Barracks were built near or on the grounds of the private companies, so that – along with the camps of the SS-owned companies – a network of more than thirty sub-camps or camps external to the concentration camp came into being. Ten of them were built in the second half of 1944, and the last in December 1944, in Hubertushütte. The Auschwitz camp network included not just the wide area around the town of Auschwitz, but the whole of Upper Silesia, and also the Sudetenland (with one external camp) and the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (with two).
The number of Auschwitz prisoners in the German munitions industry was constantly on the rise; while there were around 6,000 in 1942, the number had trebled within a year. By the middle of 1944 there were, including the forced labourers brought in by IG Farben, around 42,000 prisoners. In their own companies in Auschwitz the SS employed about 8,500 prisoners. The most important and biggest of these was Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke GmbH (German Equipment Company); the SS also ran the cement factory AG Golleschau, Deutsche Lebensmittel GmbH (German Food Company) and the Deutsche Erd-und Steinwerke GmbH (German Earth and Stoneworks). About half of the prisoners in SS companies, especially women, worked in the SS agricultural estate in the SS zone of interest, such as the Rajsko nursery, the Harmense fish and poultry breeding plant and in Babitz, Budy, Birkenau and Plawy, where sub-camps were also built; in addition, women worked in the demolition of buildings, building roads and digging ditches in the zone of interest.
Living and working conditions in the sub-camps were no better than they were in the other parts of the camp. Hunger, hard work and ruthless exploitation were a fact of everyday life. The inmates often worked for fifteen hours and more. Some sub-camps, including Blechhammer, Trzebinia, Lagischa and Jawischowitz, as well as the coalmines, were considered murderous for unskilled workers. Only qualified workers were slightly better off, since they were hard to replace and thus escaped being assigned from the outset to lethal work duties.
Until the administrative restructuring of the camp complex all the sub-camps, including Monowitz, were under the leadership of the administration of the parent camp. On 22 November 1943 the replacement of Commandant Rudolf Höss, the reasons for which are not precisely known, led to a change in the organization of the camp; Höss was succeeded by SS-Obersturmbannführer Arthur Liebehenschel. Höss took over his job as director of the headquarters of the SS Economic Administration Central Office in Berlin–Oranienburg, and he was thus promoted to the post of deputy to the inspector of concentration camps. With the change at the top of the administration, the camp area was divided into three administratively separate and autonomous complexes: Auschwitz I, the parent camp; Auschwitz II, i.e. Birkenau camp, which encompassed the SS’s own agricultural sub-camp, and was so vast that SS ‘protective custody camp leaders’ were employed for the individual camp sections; and Auschwitz III, the sub-camp conglomerate, the largest individual camp of which was Monowitz. Each of the three camps had its own SS administrative authority with a commandant at its head: Liebehenschel was commandant of the parent camp, and after his transfer to the same position at the Majdanek camp near Lublin he was succeeded in May 1944 by SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer. The commandant of Auschwitz–Birkenau was SS-Obersturmbannführer Friedrich Hartjenstein, and from May 1944 SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer. A further organizational turning point, in November 1944, saw the transformation of Monowitz into an autonomous concentration camp, from then on the administrative centre of all the sub-camps. The commandant of Auschwitz III, and later also of Monowitz as well as the sub-camps, was SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Schwarz.
The principle of ‘selection’
The regular removal of prisoners according to criteria of economic usefulness, which had at first been sporadically employed in the spring of 1942, became the rule from 4 July 1942. On that day the first selection of a whole transport began among Slovakian Jews. This date marks the beginning of systematic extermination. From now on the selection, made by SS doctors and other functionaries, determined whether prisoners lived or died. The victims included all those prisoners who were excluded from labour deployment because of their physical constitution: children, pregnant women, old people, sick people and the handicapped.
Those selected for work – in Auschwitz on average about 20 per cent of a prisoner transport – were exposed to the harshest conditions. In the arsenal of methods of killing, forced labour was only one means among others, labour deployment was only a synonym for a slower death. After an average of three to four months most of the prisoners forced to work were dead, having succumbed to beatings and hunger, weakness and inhuman living conditions.
‘Extermination through work’– the phrase appears in a letter from Reich Justice Minister Otto Georg Thierack to Himmler written on 18 September 1942– was not a concept programmatically developed and systematically put into action, but a stage in the murder programme: temporarily excused extermination were those who could work to make up for the labour shortage of the German Reich, which had become very striking since the German army’s crisis on the edge of Moscow. At the same time, high death-rates did not damage economic interests, because further supplies of employable workers were always guaranteed by the steady flow of prisoner transports to Auschwitz.
None the less, labour deployment was just as much aimed at realizing the racial dogma of physical extermination as were mass shootings and murder in the gas chambers – but in a form that was profitable to the economy of the German Reich. The labour deployment of prisoners was the result of racist policy, not contrary to it; not the antithesis of extermination but a bridge to mass murder.
4
Auschwitz the ‘model town’
The bulwark of the German presence in the East
If, belonging as it did to the ‘Eastern strip’, which was inferior from the point of view of territorial rights, Auschwitz had originally played a marginal part in the Nazi ‘Germanization policy’, its significance was fundamentally transformed in the spring of 1941 with the construction of the IG Farben plant. The town now enjoyed a peculiarly special status within the settlement of East Upper Silesia: Auschwitz was the ‘model of Eastern settlement’. The town became the ideal of economic annexation and racial selection, the future model of German rule in the conquered country, in short, a ‘bulwark of the German presence in the East’. The policy of linking industrialization, urban improvement and population restructuring was brutally driven forward. Not only in the spring of 1942, as was projected for the ‘Eastern strip’, but as early as April 1941 Jews were deported from the town of Auschwitz, the former Jewish collection point, and indigenous Poles were forced into their districts, with their poor infrastructural connections.
To encourage an entrepreneurial spirit and attract capital, as well as to tempt independent craftsmen, farmers and freelances to the East, the National Socialist state offered generous enticements in terms of finance and living conditions. There was the prospect of income tax relief, citizens’ tax was lower than it was in the Old Reich, and because of the ‘Eastern exemption’ there was hardly any property tax. There were also special terms for credit, as well as child benefit and marriage loans.
On 3 April 1941, the beginning of the week of Pesach, the mass deportation of the Jewish inhabitants of the town began – and continued for a whole week. Over the course of those days a ghostly procession was set in motion, from the Old Town towards the station. Five Reichsbahn trains were required to transport the Jews away; the old and the sick travelled on horse-drawn carts. The Jews were brought to large-scale collection points about 30 kilometres away; more than 3,000 went to Sosnowitz, and about 2,000 to Bendzin (Bendsburg). Those among them who were capable of work were handed over to the office responsible for Jewish forced-labour deployment in East Upper Silesia under SS-Brigadeführer Albrecht Schmelt.
The few Jews who lived in ‘mixed marriages’ with Catholics were at first allowed to remain in the town, as were the members of the Jewish Council, some fifty people in
all, who had to clear the Jewish apartments on behalf of the town’s German administration. Once they had finished doing that, however, they too were transported to the collection points. The cleared apartments were left locked and bolted for their future German inhabitants. The synagogue had already been destroyed by the Gestapo in November 1939, small Jewish prayer-houses in Auschwitz were now turned into storehouses, the hospital and other welfare institutions were closed. Within a short time the Jewish community had ceased to exist. The force of the intervention changed the town completely. The building of the IG Farben plant brought the tradition of the former ‘Oświęcim Jerusalem’, more than 700 years old, to an abrupt end. The plant managers were not to be cheated of the opportunity to witness the revolution that they had unleashed. Many of them lined the streets during the deportations, and it was certainly no coincidence that the founding session of the factory took place two days before they ended. Immediately after the transport of the Jews the town of Auschwitz broke away from the ‘Eastern strip’, inferior both racially and in terms of territorial rights, and the police border drawn within the town at the beginning of the war disappeared. Auschwitz received the same status as towns in the western, ‘racially valuable’ part of the Reich district of Kattowitz.
Nothing more is known about the fate of the Jews of Auschwitz. It is unclear how they lived in the collection centres of Sosnowitz and Bendzin, which were soon closed off into ghettos, and neither is it clear how many were later murdered in the camp at the gates of their own town. Finally, we do not know whether or to what extent the deportations were accompanied by a spirit of anti-Semitism. We have no information about the reactions of the town’s Polish inhabitants. Presumably they responded to the deportations with indifference. Apart from the social privileges enjoyed by IG Farben, Poles were also threatened with deportation as soon as they had finished serving as workers in the building of the factory. Since March 1941 they had also been vulnerable to the rigid legal and social system of the German Volksliste (‘ethnic list’), which reduced the social and political status of many of them after racial and ethnic investigation. The social status of the Poles depended on the degree of their individual capacity to ‘become German’ or ‘revert to being German’; Jews were excluded from this pattern from the outset. The Volksliste procedure, introduced by Himmler in the annexed Eastern regions, brought together nationality, the principle of descent and racial criteria. The purpose of the selection was to comb the Polish population for ‘people of German blood’, to preserve a ‘racially valuable’ asset for the German nation. The procedure distinguished between four ‘ethnic groups’ and ‘national’ political achievements, and on that basis four classes of nationality with different rights. This classification not only decided a person’s status, but also determined property rights, economic security and social position. Most of the Polish inhabitants of Auschwitz did not enjoy the social and legal superiority of the three Volksliste-classified groups, but were seen as so-called Schutzangehörige (‘protected dependants’),an inferior class separate from the Germans and without rights of any kind.
As a consequence of the deportations, by the spring of 1941 the town was half depopulated. Of the 7,600 inhabitants about 90 per cent were Poles, and the rest were German or of German descent. The governing class was formed of exactly 600 Reich Germans and ethnic Germans; they quickly established themselves as the beneficiaries of the revolution.
National Socialist plans for the future
At breakneck speed an industry-led urbanization policy began. Its goal was to modernize housing conditions in Auschwitz, in order to entice a qualified German workforce and its families out of the Old Reich. IG Farben saw the building of new houses and improved transport connections as the most important conditions for the fulfilment of their racial task.
The factory management’s interest was concentrated on comfortable accommodation and quality of life, and nothing repelled them as much as the state of the streets and houses. The staff arriving in the supposedly culturally backward town were to find well-equipped and child-friendly apartments as well as all kinds of sport and leisure institutions. The plan to conjure up a modern town with public buildings, extensive transport connections and many green spaces was based on the arbitrary exercise of power and delusions of grandeur. None the less many plans were worked out to the smallest detail, and some of them were actually realized. A number of different agencies were authorized to contribute to the Reich housing policy, and many of these sent representatives to Auschwitz, where they spent days and weeks discussing designs, visiting locations and rebuilding the town. The concentration camp, later an extermination camp, clearly disturbed no one, either aesthetically or politically. The close connection between the town and the IG Farben factory was characteristic of the redesign of Auschwitz. The town became dependent on IG Farben, relying on it for the supply of electricity and heating, and even the water came from the factory well.
As the major financier of the town’s modernization, IG Farben bore the costs not only of the factory’s own ‘staff estate’, but also for the urbanization of ‘Auschwitz the residential town’. The Reich authorities supported the plan with generous loans. The company put in its own capital and had considerable influence on the new building plans. Its own company, Gewoge, responsible for building the housing of the factory employees, shared the organization and financing of the projects with Neue Heimat (‘New Homeland’), which had a branch in Kattowitz and was responsible, on behalf of the German Labour Front, for building housing in the town. The plans reflected a high level of technology and ‘modernity’: 1,600‘people’s dwellings’, as they were called, were planned at first, each between 60 and 90 square metres in area, and also single-family houses and maisonettes with vegetable gardens and garages. Central heating and a hot-water supply were just as natural a part of domestic comfort as heating and gas technology, and each house had a laundry. The plans were constantly extended, projects tirelessly expanded, and several hundred apartments in the ‘IG staff estate’ were actually built; now they are part of the ‘chemists’ estate’ of Oświęcim.
The Reich ministries, including the Reich Ministry of Labour and the Reich Ministry of Economy, placed large amounts of money at the disposal of the ‘model settlement town’ of Auschwitz. Almost every single application for state subsidy was accepted, and almost all the ‘Old Town renovation measures’ were put through – and this in the middle of the war and despite all state economy drives. Like the IG Farben plant, all the town-building measures were given the highest level of urgency in the grant hierarchy of the general plenipotentiary for house-building. Construction was never halted in Auschwitz, and the flow of money was never interrupted.
The chief figure in the modernization of the town was Hans Stosberg, a qualified architect and business director of an architectural office in Breslau. At the end of December 1940 he had been given the job, by the district planning department of Upper Silesia, of drawing up plans for the reorganization and development of Auschwitz. As head architect of the ‘model settlement town’, Stosberg was given extensive powers: he negotiated on behalf of the municipality with IG Farben, as well as the regional and super-regional authorities. Stosberg, who designed countless plans and maquettes for Auschwitz, devoted himself to the new building project and realized his vision of modern town planning. With a grand sense of historical purpose, and inspired by the racial task before him, he was no more repelled than anyone else by the concentration and extermination camp. For New Year 1942 he sent greetings cards with the proud statement: ‘Birth of the new German town of Auschwitz’.
Stosberg’s plans represented the powerful self-image of the Nazi regime. Following the principle of the ‘urban landscape’, which was for Himmler the ‘leading formal and aesthetic idea of the time’, Auschwitz was to become the model of the National Socialist ‘ethnic community’ in terms of town planning as well. Stosberg planned for the town to be divided into cell-shaped districts with monumental comm
unity buildings, parade grounds, showpiece buildings and Party assembly rooms, with homes for the Hitler Youth, leisure amenities and local Party meeting rooms. He planned an imposing avenue with wide rows of houses branching off it. Monstrous ideas were set out on the drawing board. Whole satellite towns and new districts were planned. A straight road from the station through the middle of the Old Town to the IG Farben factory would require the removal of the sixteenth-century Catholic church of the Assumption. The lack of proportion evident in these projects (which were only partially realized) is apparent in the plans for the public institutions: Stosberg planned twelve schools, six kindergartens, twenty playing-fields and several additional stadiums with swimming-pools and playing-fields. The centre of the town was Alt-Auschwitz (‘Old Auschwitz’), with government offices, banks, shops and the market square. With Neustadt-Ost and Neustadt-West (‘New Town East/West’), autonomous town centres would arise, with Party buildings, wide roads, the SS estate and a housing estate for employees of the Reichsbahn. And if the town could not accommodate the building projects, there were two ‘reserve zones’ available in the neighbouring parishes of State-Stawy and Zaborze.
The Jewish quarter of the town of Auschwitz had ceased to exist in the plans. The Jewish cemetery, which had been abandoned since the deportation of the Jews, was to make way for a Party building with a hotel, a cinema and a restaurant. The gravestones had already been used for road-building at the beginning of the redevelopment. In his maquette the chief architect grouped around the nucleus of the Old Town, according to Stosberg the ‘symbol of the medieval German settler spirit’, the Piast castle, the market square and the town hall. In his drawings, the town centre was adorned with leafy Silesian lanes, and there were even a fountain in the marketplace and lime trees, and a little tower on top of the town hall.
Auschwitz: A History Page 5