Throughout those first weeks, Foth was the only person the prisoners of kin saw. He brought cakes and sweets on Ännerle von Hofacker’s birthday, and he arranged for them to receive packages of warm clothing. They found him ‘decent and obliging’. But his duties in Warhorse 1 took up only a fraction of his day. Outside those times, he carried on with his job as head of the Jewish section at the camp. There, he had earned the reputation of being the most sadistic of all the SS officers at Stutthof. As one prisoner would later testify, ‘This man felt sick if he had not killed one inmate during the course of a day’s work.’1
Occasionally, voices, speaking a Slav language, drifted over the high wall; the Sippenhäftlinge could hear the bang and clank of industry and the wail of sirens summoning the camp inmates to work. Then – as the days went by – they began to hear sounds that filled them with dread. A week after they arrived, they were woken at 4 a.m. by the crackle of flames. Looking out of the windows of their barrack, they could see the glow from the fire, burning a hundred yards away in the forest. Showers of sparks rose into the freezing air and, as the fire gathered momentum and the wind blew the smoke in their direction, there was a sickening smell, which they knew could only be the smell of burning flesh. Other sounds came from the direction of the forest. ‘Every night, as in a horrible nightmare, I could hear dogs baying,’ Fey recalled. ‘I knew that it meant some poor prisoner had tried to escape.’
24.
Tens of thousands of men, women and children were imprisoned at Stutthof, which was situated on the coast, 25 miles east of Danzig. ‘It was a gigantic place,’ one prisoner recalled.1 ‘You couldn’t take it all in with your eyes. It seemed to go on and on indefinitely.’
On most days during the cold winter months, a sea mist rolled in from the Baltic, shutting out the light and heightening the sensation of being in an ice-bound, locked-in place. Surrounded by water on all sides and staffed by 1,000 SS guards, the 300-acre site had been carefully chosen by the Nazis.2 The Vistula River to the west, and the canals running up to the sea through swamps and marshland, made escape almost impossible, and German nationals living in the nearby fishing villages could be relied on to betray any prisoners who succeeded in breaking out.
The camp had opened in 1939 after the Nazis invaded Poland. Originally built to house 4,500 Polish men, among them teachers, priests and other members of the intelligentsia considered politically unreliable, the numbers of prisoners quickly swelled as the German Army advanced east.3 Following a visit from Himmler in the winter of 1942, thirty new barracks were commissioned to accommodate Russian POWs.4 Built by the inmates, the foundations were laid using the bones of prisoners who had died from epidemics of typhoid and other diseases then sweeping the camp. ‘There were so many corpses the ovens were working 24 hours a day,’ one prisoner recalled.5 ‘Because the bodies were piling up, the burning was hurried and the bones were still hard. We had to empty the ovens, pile the bones on to wagons and drive them to the construction sites. They slotted in between the little stones and made the surfaces of the roads smoother and more stable.’
Once the barracks had been completed, and a sprawl of work camps and factories constructed to employ the new prisoners, Stutthof could accommodate 25,000 inmates. Yet by December 1944, when the Sippenhäftlinge arrived, 60,000 were crammed into the camp.
These were not the Soviet POWs that Himmler had anticipated in 1942. Following a succession of military defeats on the Eastern Front, the labour shortage in the Reich had assumed desperate proportions, and the German war effort now depended on the huge reserves of forced labour in SS-run camps and ghettos throughout the occupied countries. From the summer of 1944, as the Red Army threatened to liberate these camps, tens of thousands of inmates were evacuated. Some 47,000 prisoners had arrived at Stutthof between June and October, many of them from Auschwitz.6 ‘They stretched the camp to the limit, which couldn’t even cope with the people already there,’ SS-Hauptsturmführer Meyer, a senior camp official, recalled.7 ‘Berlin was told, but did nothing. The only response was to put the prisoners to work.’
When it became clear that a large number of the new arrivals were in no fit state to work, Berlin issued a second edict: to spare the cost of feeding the prisoners, they were to be killed.
The mass killings of inmates had begun in June under the codename Sonderbehandlung (special treatment).8 To determine which of the new arrivals would live or die, Sergeant Foth, together with other senior SS officers, presided over a selection procedure, which began the moment the transports arrived.
In the four months between June and the end of October, twenty-six trains pulled into the small station outside the camp, each carrying an average of between 1,500 and 2,000 prisoners.9 The trains came from the Kovno ghetto, from Kaiserwald – a concentration camp in Latvia – and from Auschwitz. In October, following the Red Army’s Baltic offensive, the numbers had rocketed: then, the trains had carried in excess of 4,000 prisoners.
Of the 47,000 people who arrived in the transports, over 60 per cent were Jewish and more than half were women. Their journey in the packed cattle wagons, often in searing temperatures, had taken many days: ‘We reeked of sweat that had dried on our bodies and of urine and faeces that we couldn’t clean off,’ one woman recalled.10
Crowd control and the need to avoid mass panic was a dominant concern for the SS guards, who, in the case of a large transport, were hugely outnumbered. For this reason, they attempted to conceal the prisoners’ destination. When the trains arrived at Stutthof station, the sign read ‘Woodland Camp’, and bands of musicians, playing chamber music, were lined up on the platform.11
From the station, the prisoners were marched through the gates of the camp, past Commandant Hoppe’s villa, with its well-tended garden, to a large parade ground. Men and women were immediately separated from each other, as were mothers from young children. On most transports, a number of prisoners arrived with a death sentence for ‘offences’ against the Nazis.12 These were singled out by the SS – including Sergeant Foth – and taken to the crematoria, where they were shot in the back of the head or hanged.fn1
Standing on the packed earth of the parade ground, trodden down by the multitudes herded through the place before them, the others lined up to be counted. Thirteen-year-old Schoschana Rabinovici arrived in a transport of 3,155 prisoners from Kaiserwald. ‘After they had counted us again and again, an officer stepped forward and gave a speech in German.13 His voice screamed and barked at the same time: “From now on you are no longer people; you are numbers, only numbers. That is how we will call you and that is how you must answer – with your own number, and in German. From the moment you stepped through the gates, you lost every right; the only right remaining to you is work for the German Reich. The only possibility you have of leaving here is to fly through that chimney.” With those words he pointed his finger at a chimney that could be seen at the end of the camp. Out of it rose black, stinking smoke. We now noticed, too, the peculiar sweetish smell of burning flesh, a smell that immediately stuck to us and never left us until the end.’
The procedure that followed was the same for every transport. After the roll call, the prisoners were driven forward into a large hangar, where they were made to strip and hand over their personal possessions to the camp store. Then the guards shaved their hair – including their pubic hair. This was followed by a body-cavity search for hidden valuables – mouths, ears, nostrils, rectum and genitalia. Finally, a number was scratched on their arms and they were issued prison clothing. Whereas political prisoners wore striped uniforms, Jews were given civilian clothes with their number and a yellow star sewn on the back. Second-, third-, sometimes fourth-hand, the clothes had been stripped from those who had died in the camp – whether by execution or from illness.
The prisoners were then marched back out to the parade ground, where they were again made to form up in a line. Then came the selection process to determine whether they were worth keeping alive. Sergeant Foth, togethe
r with a doctor and other senior SS officers, stood at the head of the line as, one by one, the guards called the prisoners forward.
Trudi Birger, who was sixteen in the summer of 1944, arrived with her mother in a transport of 2,169 women from the Kovno ghetto. ‘No one wanted to move forward,’ she recalled.15 ‘We were forced forward by the crush of women behind us, harried along by the Kapos with their switches and by the guards who stood along the barbed-wire fence with their dogs … All my attention focused on the doctor.fn2 He was going to decide my fate in a moment. He was a tall, handsome, blond man in a Nazi uniform … For myself, I wasn’t concerned about his verdict. I knew I would pass. I had had plenty of practice at making it through selections. I had learned to look cheerful and stand as straight as I could, to show that I was full of energy and goodwill. But I wasn’t sure about my mother … She looked closer to sixty than to forty … And the dress they had given her, a shapeless black thing, did nothing to make her look younger.’
As the women queued up to see the doctor, the guards went up and down the line picking out those who were pregnant and those evidently too weak to work. A large number of the prisoners suffered from oedema caused by years of malnourishment. ‘We had to show them our legs,’ one woman remembered; ‘whoever had lots of ulcers on their legs was immediately chased away.’16 Political prisoner Krzysztof Dunin-Wąsowicz was assigned to process the new arrivals with the SS guards. He described how, in some instances, many of the women were too weak to stand: ‘There was one transport of 150 women from Thorn sub-camp.17 They were in a miserable condition. Some of them could not get up off the ground, they were just lying there, moaning. Many of them were pregnant or had just given birth. All of them were very thin and had wounds on their legs.’
The doctor examined those who reached the head of the line. After feeling their arm muscles, he asked whether they were suffering from any diseases. ‘He looked intently and impersonally at each woman as she stood before him, inspecting her for flaws that would make her useless as a labourer,’ Trudi Birger wrote.18 ‘With small, cold gestures, barely a word, he sent some to the left, others to the right. There wasn’t one of us who didn’t know what that meant.’
Trudi and her mother passed the selection process, but thousands of women failed. Those deemed unfit for work were crammed into segregated blocks where they died from illness, or were summarily killed by the camp guards. A variety of methods were used: gas, death by lethal injection, drowning.
In the barracks housing Jewish women, Sergeant Foth determined which were to be killed. ‘The death sentences were arbitrarily handed down by Oberscharführer Foth,’ Dunin-Wąsowicz wrote.19 ‘The guards and Kapos were as zealous, but when it came to killing Jews, Foth was without doubt the most depraved and ruthless. One time, when the gas chamber wasn’t working, this bloodthirsty sadist beat the women to death with his own hands.’
Dunin-Wąsowicz described how Foth, a father of eight, particularly sought out pregnant women. ‘Once it happened that one of the young Jewish women, who was pregnant, fled from a group he had condemned to death and managed to hide on the top floor of the barracks.20 Foth led a search party, found her, and brought her triumphantly back to the group.’ As SS officer Hans Rach testified after the war, Foth would also scour the barracks housing women whom the doctor had judged fit for work, looking for his next victims: ‘Every day, he ordered a roll call lasting several hours, picking out the sick and weak women.21, 22 He judged their state of health according to their legs, forcing the Jewish women to run races against each other. Anyone who could not run was loaded on to a wagon and taken to the gas chamber. When the chamber was full, the door was shut. Otto Knott, who had undergone special training at Lublin concentration camp, climbed on to the roof and poured Zyklon B through a special opening into the chamber … Foth also did this.’
‘I don’t want anyone to forget the pure cruelty of the camps,’ Trudi Birger wrote in her memoir of her time at Stutthof.23 ‘They weren’t just impersonal death factories, where people were processed in gas chambers and crematoria, like products on some kind of macabre conveyor belt. They were places where sadistic, barbaric criminals were able to carry out their cruellest and most grotesque fantasies.’
While camp regulations prevented the guards from flogging the prisoners, there were no rules against murder, arbitrary acts of maltreatment or everyday harassment.24 Prisoners were shot for insignificant reasons – smoking in the latrines or singing carols – and for the guards’ own amusement. One of their favourite pastimes was to open the gates to the camp and cajole inmates to leave; then they would shoot them on the grounds that they had tried to escape. At other times, the guards used specially trained German shepherd dogs to attack the prisoners. Former SS members admitted that, ‘for the fun of it’, the dog handlers would set their animals on working parties returning to the camp to ‘liven up the inmates a bit’.25 Prisoners were expected to stand to attention and doff their caps when a guard passed.26 At night, teenage girls were dragged out of their bunks to the SS barracks and made to parade, as if on a catwalk, so the guards could choose those they wanted to sexually abuse.27
The Kapos exercised their own regime of terror. These were prisoners assigned by the SS to supervise working parties and to run the blockhouses. Exempt from hard labour, and allocated extra food rations, they made it easier for the SS to control the camps. The system – employed in all the Nazi concentration camps – was designed to allow the camp to function with fewer SS personnel; without the Kapos, it would have been impossible for the authorities to maintain day-to-day operations. In 1941, a number of Category A prisoners from civilian gaols in Germany had been transferred to Stutthof, and it was from their ranks, rather than the numerous political and religious prisoners, that the Kapos had been recruited. Convicted murderers, child abusers and members of violent criminal gangs, they were chosen for their cruelty.
Speaking to a group of generals in June 1944, Himmler boasted that the Kapos explained the ‘success’ of the concentration-camp system. Outlining this ‘ingenious scheme’ for ‘holding down sub-humans’, he explained their role in relation to other prisoners: ‘The moment he becomes a Kapo, he no longer sleeps with them.28 He is held accountable for the performance of the prisoners’ work, and for their cleanliness … The moment we become dissatisfied with him, he is no longer a Kapo – he’s back to sleeping with his men. And he knows that, on that very first night, they will beat him to death.’
The Kapos would go to any lengths to convince the guards of their suitability for the job. According to the testimonies of survivors, they would sometimes bludgeon and whip prisoners to death. Beatings, according to Schoschana Rabinovici, an evacuee from the Vilnius ghetto, were an everyday occurrence: ‘From experience we learned to keep silent when getting a beating.29 When you kept silent, those doing the beating calmed down faster.’ Genowefa Larysz, the Kapo of Barrack 23 – a blockhouse for female Jewish prisoners – was one of the most notorious. Every morning at roll call, she forced her charges to stand naked in front of her for several hours with their hands in the air.30 She poured soup over any who failed this endurance test or who needed to go to the toilet. Then she would kick them, and beat them about the head with an iron-rimmed bucket, before passing their names to the SS guards to add to the list of women earmarked for execution.
Many of the prisoners sought to curry favour with the Kapos. Schoschana’s mother, Raja, used her skill as a seamstress to make a pair of satin pyjamas out of the lining of a quilt for Anna, her Kapo. In return, Raja requested to be assigned to the barrack toilets, which would entitle her to extra rations: ‘The toilets were situated in a large room at the back of the barracks – ten in a row, without cubicles … Most of the women suffered from diarrhoea and dysentery, and the toilets were very dirty.31 The toilet attendant had to sit in the toilet area the whole time, paying attention to their cleanliness, cleaning the ten bowls, and making sure the women were orderly in their use of them. When Anna went
to the bathroom, the toilet attendant had to bump all the women waiting in the line to keep the toilet free for Anna’s sole usage. At those times, Anna herself would walk imperiously down the line saying, “Make way, the Queen is going to shit.”’
Whether fit for work or sick, the prisoners lived in the same conditions. Originally designed for 450 occupants, each blockhouse accommodated more than 1,000 people. They slept, three to a bed, in three-tiered wooden bunks – two sleeping in one direction, and one between them, lying the other way.32 The beds were less than 3 feet wide; yet many of the inmates thought themselves lucky to have them: some barracks were so overcrowded, the prisoners had to sleep on the floor. Food was almost non-existent and nearly all the inmates suffered from symptoms of starvation – dizziness, hallucinations and muscle atrophy, making any movement painful. In the mornings, they were given a bowl of soup: ‘The guards had taken the spoons away so the only thing we could do was fish out bits of potato and carrot with our fingers,’ one woman recalled.33 In the evenings, they received a small piece of bread spread with fat. To stave off hunger, as another inmate remembered, the working parties carried human bones in their pockets, which they ‘sucked on like candy’.34
Shifts, for those prisoners able to work, lasted eight and a half hours. The work was varied. There were numerous factories at Stutthof, including an armaments factory owned by Focke-Wulf, which made aeroplane parts, and a clothing factory, where uniforms belonging to German soldiers killed on the Eastern Front were recycled. A number of women worked as seamstresses in the fur section, repairing the collars on greatcoats that arrived, ripped by shells and bullets, and often spattered with blood.35 Most prisoners, however, were assigned to outdoor duties. On her first day at Stutthof, Maria Rolnikaite, an evacuee from Kaiserwald, was sent to work on a farm owned by a German. ‘There were several of us in the work party.36 All women. They tied our hands behind our backs, and joined us together with a rope fastened to the farmer’s cart. The farmer and the accompanying guard got into the cart and off we went. The pony pulling the cart built up to a trot and we had to run to keep up.’
The Lost Boys Page 23