Berlin at War (50 page)

Germany. The works reflect their author’s interests and background

perfectly, being full of geographical references and classical allusions.

One of them, which goes to the heart of Haushofer’s predicament as

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berlin at war

an intellectual critic of the Nazi regime, was found in his pocket after

he was executed by the SS in the final days of the war:

GUILT

I bear lightly that which the court

Will call my guilt: the planning and concerns.

A criminal I would be, had I not planned for

The future of the nation from a sense of my own duty.

Therefore I am guilty, but not in the way you think,

I should have earlier recognised my duty,

I should have more sharply called Evil Evil

I reined in my judgement too long . . .

I indict myself in my own heart:

I have long betrayed my conscience,

I have lied to myself and to others –

I knew early on the whole course of the disaster –

I did warn – but not enough or clearly!

And today I know what I was guilty of . . .57

Plötzensee prison, in the neighbouring suburb of Charlottenburg,

also served as a regular jail under the Nazis. As in Moabit, conditions

in Plötzensee were hardly comfortable. Inmates were generally

confined to a small, damp cell, with only the briefest of exeats

permitted, to walk in the prison yard. The lack of food was the greatest

torment. On average, inmates received a crust of dried bread and a

cup of ersatz coffee for breakfast, followed by potatoes and unidenti-

fied vegetable leaves for lunch. In the evening, they would receive a

thin soup containing perhaps some scraps of meat or fat. As if such

fare was not unappetising enough, one prisoner complained that gener-

ally around a third of the food provided was already rotten.58 Conditions

would deteriorate markedly in the second half of the war, with over-

crowding and inadequate medical treatment exacerbating an already

difficult situation.

But, beyond that, Plötzensee earned itself a much darker reputation.

It was there that the guillotine – first installed in 1937 – put many hundreds

the watchers and the watched

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of the ‘enemies of the state’ to death. The execution procedure at

Plötzensee was described by the prison chaplain, Harald Poelchau, in

his memoirs:

The bound prisoner was led to the execution room, with his chest

bared. After reading out the sentence, before the usual witnesses, the

state prosecutor would turn to the executioner with the words

‘Executioner, carry out your work.’

Only then did the executioner pull back the black curtain. I will

never forget the sound. Then the guillotine was visible in the glow of

the electric lights.

The condemned then had to lie against a vertical board. Before he

knew what was happening, the board pivoted through 90 degrees and

he swiftly found himself with his neck beneath the blade . . . At the

same moment, the executioner pressed a button. The blade dropped

and the prisoner’s head fell into a waiting wicker basket. Now, with

similar speed, the executioner pulled the black curtain closed, to hide

the terrible scene. Again, that terrible sound that got right under one’s

skin. Then, in firm military tones, the executioner announced: ‘Mr

Prosecutor, the sentence has been carried out.’59

The killing at Plötzensee did not stop, even after the guillotine was

destroyed after an air raid in September 1943. On the contrary, the

attempted escape that resulted prompted a review of the policy of

keeping large numbers of condemned prisoners on death row, and in

response the execution chamber was fitted with a heavy beam, with

meat hooks attached along its length, from which prisoners were hanged

eight at a time. Over the space of a single week, that September, more

than 250 prisoners – mainly Czechs, French and Germans – were hanged.

At night, when the power failed, the executioners continued their

grizzly work by candlelight. A similar fate would await the many plot-

ters implicated in the Stauffenberg Plot of 20 July 1944. In all, during

the course of the war, over 2,500 people were executed at Plötzensee.

Ultimately, Moabit and Plotzensee were mainly restricted to specialised

categories of offenders, such as those involved in resistance activity.

Most prisoners who passed through the hands of the Berlin Gestapo

would have ended up at Sachsenhausen. Established a few miles to

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berlin at war

the north of the capital in 1936, close to the small town of Oranienburg,

Sachsenhausen was seen as a ‘model’ concentration camp and served

as a training facility for SS guards and officers, many of whom went

on to put their training into practice elsewhere in the Nazi empire.

Among those who passed through the camp in this capacity was the

future commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss.

In outline, Sachsenhausen was a perfect triangle, with a main gate

– bearing the legend ‘
Arbeit macht Frei
’ – in the centre of one side

opening onto a semicircular assembly area. From there the gable ends

of the wooden barracks radiated out in perfect symmetry, each one

bearing a word inscribed in white gothic script against the dark wood.

Reading along the line, the inscription read: ‘There is only one way

to freedom! Through labour, obedience, sobriety, order, cleanliness,

self-sacrifice and patriotism.’60 If only it were that simple. The majority

of those that would inhabit those barracks were entirely subject to

the whim of the Gestapo and SS; denied any formal trial, they had

been detained under the expedient of ‘protective custody’.

Life in Sachsenhausen was predictably harsh. Random acts of cruelty

and humiliation from the guards were commonplace. Often new

arrivals would be targeted in a calculated show of strength. As one

inmate recalled:

The Jewish prisoner began to explain that his arrest was a mistake and

that everything could be explained. The SS man listened and then

suddenly flung a large bunch of keys into the man’s face. With blood

flowing out of his nose, the Jew tried in vain to hold his head up. As

he saw the SS man coming towards him, he raised his hand in front

of his face to protect himself. ‘What!’ screamed the SS man, ‘you filthy

Jew, you dare to raise your hand against the SS? I should kill you on

the spot.’ He began hitting our Jewish comrade, until he collapsed to

the ground. The SS man then fetched a jug of water, poured it on the

man and ordered him to get up . . . We stood petrified next to him,

knowing that this reception was a lesson for all four of us.61

On arrival, the prisoners were categorised according to the nature of

their ‘offence’. To this end, they were given coloured badges, which

were to be sewn on to the prison uniform over the left breast and on

the seam of the trousers. Political prisoners wore a red triangle, while

the watchers and the watched

241

‘habitual criminals’ wore green, forced labourers wore blue and homo-

sexuals, predictably, wore pink. As an ‘asocial’ Bruno Wattermann would

have been given a black triangle. In addition, Jewish inmates wore an

inverted yellow triangle superimposed upon the badge denoting their

primary offence – thereby creating a Star of David. Further badges could

be used to denote repeat offenders or escape suspects, and a capital

letter was often superimposed on the triangle to give the nationality of

the offender: P for Poles, F for French, N for Norwegian and so on.

The average day at Sachsenhausen began before dawn, at 4.15 in

summer, an hour later in winter. Prisoners had forty-five minutes to

wash, dress, make their beds and eat a little breakfast – usually a thin

ersatz coffee and a piece of bread. Each barrack building generally

contained around five hundred prisoners, divided between the two

‘wings’ of the building, and huddled into three-tiered wooden bunks.

At the centre of each block was a latrine with a communal ‘fountain’

for washing.

Each morning, their ablutions completed, the prisoners gathered

on the assembly area – the
Appellplatz
– for roll-call, at which they

presented themselves in block order. They would then be counted off

into work details and marched out of the camp with a complement

of guards and overseers. When they returned in the evening, a second

roll-call was held, after which the prisoners could return to their

barracks before ‘lights out’ at 10.00 p.m.

Sachsenhausen was certainly not sealed off from the city on whose

fringes it stood. It was an integral part of the local economy, being

supplied and maintained by local firms and in turn sending its legions

of pyjama-clad inmates to work in local businesses and factories, where

they were expected to redeem themselves by their labour. The aircraft

manufacturer Heinkel, for example, used many thousands of concen-

tration camp prisoners in its factory at nearby Oranienburg.

But Sachsenhausen was famous for two particularly brutal ‘enter-

prises’. The first of these was the brickworks established close to the

camp in 1940, which was intended to produce bricks for the planned

rebuilding of Berlin. Because of the dreadful conditions at the site, the

brickworks served from the outset as a destination for those prisoners

who had been assigned to a
Strafkommando
– a punishment detail.

There, prisoners had an average life expectancy of only three months,

a figure drastically reduced even from that which was common at

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berlin at war

Sachsenhausen itself. One inmate, forty-year old journalist Arnold

Weiss-Rüthel, described conditions:

Smoke, dust and a dense fog poisoned the air, whilst the deafening

sound of clanging hammers, clattering chains and wheels, rattling

machinery and the shrill whistles of the foreman prevailed from

morning to evening . . . Soon my hands and face were covered in burns,

breathing became difficult, the scorching heat made every movement

torturous . . . It still puzzles me how I survived.62

As if the heavy labour were not enough, prisoners were also exposed

to the full capricious fury of the SS. Like Sachsenhausen itself, the brick-

works complex was surrounded by a cordoned-off perimeter area, which

prisoners were forbidden to enter, and where they could be shot without

warning. This cordon also served a nefarious purpose for the SS guards,

who would deliberately push exhausted prisoners beyond the line, either

for their own sport or as a punishment for insufficiently vigorous labour.

The hapless prisoner, vainly pleading his innocence, would then be

summarily shot. As another former inmate explained:

The brickworks cost the most blood and the most victims. There was

not a day that did not bring a death. The record was 28 dead and over

50 injured on one day. Many were ‘shot whilst attempting to escape’.

Others were simply flung into the water whilst the bricks were loaded

onto canal barges; there they either drowned or were used by the SS

for target practice.63

Though many Jews, Poles, gypsies and other prisoners found

themselves working in the brickworks, the site would have a special

significance for the Berlin gay community. Those inmates bearing

the pink triangle – known as ‘175ers’, after the paragraph of the

German legal code that outlawed homosexuality – found themselves

assigned to punishment details with murderous regularity.

The second infamous Sachsenhausen ‘enterprise’ was the so-called

Schuhprüfstrecke
, or ‘shoe testing course’, a 600-metre track laid out around the centre of the camp. Here, in a bizarre and little-known example of

Nazi pseudo-science, inmates were forced to test materials for the soles

of Wehrmacht boots. For this purpose, the track itself was divided into

the watchers and the watched

243

nine different surfaces, ranging from concrete and cobbles to gravel and

loose soil. The prisoners selected – again from the
Strafkommando
– were

forced to march up to 40 kilometres per day, carrying 15-kilogram sand-

bags, often in ill-fitting boots. They would march, in many cases, until

they collapsed. One of those who experienced the ‘shoe testing course’

at first hand was Kurt Bachner:

Already on the first day my feet were so raw that the material that I had

wrapped around them was soaked through with blood. On the second

day, I was in the most excruciating pain, right from the first moment.

My shoes were so big that my blisters and wounds were rubbed with

every step. After roll call the next day, my block senior managed to have

me taken to the medical barrack. But after some ointment was applied,

my feet were packed back in the filthy rags and I was sent back to the

column of marching men. I cannot tell you how I got through that day.64

In fact, Bachner was fortunate to have received even the perfunc-

tory medical treatment that he did. One of those who were denied

treatment was a Dutch resistance fighter by the name of Graafland.