Auschwitz (6 page)

Alongside this policy of turning Poland into a nation of illiterates was a proactive attempt to “sift out those with valuable blood and those with worthless blood.” Polish children between the ages of six and ten would be examined, and those who were thought racially acceptable would be snatched from their families and raised in Germany; they would not see their biological parents again. The Nazi policy of stealing children in Poland is significantly less well known than is the extermination of the Jews, but it fits into the same pattern. It demonstrates how seriously a man like Himmler believed in identifying the value of a human being through racial composition. Removing these children was not for him—as it might seem today—some evil eccentricity, but an essential part of his warped worldview. From his standpoint, if such children were allowed to remain, then the Poles “might acquire a leader class from such people of good blood.”

Significantly, Himmler wrote of these children: “However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physically exterminating a people as fundamentally un-German and impossible, then this method is the mildest and best one.” Although Himmler writes this in the immediate context of the Polish children, it is clear, because
he refers to “physically exterminating a people” as being “fundamentally un-German” that he must also extend this admonition to other “peoples”—including the Jews. (Further confirmation of this interpretation is provided by Heydrich's statement in the summer of 1940, directly in the context of the Jews, that: “Biological extermination is undignified for the German people as a civilized nation.”
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In his wide-ranging memorandum, Himmler also announced what he wanted the fate of the Jews to be, saying, “I hope to see the term ‘Jews' completely eliminated through the possibility of a large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some other colony.” This return to the previously established policy of emigration was available now because of the wider context of the war. Himmler was counting both upon the imminent defeat of France and the consequent swift capitulation of the British, who would then want to sue for a separate peace. With the war over the Polish Jews could be packed on to ships and removed—possibly to one of the former African colonies of the French.

Far-fetched as the idea of shipping millions of people to Africa seems today, there is no doubt that, at the time, it was taken seriously by the Nazis. Radical anti-Semites had been suggesting the removal of the Jews to Africa for years, and now the course of the war seemed about to make this solution to the Nazis' Jewish “problem” possible. Six weeks after Himmler's memo, Franz Rademacher in the German Foreign Office wrote a document that announced the proposed African destination of the Jews—the island of Madagascar.
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It is important to remember, however, that this plan—like all the other wartime solutions to the “Jewish problem”—would have meant widespread death and suffering for the Jews. A Nazi governor of Madagascar would most likely have presided over the gradual elimination of the Jews within a generation or two. The Nazis' “Final Solution” as we know it would not have occurred, but almost certainly there would still have been another type of genocide.

Himmler passed his memorandum to Hitler, who read it and told him that in his view it was “gut und richtig” (“good and correct”). Significantly, Hitler never wrote down his views on the memo. It was sufficient for Himmler to be armed with the Führer's verbal approval for its contents. This was the way that high policy was decided in the Nazi state.

Rudolf Höss and his embryo concentration camp at Auschwitz were but a small part of this overall picture. Auschwitz was situated in one of the parts of Poland that was to be “Germanized,” and so the immediate future of the camp would be decided, to a large extent, by its location. The Upper Silesia region had passed between the Poles and the Germans a number of times before and, immediately preceding World War I, it had been part of Germany, only to be lost in the Versailles settlement. Now the Nazis wanted to reclaim it for the Reich.

Unlike the other areas to be “Germanized,” however, Upper Silesia was heavily industrialized and large parts of it were unsuitable for settlement by the incoming ethnic Germans. This meant that many of the Poles would have to remain as a slave workforce which, in turn, meant that a concentration camp was thought particularly necessary in the area in order to subdue the local population. Originally Auschwitz had been conceived as a holding concentration camp—a “quarantine” camp in Nazi jargon—in which to keep prisoners before they were sent on to other concentration camps in the Reich. But, within days, it became clear that the camp would function as a place of permanent imprisonment in its own right.

Höss knew that the war had radicalized everything, including the concentration camps. Although modeled on a place like Dachau, this new camp would have to deal with a more intractable problem than the institutions in the “Old Reich.” The camp at Auschwitz needed to imprison and terrorize Poles at a time when the whole country was being ethnically reordered and Poland—as a nation—was being intellectually and politically destroyed. Thus, even in its first incarnation as a concentration camp, Auschwitz had a proportionately higher death rate than any “normal” camp in the Reich. Of the 20,000 Poles initially sent to the camp, more than half were dead by the start of 1942.

The first prisoners to arrive at Auschwitz in June 1940 were not Poles but Germans—thirty criminals transferred from Sachsenhausen concentration camp. They would become the first Kapos, the inmates who would act as agents of control between the SS and the Polish prisoners. The sight of these Kapos was the strongest first impression made on many of the Poles who arrived in the initial transports to the camp. “We thought they were all sailors,” says Roman Trojanowski,
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who arrived at Auschwitz as a nineteen
year old in the summer of 1940. “They had berets like mariners–and then it turned out they were criminals. All of them were criminals.”

“We arrived and there were German Kapos and they yelled at us and struck us with short batons,” says Wilhelm Brasse,
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who arrived at about the same time. “When someone was slow in coming down from the cattle truck he was beaten, or in several instances they were killed on the spot. So I was terrified—everyone was terrified.”

These earliest Polish prisoners at Auschwitz had been sent to the camp for a variety of reasons—they might be suspected of working in the Polish underground, or be members of a group the Nazis specially targeted, like priests or the intelligentsia, or simply be someone to whom a German had taken exception. Indeed, many of the first group of Polish prisoners, who were transferred from Tarnów prison and arrived at the camp on June 14, 1940, were simply university students.

The immediate task for these new arrivals was simple—they had to build the camp themselves. “We used very primitive tools,” recalls Wilhelm Brasse. “The prisoners had to carry stones. It was very difficult, hard labor. And we were beaten.” But not enough construction materials had been provided to complete the task, so a typical Nazi solution was found—theft. “I worked at demolishing houses that used to belong to Polish families,” Brasse continues. “There was an order to take building materials such as bricks, planks and all kinds of other wood. We were surprised the Germans wanted to build so rapidly and they did not have the material.”

The camp quickly developed a culture of theft, not just from the local population, but from within the institution itself. “The German Kapos would send us inmates off and say, ‘Go and steal cement from another work commando—we don't care about the other guys,'” says Brasse. “And that is what we did. Planks or cement would be stolen from another commando. In the camp lingo that was called ‘organizing.' But we had to be very careful not to be caught.”

Nor was this culture of “organizing” confined to the inmates. In those early days Höss too stole what he needed:

While Höss was “organizing” what he considered necessary to make Auschwitz into a “useful” camp, behind the newly pilfered barbed wire it soon became clear to the Poles that their chances of survival depended chiefly on one factor—which Kapo they worked for. “I very quickly understood that in the ‘good' work commandos the prisoners would usually have full, round faces,” says Wilhelm Brasse. “They behaved differently from the ones who had the hard jobs and looked haggard—like skeletons wearing uniforms. And immediately I would notice that with this Kapo it's better because the prisoners look better.”

Roman Trojanowski struggled under the command of one of the cruelest Kapos, who once punished him for a minor transgression by smashing him in the face and then making him squat for two hours holding a stool in front of him. The harshness of life in this work commando was breaking him. “I had no strength to run around with wheelbarrows every day,” he says. “After one hour the wheelbarrow would fall out of your hands. You just fell on the wheelbarrow and you would hurt your leg. I had to save my skin.” Like many inmates, before and after him at Auschwitz, Roman Trojanowski knew he had to find a way out of his current work commando or perish.

One morning an announcement was made at roll-call—experienced carpenters were required. So Trojanowski volunteered and, even though he had never been a carpenter in his life, said that he had “seven years of practice.” But the plan backfired: it was obvious once he began work in the carpentry shop that he could not do the job.

Thrown out of the carpentry shop, Trojanowski still sought a job indoors. “That was decisive,” he says. “To survive you had to be under a roof.” He spoke to a friend who knew a relatively benign Kapo called Otto Küsel. Together with his friend he approached Küsel, exaggerated the amount of German he knew, and managed to get a job working in the kitchen preparing food for the Germans. “That's how I saved my life,” he says.

In this struggle for survival within the camp, two groups of people were singled out from the moment of their arrival for particularly sadistic treatment—priests and Jews. Although, at this stage of its evolution, Auschwitz was not a place where large numbers of Jews were sent—the policy of ghettoization was still in full swing—some of the intelligentsia, members of the resistance, and political prisoners who were sent to the camp were also Jews. They, together with Polish Catholic priests, were more likely than the other inmates to fall into the hands of the penal commando unit run by one of the most notorious Kapos of all, Ernst Krankemann.

Krankemann arrived at the camp in the second batch of German criminals, transferred from Sachsenhausen on August 29, 1940. Many in the SS disliked him, but he had two powerful SS supporters in Karl Fritzsch, the Lagerführer (and Höss's deputy), and Palitzsch, the Rapportführer (commandant's chief assistant). Krankemann, who was enormously fat, would sit on top of the harness of a giant roller that was used for flattening the roll-call square in the center of the camp. “First time I saw him,” says Jerzy Bielecki,
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one of the earliest prisoners to arrive in Auschwitz, “they were rolling the square between the two blocks, and because it was a very heavy roller the twenty or twenty-five people in the unit were unable to pull it. Krankemann had a whip and would hit them. ‘Faster, you dogs!' he said.”

Bielecki saw these prisoners forced to work without a break all day leveling the square. As evening fell, one of them collapsed on his knees and could not get up. Then Krankemann ordered the rest of the penal commando to pull the giant roller over their prostrate comrade. “I had got used to seeing death and beatings,” says Bielecki. “But what I saw then just made me cold. I just froze.”

Far from being indifferent spectators to this kind of brutality, the SS actively encouraged it. As Wilhelm Brasse, and indeed all the Auschwitz survivors, testify, it was the SS that created the culture of murderous brutality in the camp (and often these men committed murder themselves). “Those Kapos that were especially cruel,” says Brasse, “were given prizes by the SS—an additional portion of soup or bread or cigarettes. I saw it myself. The SS would urge them on. I frequently heard an SS man say, ‘Beat him well.'”

Notwithstanding the appalling brutality prevalent in the camp, Auschwitz was, from the Nazi perspective, still something of a backwater in the maelstrom of the brutal reorganization of Poland. The first sign that all this was to change came in the autumn of 1940. In September, Oswald Pohl, head of the SS Main Administration and Economic Office, inspected the camp and told Höss to increase its capacity. Pohl believed that the sand and gravel pits nearby meant that the camp could be integrated into the SSOWNED German Earth and Stone Works (DESt). Economic considerations had been growing in importance for Himmler and the SS ever since 1937 when, with the concentration camp population in Germany down to 10,000 from more than 20,000 in 1933, he had hit on an innovative solution to protect the future of the camps—the SS would go into business.