been done, and Salazar had to ensure that the form accompanied the body to the crematorium. Everything, no matter how bizarre, had to be documented. He had been at this job for over a year, but he still found it difficult to believe. Fred was simply flabbergasted. He had never imagined that inhumanity could be so obsessively organized and bureaucratic.
On Sunday afternoons, kommandos were suspended, and the prisoners had their only really uplifting moments. At that time, the Buchenwald prisoner symphony gathered to perform in the appellplatz, with the music broadcast through the speakers in the camp. Fred welcomed the change in the music that played over the loudspeakers every other day. The music never changed and never paused, except when announcements were made. He had learned to associate that music with pain, abuse, and hard labor. It was wonderful to have it stop and be replaced by live music that was always new. He had never been a big fan of classical music, but he found himself deeply moved by the soaring melodies.
It was a brief window into life outside of what he had come to consider as hell on earth. There were dead bodies by the aborts, outside the hospitals, and by the barracks entrances; they arrived by the truckload from satellite camps, by wagon from the stone quarry, and by hand-carts from just about anywhere in the camp. The abused prisoners were immersed in violence and surrounded by death. The crematorium was running each and every day, and on calm days, the thick smoke belching from the smokestack blanketed the sodden camp like a shroud. What more would Hell offer? A barb-tailed Satan might be missing, but surely the SS men could fill the role of demons.
THE THIRD WEEK
Fred’s dysentery was wearing him down. Several times each day he hobbled on his bandaged, bloody feet to the abort. As more and more prisoners in the quarantine section of Little Camp were similarly afflicted, the lines grew and the waiting time extended. One morning when it was particularly long and the internal pressures acute, Fred decided to use the larger abort in the main portion of Little Camp. He easily talked his way out of “his” compound, and rushed to the nearby abort, and found an empty place at the far corner.
With a sigh of relief that was more like a groan, he balanced his posterior on the beam and let it go. As his wastes splattered down into the pit, he heard splashes and sensed movement below him. Startled, he glanced down to see a young man, his face slathered with waste, shifting away from Fred to crouch at the side of the tank. When Fred opened his mouth to call out, the man raised his right hand above the muck and put his finger across his lips, as if to say SSSHHH. Fred glanced around, but the prisoners seated nearby were staring straight ahead, clearly avoiding any glances in hi
s direction. Curious, Fred leaned forward as if straining to defecate, and asked the man in French what he was doing and if he needed help.
No help was needed or possible. The man was hiding from a kommando working at the stone quarry. The kapo at the quarry and the guard, SS-Oberscharführer (Sergeant) Baier, had singled him out for special treatment, kicking, punching, and clubbing him at every opportunity. He had seen this before — one or two prisoners were selected, abused repeatedly, and then executed while “trying to escape.” It was generally assumed that this was done to get the “killing bonus” (extra pay, sausages, liquor, and sometimes a Red Cross package) that would be split between the guard and the kapo.
He was sure that if he went to the quarry one more time, he would never return, so instead of heading off with the others that afternoon, he had snuck away. He had hidden in the cess pit ever since, out of sight from the entrance. At nightfall, when the abort was relatively empty and he’d be easily spotted from the entrance, he planned to hide among the pile of corpses. His tale told, the young man then asked Fred where he was from, and how he got to Buchenwald. Fred found it rather surreal to have a friendly, rational, otherwise normal conversation with a guy immersed in fetid goo.
When Fred left, he promised to return the next day and talk further. But when he returned, there was no sign of his new acquaintance. He strolled casually around the tank, surreptitiously looking for him, but to no avail. His activities did not go unnoticed, and one of the other prisoners approached Fred and asked with a wry look if he’d lost something. Interrupting Fred’s stammered reply, the man explained that late the previous afternoon, SS guards had entered Little Camp searching for a prisoner missing from his kommando. When they found him hiding in the abort, two of the guards took boards and pushed the man below the surface until he drowned. The guards were laughing the whole time. The body had yet to surface. Seeing Fred’s astonishment and dismay, the man merely shrugged and said that it had happened before.
On 13 September, Fred’s squad had the job of retrieving the morning coffee. At 0630, a team that included Fred, Sam, and two others left Little Camp and headed to the kitchen. They were almost to the entrance when they were approached by a burly SS sergeant with a kapo in tow. The airmen, by now well trained, immediately stopped, whipped off their caps, and stood at attention, their eyes lowered. The guard circled the group once, then asked in passable English if he was correct, that they were terrorfliegers from Little Camp. On getting the response he expected, he ordered Fred and Sam to leave the detail and come with him on a special duty.
Fred and Sam recognized him as the guard who had told the arriving airmen that the way out was through the smokestack.81 Following the guard with some trepidation, their unease increased when they realized that they were heading to the crematorium.
They were led along the brick wall, and entered the courtyard through a gate at the front of the building. As they entered, the first thing they saw was a tall pile of corpses to their left, stacked like cordwood near a side door to the main building. More bodies were piled on a corpse cart. Their minds were still wrestling with the implications of that pile as they were led to the side of the building, down a set of concrete steps, and through a door into the basement.
The guard walked ahead, but Fred and Sam stood frozen in place until they were pushed into the room by the kapo who was following them. They were standing in a small, open portion of the basement (the rest of the basement housed the crematorium furnaces). The room had unusually high ceilings. Two or three feet below the ceiling, 48 L-shaped hooks jutted out of the white plaster walls. But the stark decor was not the focus of their attention. What transfixed them was the sight of the bodies of prisoners dangling from many of those hooks. The room stank, and there were puddles of urine and dribbles of feces beneath many of the bodies.
In a daze, Fred did a quick count almost automatically, and realized that there were more than a dozen dangling bodies. They were hung by double loops, one around their neck and the other around a wall hook. Some of the loops were made of slender cords, others from heavy wire. The faces of the dead, grossly distorted and discolored, bore agonized expressions. Their hands were bound behind them, now pressed against the walls by their sagging body weight.
There was an SS officer in the room as well as a second SS guard and two green triangle prisoners (German criminals) who worked in the basement. The SS sergeant who had fetched them ordered them to each grab a leg of the closest body and lift it. As they complied, he used a short pole to slip the upper loop off the wall hook. After the body had been lowered to the floor, the SS officer, presumably a doctor, checked for a pulse while the guard removed the strangulation loop from the neck.
With Fred and Sam as one team and the two German prisoners as another, they repeated the process several times. The SS doctor moved between the prisoner teams, checking each body. If there was a stubborn sign of life, a crunching blow to the head from a wooden club wielded by a guard solved the problem.
Fred tried to blank his mind, tried not to think about what he was doing each time he wrapped his arms around a wet, cool, stinking thigh and pushed upward so that the loop could be freed. Each time he went through the motions, he felt the backs of his hands and arms scraping against sharp irregularities in the grimy plaster walls, but he simply ignored the sensation. His attention was more on the need to lift the weight and ignore the stabbing abdominal pain that would accompany the effort.
It wasn’t until the fourth body was being lowered to the floor that Fred noticed that the bound hands were bloody and the fingers raw. Glancing back at the wall, he saw bloody streaks a foot or so below eye level. The next time, as he and Sam were directed to the next dangling body, his detachment failed, and as he grabbed the prisoner’s thigh and began to lift, his eyes focused on the irregularities in the plaster that had been scratching his hands and forearms. Over a band at least a foot wide, the wall was carpeted with the broken pieces of fingernails torn from the hands of struggling prisoners as they slowly strangled. There were hundreds of these fragments below each hook, thousands in the room. How many deaths, how much agony, how much evil could one room contain?
The scale was overwhelming, and Fred was consumed by horror and loathing. He paused in mid-lift, leaning against the wall, his heart racing. Sam, uncertain as to what was happening, paused as well, with anxious glances at the guards. Fred, realizing the danger he was in, returned to the job at hand, but his mind was still reeling. By the time they lowered the last of the executed prisoners to the cold concrete floor, he was fighting back the dry heaves, much to the amusement of the guards. Fred knew even then that he’d be seeing that wall and the fingernails of countless unknown victims in his waking and sleeping moments for the rest of his life.
When the doctor left the basement, the two prisoner teams carried the bodies across the basement to an open steel elevator, like an enormous dumb-waiter. When the bodies were loaded, they pulled on the ropes to the pulley system that lifted the corpses to the ground floor, where they would be unloaded by other prisoners.
At last the job was done. The SS sergeant, smirking at Fred’s obvious discomfort, explained that he had wanted them to understand that this was what spies and terrorfliegers deserved, and that their turn was coming. He then ordered the kapo to escort them back to Little Camp, with the promise that he would be seeing them again very soon.
When they rejoined their squad, they were peppered with questions, but neither man was in the mood to talk. Fred just shook his head, and Sam mumbled something about telling them later. Fred went off and sat by himself, trying to absorb what had happened and what it meant. He had been raised as a Roman Catholic. He was never as devout as his sisters, who had wanted to be nuns until they discovered boys, but he had gone to church regularly. He had fervently prayed several times since being shot down — for his family, for his friends, and for his own future. Looking back over the last month, he saw all too clearly that prayers from Buchenwald weren
’t answered. He would never pray again.
Within a few hours, all of the airmen knew about the executions as Salazar, the prisoner working in the pathology lab, passed the word that many of the SOE agents had been escorted to the crematorium and executed in the strangling room. The execution order had come directly from Reichsführer Himmler’s office in Berlin.
THE FOURTH WEEK
On 17 September, at the end of his fourth week at Buchenwald, Fred saw the SS medical party approaching Little Camp. Fred, Sam, and many others were out in the open, and Fred was too exhausted to run. But many of the other airmen immediately scattered, and when Kindinger ordered an assembly, fewer than half of the airmen could be located. Fred stood midway along the first row of airmen, with Sam to his immediate left and Charles Roberson two spaces farther down the line. The SS doctor seemed annoyed that so few airmen had assembled. He spoke angrily to Kindinger, and his movements were abrupt.
Before reaching Fred, he broke the hypodermic needle when he missed the intended spot and buried the tip in the airman’s sternum. Cursing, he used a pair of pliers provided by an aide to extract the broken tip, remove the base of the needle, and screw on a replacement. He repeated the procedure, successfully this time, and moved on down the line.
Whether it was general inattention or some other factor, the doctor missed his mark again, slamming the needle into the edge of Fred’s sternum. Trying a different strategy, he first smacked his hand hard enough to drive the needle through the sternum. Once it was inserted far enough, he gave the injection before attempting to retrieve the needle by rotating and wiggling it while the orderlies braced Fred. The strategy failed — the hypodermic needle bent and broke just above the skin surface. With a pair of pliers, the doctor was able to extract the needle remnant from Fred’s chest. But when he removed the base of the needle from the syringe, he was told that they had run out of spare hypodermic needles. Shaking his head in disgust, the doctor marched off in a huff, and the ordeal was over.
Betrayed: Secrecy, Lies, and Consequences Page 17