Auschwitz (24 page)

About 70 percent of SS men in Auschwitz fell into this category; 26 percent were non-commissioned officers (non-commissioned ranks above Rottenführer); and just 4 percent of the total SS complement were officers. There were around 3,000 members of the SS serving in Auschwitz I and the related sub-camps at any one time.
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The SS administration of the camp was divided into five main departments—the headquarters department (personnel, legal, and other related functions), the medical unit (doctors and dentists), the political department (the Gestapo and the criminal police, the Kripo), the economic administration (including the registration and disposal of property stolen from the murdered prisoners), and the camp administration
(responsible for security within the camp). By far, the biggest department was the last—about 75 percent of the SS members who worked at Auschwitz performed some kind of security function. Oskar Groening was unusual only in that he had a comparatively “easy” job as part of the economic administration.

By the summer of 1942, Auschwitz was receiving transports of Jews from all over Europe, including Slovakia, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In operation since the autumn of 1941, the policy of sending Jews from the West to holding ghettos (such as Łódź) where further selection could take place before those Jews “unfit for work” were murdered, was abolished. Once Auschwitz developed selection on arrival, the whole extermination process was streamlined.

The camp's corrosive influence now even reached part of the United Kingdom—the holiday island of Guernsey in the Channel Islands. For those people—and there are still many—who partly define “Britishness” by the United Kingdom's resistance to Hitler, and who are certain that no one in England, Scotland, or Wales would have collaborated with the Nazis had they arrived on British shores, this is a profoundly disturbing story.

The Channel Islands, a small archipelago off the northwest coast of France whose biggest and principal islands are Jersey and Guernsey, were never capable of being defended by the British. Loyal to the British Crown, but fiercely independent of the British government, the islands were occupied by the Germans without a struggle in June and July 1940. Just as in France, the Germans preferred to run their occupation as much as possible through the existing government infrastructure—this was to be a very different kind of occupation from that practiced in Poland or the Soviet Union. Nonetheless the Nazis were, in principle, as intolerant of the presence of Jews in the Channel Islands as they were in Minsk or Warsaw. In October 1941 a notice was published in the
Jersey Evening Post
calling on Jews to register with Clifford Orange, chief aliens officer in Jersey. That same month a similar notice appeared in the
Guernsey Evening Post
, calling on all Jews to come forward and make themselves known to the police.

Knowing of the imminent arrival of the Germans, the majority of the Jewish population had already escaped to the British mainland. Only a small number of Jews unable—or unwilling—to leave were left behind. As a result,
twelve Jews registered on Jersey and four on Guernsey. The registration process, as throughout the Nazi state, was the beginning of systemized persecution. Jewish businesses had first to display a sign in the window announcing “Jewish undertaking,” and then the businesses were “Aryanized” and compulsorily sold to non-Jews. The Channel Island authorities cooperated in this process—indeed, it was administered by them. A typical, and heartrending, letter from one of the Jersey Jews, Nathan Davidson, to the Attorney General on Jersey dated January 23, 1941, reads: “In accordance with your instructions I beg to inform you that I have finished the winding up of my business ... the blind on the window pulled down and a notice CLOSED displayed.”
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Clifford Orange was able in June 1941 to confirm to the Bailiff (the leader of the island's government) on Jersey, and through him to the German authorities, that “there are no Jews, registered as such, in the island who are carrying on businesses.”
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Subsequent orders restricted the hours during which the Jews on the Channel Islands could go shopping and imposed a curfew on them. The only discriminatory order the authorities on Jersey balked at was one stating that Jews should wear the yellow star. In this one case the Bailiff and Attorney General appealed to the German authorities and asked them to reconsider. But despite their protests Dr. Casper, the German commandant, still requested that special stars be sent to the island with the English word “Jew” instead of “Jude” printed in the middle. The stars appear to have never arrived. Subjected to curfew as they were, few Channel Islands Jews could earn a living. Nathan Davidson, having shut down his shop, simply collapsed under the weight of the persecution heaped upon him. He was admitted to a Jersey mental hospital in February 1943 and died the following year. Another Jersey Jew, Victor Emmanuel, committed suicide.

But it was on nearby Guernsey that the actual physical deportation of Jews began. Three women—Auguste Spitz, Marianne Grunfeld, and Therese Steiner—were transported from the island in April 1942. All three were foreign nationals, Spitz and Steiner Austrian, Grunfeld Polish. They all therefore knew only too well the Nazis' hatred of Jews. Therese Steiner, for example, had left her native Austria as the country grew ever more anti-Semitic. Eventually she had found work as a nanny, working for an English family who
came to the Channel Islands in 1939. They returned to the British mainland in the spring of 1940, but Therese was prevented by the Channel Islands authorities from leaving and, following British Home Office guidelines, was interned as a “foreign alien.” She thus ended up in the hands of the very people she had come to the United Kingdom to escape. Therese managed to find work as a nurse at a hospital in Guernsey, where Barbara Newman
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knew her well.

Barbara Newman also was very clear about Therese's attitude to the Nazis: “I was under the impression that she'd spit on them if she could—that's the way she felt about them.”

In the spring of 1942 the German authorities ordered the Guernsey government to deliver the three foreign Jews for deportation. Sergeant Ernest Plevin of the Guernsey police recalled ordering Therese Steiner to pack her bags and report to the Germans, “I do remember—well—Therese coming into the office, where I conveyed to her the instructions given to the Guernsey police by the German military authorities. Therese became extremely distressed, bursting into tears, and exclaiming that I would never see her again.”
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Barbara Newman accompanied Therese on her last walk on Guernsey, down to St. Peter Port on Tuesday, April 21, 1942.

The idea that Therese was leaving Guernsey to be transported to her death was inconceivable to Barbara Newman: “It was all outside our experience, really, wasn't it? Things like that don't happen in England.”

Auguste Spitz, Marianne Grunfeld, and Therese Steiner all placed themselves into the hands of the Germans at St. Peter Port and boarded a boat that took them to the French mainland. Once in France, they registered as Jews and Therese Steiner found temporary employment as a nurse. In July, they all became caught up in the mass deportation of foreign Jews from France. On July 20th they began their journey to Auschwitz, arriving there three days later. It is not known whether any of the three survived initial selection. What is known with certainty is that none of them survived the war. Therese had been right—the citizens of Guernsey would never see her again.

The remaining Jews on the Channel Islands were deported the following year, in February 1943, but they were sent to an altogether different fate. Their deportation—together with others taken from a broad spectrum of Channel Islanders, including “Freemasons,” “former officers of the armed forces,” and “suspected Communists”
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—had been ordered in retaliation for the British commando raid on Sark, one of the smallest of the inhabited Channel Islands, five months before. Only one of the deported Channel Island Jews was singled out by the Germans for “special treatment”—John Max Finkelstein, originally from Romania, who was eventually sent to Buchenwald concentration camp and then the special ghetto at Theresienstadt. He survived the war.

The other deportees, including the Jews, were sent to internment camps in France and Germany where their treatment, though extremely unpleasant, was not comparable with the suffering imposed on the inmates of Buchenwald or Auschwitz. Significantly, the Jews (with the exception of Finkelstein) were not separated from the other Channel Islanders. We can only speculate as to why they were treated this way by the Nazis—there were always anomalies in the implementation of the “Final Solution.” In this case, it is perhaps significant both that they were deported along with other categories of people who would have been considered less “dangerous” by the Germans, and also that they were Jewish nationals from a country that the Nazis considered “civilized” and perhaps still did not wish to alienate overtly
(along the same lines, Jews transported in the autumn of 1943 from Denmark were sent to Theresienstadt and not to Auschwitz).

Of course, while the authorities in the Channel Islands helped the Germans deport the Jews, they could not have known for certain the fate of the Jews. They were aware that the Nazis had singled out the Jews for persecution, however, and that they were almost certainly about to transport their victims to a worse life than the one, already full of suffering, that they had left behind. Yet, the authorities did nothing to prevent the deportations. On the contrary, the police and civil servants cooperated promptly with the Germans.

It is true that the authorities on Jersey protested at the implementation of the Yellow Star order (although those on Guernsey did not). It is also hugely significant, however, as Frederick Cohen points out in his pioneering study of the treatment of Channel Island Jews during the occupation,
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that much more effort was made by the authorities to protect Masons who were living on the islands. A British intelligence report from August 1945 states,

We can't know for certain what would have happened if the Guernsey authorities had protested vehemently at the deportation of Auguste Spitz, Marianne Grunfeld, and Therese Steiner. Probably, it would have made little practical difference—although it would remain to this day a proud moment in the history of Guernsey—but there still remains the possibility that speaking out at the time might have saved the lives of these three women who had sought sanctuary in the United Kingdom. That fact, on its own, is enough to make this incident an indelible stain on the island's past.

The same month that the three deportees from Guernsey arrived at
Auschwitz, Heinrich Himmler made another visit to the camp. On July 17, 1942, the Reichsführer SS drove in through the camp gates, fifteen months after his first tour of inspection. Kazimierz Smoleń,
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one of the Polish political prisoners, remembered Himmler from before: “He looked not quite a military man. He had glasses with gold rims. He was a bit fat and had a tummy. He looked like—and I'm sorry, I don't want to offend anyone—he looked like a provincial schoolteacher.”

On this visit, the ordinary-looking man with glasses and a tummy saw the camp transformed, with a whole new complex under construction at Birkenau. He spent time examining the plans for the future development of the camp and traveled around the forty square kilometers of the Auschwitz Zone of Interest (the area under the direct administrative control of the camp). Then he watched the selection of a newly arrived group of prisoners and their subsequent gassing in “The Little White House.” After witnessing the killings, Himmler attended a reception in his honor at the home of Gauleiter Bracht in the nearby city of Kattowitz. The next day he returned and toured the women's camp in Birkenau. Here he witnessed the flogging of one of the inmates—a punishment he himself authorized. So pleased was Himmler with what he saw at Auschwitz that he immediately promoted Rudolf Höss to the rank of SS lieutenant colonel.

Höss's career was blooming; the visit of the Reichsführer had been a huge success. But there remained at least one problem: His SS bosses were concerned at the number of escapes from Auschwitz. Escapes were not a new phenomenon in the history of the camp, the first recorded one had taken place as early as July 6, 1940. What led to a warning to be issued to all SS concentration camp commanders in the summer of 1942, however, were the circumstances of one particularly daring break-out from Auschwitz that had occurred just a few weeks before Himmler's visit.