The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

  One hundred and eighty-seven prisoners were selected, variously classed as mentally handicapped, blind, deaf-mute or disabled, including some injured by accidents or abuse. They were told that they would be going to a special recuperation camp, where they would be properly looked after and allotted easy work in textile factories. The prisoners were suspicious, but many – especially those most in need of care – chose to believe the hopeful lies. Transports came and collected the 187 men. ‘One morning, their effects came back,’ wrote Gustav. The grim delivery included clothing, prosthetic limbs and spectacles. ‘Now we know what game is being played: all of them gassed.’ They were the first of six transports of prisoners murdered under Action 14f13.

  At the same time, Commandant Koch began an ancillary programme: the elimination of prisoners carrying tuberculosis. SS-Doctor Hanns Eisele was in charge. A virulent anti-Semite, Eisele was known to the prisoners as the Spritzendoktor – Injection Doctor – because of his keenness to dish out lethal injections to sick or troublesome Jews. He was also known as White Death,23 using prisoners for vivisection for his own personal edification, administering experimental injections and unnecessary surgery – even amputations – and then murdering the victims.24 He would be remembered as perhaps the most evil doctor ever to practise at Buchenwald.

  The scheme began when two large transports arrived carrying prisoners from Dachau. Five hundred were diagnosed with tuberculosis – on the basis of general appearance rather than a proper medical examination – and sent to the infirmary. There they were immediately killed by Dr Eisele with injections of the sedative hexobarbital.25

  Within a few months, the character of Buchenwald had altered irrevocably. From now on, anything which weakened a man – any injury, sickness or disability – was as good as a death sentence. Such things had always carried a severe risk, but now it became a stone certainty that being rated unfit for work or ‘unworthy of life’ automatically put a man’s name on an extermination list.

  And then the first Soviet prisoners of war arrived, and yet another new door opened into another new department of hell.

  In the Nazi mind, Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same – Jews, they claimed, had created and spread communism, and now ran it alongside the global capitalist conspiracy which they were also, contradictorily, alleged to be running.26 This mythology had inspired the invasion of the USSR and a campaign of murder, with death squads following the army and slaughtering Jews in their tens of thousands. Captured Red Army soldiers, hundreds of thousands of whom had been rounded up in the first weeks of the invasion, were treated as subhuman – if not Jews, then the thralls of Jews: degenerate and dangerous. Political commissars, fanatical communists, intellectuals and Jews were singled out for immediate disposal. The task couldn’t be accomplished in the POW camps because of the risk of spreading panic among the bulk of the prisoners; thus the SS decided to use the concentration camps. The programme was codenamed Action 14f14.27

  בן

  On a day in September, Fritz stood at roll call in the column with the other block 17 men. His papa stood with the men of his barrack in another part of the square.28 It was like every one of the hundreds of other roll calls they had stood through. The tedious progression of numbers and answers; the announcements; the round of routine punishments … and then, something entirely unprecedented.

  That day, the first transport of Soviet prisoners of war had arrived in Buchenwald. They were a small batch: just fifteen lost, frightened men in tattered Red Army uniforms. Fritz watched curiously as Sergeant Abraham (Philipp Hamber’s killer) and four other guards surrounded the Russians and marched them off the square. Several thousand pairs of eyes followed them as they went. At the same time, the camp orchestra sat tuning up. On an order from the podium, they began to play the Buchenwald Song.

  The routine of roll-call singing was so ingrained that Fritz and his comrades opened their mouths and gave voice without thinking:

  ‘When the day awakens, ere the sun smiles,

  The gangs march out to the day’s toils …’

  Straining his eyeballs, Fritz watched the Russians being force-marched past the crematorium towards the section of the camp occupied by a small factory – the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke (DAW), whose prisoner workforce manufactured military equipment for the German army – beyond which was an SS shooting range. The POWs and their guards passed out of sight.

  ‘And the forest is black and the heavens red,

  In our packs we carry a scrap of bread,

  And in our hearts, in our hearts, just sorrow.’

  Thousands of voices roared over the camp, almost but not entirely drowning out the volleys of shots from beyond the factory.

  The Russian soldiers were never seen again. A couple of days later, another thirty-six Soviet POWs were brought to the camp, and again the prisoners had to sing to drown out the gunshots.

  ‘They say they were commissars,’ Gustav wrote, ‘but we know everything … How we feel is not to be described – now shock is piled upon shock.’

  This method of execution proved too inefficient to handle the large numbers of Russians the SS wished to dispose of. Thus, while small groups were being murdered on the shooting range, a new facility was being prepared. In the woods near the road to the quarry, the SS had a disused stable building, in which a team of carpenters from the construction detail were hard at work. The facility was codenamed Commando 99, and its purpose, though secret, would soon become apparent.29 At the same time, three barrack blocks in the corner of the main camp were fenced off, forming a special enclosure for Soviet POWs, who began to arrive in their thousands.30

  Each day, Russians selected for liquidation were taken in groups to Commando 99, where they were told they would undergo a medical inspection. They were led, one at a time, through a series of rooms filled with medical paraphernalia and staffed by men in white coats. The prisoner’s teeth were examined, his heart and lungs listened to, his eyesight tested. Finally he was led into a room with a measuring scale marked on the wall. Obscured by the scale was a narrow slit at neck-height, behind which was a concealed room in which stood an SS man armed with a pistol. While the prisoner was being measured, the attendant tapped on the partition, and the hidden guard shot the prisoner in the back of the neck.31 Throughout the building, loud music drowned out the sounds of the shots, and while the next victim was being brought through, the previous prisoner’s blood was hosed off the floor.

  Fritz and Gustav and all their fellow prisoners knew perfectly well the nature of the ‘adjustments’ (as the SS officially called the executions) being carried out in the old stable.32 The carpenters who had converted the building were Fritz’s workmates. Lorryloads of Russians arrived daily and disappeared; and everyone saw the closed van driving up the hill from Commando 99, dribbling trails of blood along the road and across the square to the crematorium. After a while, the van was fitted with a metal-lined container to prevent leakage. The crematorium couldn’t cope with the numbers, and mobile ovens had to be brought up from Weimar; they were parked on the edge of the roll-call square, incinerating the bodies right in front of the other prisoners.33

  ‘Meanwhile the shootings continue,’ Gustav recorded.

  אחים

  Surely one must finally lose the ability to be appalled? It must get worn down like a stone with the passage of use, blunted like a tool, numbed like a limb. One’s moral sense must scar and harden under an unending series of lacerations and bruises.

  For some, perhaps that was so; for others, the opposite was true. Even some of the SS could only withstand so much. The camp guards all had to take turns handling the victims in Commando 99 and wielding the pistol, and found that continuous, orchestrated butchery was not the same as the sporadic murders they were accustomed to. Many revelled in it; they saw themselves as soldiers, and these killings were their contribution to the war against Bolshevik Jewry, but others were broken by it, and tried to avoid duty in Commando 99; some fainted when faced
with the carnage or suffered mental breakdowns; a few worried that if word got out – as it inevitably would – it could lead to retaliation against captured German troops by the NKVD, the Soviet Gestapo.34

  For the Buchenwald prisoners, all of whom were witnesses to Action 14f14 and some of whom were forced participants in the cleaning-up, the effect was corrosive and traumatic. And it was far from being the end.

  At the end of 1941, prisoners began to be subjected to lethal medical experiments designed to develop vaccines for German troops.

  Everyone knew that something was afoot when they fenced off block 46 – one of the two-storey stone-built barracks near the vegetable gardens. After roll call one winter’s day, the adjutant produced a list and stood surveying the massed ranks of prisoners before beginning to call out numbers. The heart of every man there beat a little faster; whenever the SS compiled a list, it was never for anything good. Each selected man turned pale as his number was called.

  It was doubly unnerving that SS-Doctor Erwin Dingfn2 was on hand. A trim, nervous-looking little man who had served with the Waffen-SS, Ding was known for his incompetence.35 The same was true of his deputy, SS-Captain Waldemar Hoven; a remarkably handsome fellow, Hoven had worked as a movie extra in Hollywood; medically unqualified, he was even more incompetent than Ding. But he was very handy at delivering lethal injections of phenol.36

  The prisoners whose numbers had been called – a mixture of Jews, Roma, political prisoners and green-triangle men – were marched to block 46 and disappeared inside.

  What happened to them in there only became known when the survivors were let back out. Ding and Hoven injected the prisoners with typhus serums; they immediately fell ill with bloating, headaches, bleeding rashes, hearing loss, nosebleeds, muscle pain, paralysis, abdominal pain, vomiting. Many died, and the survivors were left in a pitiable state.37

  At periodic intervals, more batches of prisoners were sent to block 46 to be ruined and killed in the name of research. Several old friends of Gustav’s from Vienna were among the prisoners selected for torment. However, they were saved when the SS high command deemed it improper for Jewish blood to be used in the development of a vaccine that was to be injected into the veins of German soldiers. The Jewish subjects were ejected from the programme and returned to the normal hell of the camp.38

  Tini and Herta sat at the kitchen table, plying their needles and thread. Mending had always been a part of Tini’s married life; with little income and four children, there had always been stitching and darning to do. Now, month by month, Herta’s and her own clothes got shabbier, and their needles worked overtime to keep them in one piece.

  Today, however, their sewing was not mending. On 1 September 1941, it had been announced by the Ministry of the Interior in Berlin that as of the nineteenth of the month, all Jews living in Germany and Austria must wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing – the Judenstern.

  The Nazis had already revived this medieval practice in Poland and other occupied territories. Now it had been decided that all Jews, including those at home, must be deprived of their ability to be camouflaged within society.39

  Along with their neighbours and relatives, Tini and Herta had had to go along to the local IKG collection point to get their stars. They were factory-made, printed on rolls of fabric, with the word Jude in black lettering styled to resemble Hebrew.40 Each person was allotted up to four. The final insult was that they had to pay for them: ten pfennigs each. The IKG bought them in huge rolls from the government for five pfennigs a star and used the profit to cover administrative costs.41

  Even now, Tini hadn’t given up the fight to get Herta away from this nightmare. There were girls her age and even younger being sent to concentration camps now. In desperation, Tini had written to Judge Barnet in America, begging him to help. Despite his offer of sponsorship, the usual obstructions had blocked Herta’s visa. ‘I am devastated that she has to stay here. I was informed by an unofficial source that relatives in the US can petition Washington to obtain a visa. May I ask you to do something for Herta? I do not want to have to reproach myself like in Fritz’s case.’42 Sam Barnet had acted right away, filing the necessary papers and putting up 450 dollars to cover all Herta’s expenses.43 But the bureaucratic maze had been too complex and the barriers impossible to surmount. Herta’s visa had not been approved.

  Their needles plied in and out, through the cheap yellow calico of the stars and the worn wool of their coats. Tini glanced across at her daughter; she was fully a woman now – nineteen, going on twenty, about the age Edith had been when she went away. Nineteen and pretty as a picture. Imagine how beautiful she could have been if there were nice clothes for her and not this life of deprivation and fear. And when Herta looked back at her mother, she saw lines etched by worry and cheeks sunken from hunger.

  The appearance of the yellow stars in Vienna over the following weeks produced strong reactions among non-Jews. They had grown so used to the idea that Jews had largely disappeared from the country – vast numbers had emigrated, and the supposedly dangerous ones had been sent to the camps – that it was as if thousands had suddenly materialized in their midst, marked for all to see. Some people were ashamed of what the Nazis had done; they believed that it was right and proper to bar Jews from public life, but to stigmatize them in this highly visible way was somehow wrong. Shopkeepers who had been willing to sell discreetly to Jews now had the embarrassment of having their other customers know that they did so. Some braved it out; others began to shut their doors to wearers of the yellow star. For those Jews who had been sufficiently Aryan-looking to ignore some of the restrictions, that was now out of the question. Some members of the public, shocked to find so many Jews still about, began to demand that harsh action be taken.44 It seemed that life could not possibly get any worse.

  But of course it could; the bottom of the pit had not yet been reached, not by any means.

  On 23 October, the head of the Gestapo in Berlin relayed an order to all Reich security police. With immediate effect, all emigration of Jews was banned.45 Their removal from the Reich would now be solely by compulsory resettlement to newly established ghettos in the eastern territories. The last vestiges of Tini’s hopes for Herta were snuffed out with the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen.

  In December, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the United States, and the final barrier fell.

  9. A Thousand Kisses

  אבא

  Spring had come to Buchenwald again; Gustav’s and Fritz’s third. The forest was alive with greenery, the singing of blackbirds counterpointing the harsh scrawk of the crows. Each morning, soon after the rising of the sun, would come the rasp of saws biting into tree-trunks, the grunts of the slaves wielding them, and the snapped insults and orders of the kapos and guards. Then a yell, and a great beech or oak would come crashing down, the slaves setting about it, reducing it quickly to logs and a carpet of leaves.

  Gustav, already tired, shoulders raw from carrying, went among them with his team, collecting logs to transport to the construction sites. He was doing well – a foreman now, in charge of his own twenty-six-man team. ‘My lads are true to me,’ he wrote, ‘we are a brotherhood, and stick tightly together.’ Friendship was precious, and often short-lived. In February several of Gustav’s friends, ‘all strong fellows’, had been sent away in another transport of ‘invalids’, and next day there had been the usual returning crop of clothes, prosthetics and spectacles. ‘Everyone thinks, tomorrow morning it will be my turn. Daily, hourly, death is before our eyes.’

  In February the SS had murdered Rabbi Arnold Frankfurter, who had married Gustav and Tini in 1917, flogging and tormenting him until his aged body could take no more. In the wreck that remained, it was hard to recognize the portly, bearded rabbi of old Vienna. Before he died, Rabbi Frankfurter asked a friend to pass on a traditional Yiddish blessing to his wife and daughters: ‘Zayt mir gezunt un shtark’ – ‘Be healthy and strong for me.’1 Gustav remem
bered his wedding day clearly, in the pretty little synagogue in the Rossauer Kaserne, the grand army barracks in Vienna: Gustav in dress uniform, the Silver Medal for Bravery gleaming on his breast; Tini in picture hat and dark coat, almost plump before decades of hardship and mothering sculpted her into handsome maturity.

  Taking off his cap and running a hand over the bristles of his shaved scalp, Gustav looked up into the canopy of swaying leaves. With a feeling like a faint ghost of contentment, he replaced his cap and sighed. ‘In the forest it is wonderful,’ he had written in his diary. ‘If only we were free; but always we have the wire before our eyes.’

  Work these days was even more exhausting than ever; since January a new commandant had taken over: SS-Major Hermann Pister. ‘From now on a new wind blows in Buchenwald,’ he’d told the assembled prisoners,2 and he meant it. An exercise regime had been introduced, in which prisoners were roused half an hour earlier than usual for roll call and made to do exercises half-dressed.

  Hitler’s hatred of Jews was swelling beyond all control or constraint. The invasion of the Soviet Union had failed to achieve the decisive conquest he’d expected. A food crisis had taken hold in the Reich, and communist partisans were causing trouble everywhere from France to the Ukraine. In the fevered Nazi mind, it was all the fault of the Jews; having caused the war in the first place with their global conspiracies, they were now hobbling German progress.3 In January 1942 the heads of the SS had agreed at last upon the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. Mass deportation, emigration and incarceration had not worked. Something far more drastic and decisive was required. The exact nature of it was kept secret from the public, but it transformed the concentration camp system. Jews came under even closer, even more hostile attention than before. In Buchenwald, euthanasia of invalids, starvation, abuse and murder had whittled down the Jewish prisoner population, until by March there were only 836 left, among a total of over eight thousand other prisoners.4 The only thing keeping Buchenwald’s remaining Jews alive was their usefulness as workers, and that might not hold out for long under the pressure from the top to bring about a ‘Jew-free Reich’.