Auschwitz (33 page)

Hodys told Morgen,

After Morgen interrogated her further, Hodys confessed that Höss had returned to her cell on several different nights and that “eventually we had intercourse.” To avoid the SS guards, Höss had entered the jail not by the normal route—straight down from his office above—but via his own garden and through an underground air raid shelter that adjoined the basement. Having found a secret way to Hodys' cell, and having convinced her to be compliant, Höss had sex with her on several different nights. Hodys even recounts how on one occasion the naked commandant was in bed with her when an alarm went off and he was reduced to hiding in a corner of the cell.

After several weeks in the SS jail, Hodys was transferred to Block 11. But her condition had changed—she was now pregnant. She recounts how Höss—to protect himself—made her sign a note confessing that she had slept with another prisoner in the camp. She then spent several months imprisoned in Block 11 and tried, but failed, to give herself an abortion. Released back into the women's camp at Birkenau, she says she finally managed to obtain “something” to abort the fetus.

Hodys' account of her affair with Höss is fraught with difficulty. The first problem is that she is the only source for virtually everything she says. Morgen seems to have believed her, however, and he was trained as a lawyer. Furthermore, Hodys appeared to have had little to gain from fantasizing a relationship with Höss, especially because by the time Morgen interviewed her she had already been released from Auschwitz. Höss never admitted to an affair with Hodys, and his own account of his relationship with his wife is contradictory. He confessed to the American officer Dr. Gilbert during his interrogation at Nuremberg after the war that he and his wife rarely had sex once she was aware of just what he was doing at Auschwitz. Yet, in his memoirs he speaks in glowing terms about his relationship with her, the woman he had always “dreamed of.”

Nothing came of Morgen's investigation into Höss's possible relationship with Hodys. By the time the interview took place, in October 1944, it was obvious, with the Red Army closing in, that Auschwitz would not exist for much longer and indeed the whole Nazi State was crumbling. In any event, Morgen's initial investigation into the running of the camp, held the previous year, had already had a devastating effect. Not only were individual SS soldiers prosecuted for corruption, but—in one of the most bizarre aspects of the history of Auschwitz—the man who controlled the horror of Block 11, Maximilian Grabner, was held to account for not seeking the correct “permission” from Berlin before executing prisoners. It seems ludicrous that Morgen pushed forward with charges against Grabner when he ignored the killings in the gas chambers of Birkenau—presumably, such mass extermination was thought to have the necessary “permission” from higher authority.

Grabner was put on trial and his defense was that Höss had given him permission to “clear out” Block 11 by shooting prisoners. Höss, almost certainly protected by supporters above him in the Nazi leadership, was never himself charged with any offence. Grabner, however, lacked protectors and was brought before an SS court where the case eventually collapsed. He was subsequently tried once more by the Allies and executed—not for breaching SS regulations but for his commission of war crimes.

Unraveling the complex motivation behind the whole Morgen investigation is a difficult task. All the leading figures who gave evidence about it—
Höss, Grabner, and Morgen himself—had particular agendas they wished to pursue when they finally came to give their accounts of the episode after the war. For Grabner, it was that his actions were entirely authorized by Höss; for Morgen, it was that he was a crusader for the truth; and for Höss it was that, while he had willingly participated in the extermination program at Auschwitz, he had always been true to Himmler's dictum and had never “taken anything” for himself.

What does seem plain is that there were internal SS political reasons behind a number of the consequences of the Morgen investigation, not least the decision to remove Höss from the post of commandant, which was taken in the autumn of 1943. Höss's dismissal was dressed up as a “promotion” to a more senior role in concentration camp administration back in Berlin, but it is clear that he did not want to go. Not only did he leave his family behind in his house at Auschwitz, but letters between Martin Bormann, Hitler's powerful party secretary, and Himmler demonstrate that the former was trying to save Höss's job on his behalf. But Himmler was unrelenting : Höss was to be moved from the camp.
²⁰

One of Höss's last major initiatives at Auschwitz seemed to be one of his strangest. An institution was created—one that seems utterly incongruous in the context of the previous history of the camp: a brothel. The location of this facility for selected prisoners could scarcely have been more prominent—Block 24, immediately next to the main “Arbeit macht frei” gate in the main camp. Auschwitz was not the only camp to have a brothel, however; in fact, it was the fifth camp within the Nazi State to offer such a “service.”

Himmler had decided that providing brothels across the concentration camp network would increase productivity by offering “hard-working” prisoners (excluding Jews) an incentive to work even harder. He had ordered brothels to be constructed at Mauthausen and Gusen camps in Austria after an inspection as far back as May 1941 (they were finally opened in the summer of 1942). Then, in March 1943, he visited Buchenwald and demanded that another brothel be established there and also at other camps. His faithful factotum Oswald Pohl issued the necessary orders to concentration camp commandants in May 1943.
²¹

Józef Paczyński,
²²
one of the Polish political prisoners who lived in Block 24 in the summer of 1943, laughed when he first heard the news. But
it was not a joke. He and the other inmates were transferred out of Block 24 and saw how, over the next few days, “brigades of carpenters and bricklayers” began to fashion small rooms out of the large empty space of the barracks on the first floor:

A few days later came the official opening of the “house of pleasure.” And Paczyński was there: “Because I was an old inmate, and my Kapo was given two tickets [to the brothel], he gave me the second ticket. So I made myself look nice and I went along.” Paczyński discovered that the first part of the process—in an operation of military efficiency—was for each prospective “client” to be examined by an SS doctor. If they passed this intimate examination their hand was stamped and they were taken to another room on the ground floor of Block 24. Here they participated in a “ballot” to see to which room upstairs (and thus to which prostitute) they were to be allocated, and also in which order they would see her.

Paczyński recalls that he was “second, into room number nine.” A bell was rung every fifteen minutes as a sign for each prostitute to change customers. And so anxious was Paczyński for his turn that when the bell rang he rushed into room number nine only to see the previous inmate still trying to put on his trousers. Unfortunately—from his point of view—Paczyński was subsequently “unable to perform,” and so he sat chatting on the bed to an “elegant, good-looking girl” for his allotted time.

Ryszard Dacko
²³
was another prisoner who experienced the “delights” of the brothel. He was twenty-five years old in 1943, and a fireman at the main camp—a prized job, as firemen could travel relatively freely around Auschwitz and thus “organize” plenty of contraband for themselves. The Germans also valued the fireman because, Dacko believes, back in their homeland firemen were “respected.” As a result, the members of the Auschwitz fire brigade received a number of vouchers for the camp brothel and Dacko duly attended. He spent time with a girl called Alinka: “I wanted
to be as close as possible to her—to embrace her. It was three and a half years since I was arrested—three and a half years without a woman.” Alinka, according to Dacko, was a “very nice girl—she's not ashamed of anything. She gave one what one wanted.”

The rooms where the women conducted their business still exist today—they are used to store archival documents. And one of the striking features of the doors are the large peepholes set into each of them. “They [the SS men] wanted to maintain order,” says Ryszard Dacko, “if a prisoner were to strangle a girl or something. So they just looked through the peep-hole. It was [also] just male voyeurism. Most men like to look when someone's making love.”

The visual supervision of prisoners having intercourse was also designed to ensure that “perverted” sex acts were avoided (according to Józef Paczyński, prisoners had to have sex in the missionary position only) and also to prevent close relationships from developing between couples (in other brothels in the concentration camp system prisoners were even forbidden to talk to the women).

The SS did not supervise the brothel so stringently in the early hours of the morning, however, and that was when real trouble started. Dacko recalls how one of the prisoners managed to duplicate the key to the brothel to be able to visit his favorite girl at night. The trouble was that other prisoners had the same idea, and so fights broke out in the corridor on the first floor.

The idea that at Auschwitz prisoners could be found brawling in an SSSPONSORED brothel seems, at first hearing, inexplicable. But it is actually a story that illustrates the sophisticated hierarchy of prisoners that had by now developed at the camp. As Józef Paczyński points out, the idea that Jews could use the brothel was inconceivable. They were considered a lower class of inmate, subject to a level of ill-treatment that some of the Polish or German non-Jewish prisoners escaped.

The Nazis could see that one of the keys to the smooth running of the camp was the attitude of inmates who had managed to gain the relatively privileged jobs—mostly the surviving Polish political prisoners who had first entered the camp in 1940. This class of prisoner was not subjected—as a rule—to the ruthless and regular selections that other inmates endured.
But the Germans wanted a better way of motivating them. A brothel, with entrance dependent on vouchers issued by the Nazis, was a reward for good behavior for about 100 of these key inmates and a clear incentive to behave even better in the future.

Another possible reason for the establishment of the brothel, one subscribed to by Józef Paczyński, relates to the prevalence of homosexuality in the camp. He recalls how a number of “prominent” prisoners took adolescent boys as their personal servants, and how a sexual relationship often developed between them. He therefore believes that it was “because the Nazis wanted to eliminate such homosexual behavior” that they set up the brothel.

The whole question of the Auschwitz brothel is, not surprisingly, an extremely sensitive one. One of the most sensitive aspects of all relates to the attitude of the prisoners who used the brothel. For the most part, they seem to have had no problem with the morality of it all. Most of the women who worked in the brothel were selected from the inmates of Birkenau (unlike other brothels in the concentration camp system, women were not sent there from Ravensbrück) and then were forced to have sex with approximately six men every day. Their experience in the Auschwitz brothel is one of the hidden stories of suffering in the camp, and bears some comparison with the ordeal of the Korean “comfort women” who endured so much as a result of the sexual abuse meted out to them by soldiers of the Japanese army. But in Auschwitz at the time, the women who worked in the brothel were not so much pitied as envied. “The girls were treated very well,” says Ryszard Dacko. “They had good food. They took walks. They just had to do their job.”

Nothing demonstrates more effectively the immense power of context in human relations than Dacko's apparently callous statement that they “just had to do their job.” For, in the context of Auschwitz, where torture and murder were commonplace, it was possible for him to see the life of a woman in the brothel as a “good” life. With so much other suffering around him, it clearly never occurred to him to ask, “Ought I to be having sex with this woman?” Instead, it is clear what was on his mind—that he had endured “three and a half years without a woman” and here was his opportunity to put that situation right.

There is another difficulty with the existence of the brothel at Auschwitz. Holocaust deniers and other apologists for the Nazis seize upon its presence as evidence that Auschwitz was a very different place from that painted in conventional historiography. This problem is especially stark when combined with knowledge of the so-called “swimming pool” at the Auschwitz main camp.

In reality, Auschwitz had a water storage tank over which the firemen had fixed a makeshift diving board, but selected inmates were certainly able to bathe in it. “There was a swimming pool in Auschwitz for the fire brigade,” confirms Ryszard Dacko. “I could even swim there.” This facility has become one of the totems of the Holocaust deniers' case. “This is supposed to be a death camp?” they say. “With a swimming pool for the inmates? Come off it!” In reality, however, its existence fits into the same pattern as that of the brothel. Instead of showing how Auschwitz was not a center for mass murder—which it undeniably was—the presence of these two institutions demonstrates once again the complex make-up of the various camps that together constitute “Auschwitz.”