Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (36 page)

In the upper camp – the death-camp – there was no whippingpost or roll-call, but equally there was no possibility of stealing food to supplement the camp rations, and the least infringement of the rules meant being shot on the spot. And the rules became ever more stringent as the ss, with the inexorable advance of the Russians, became increasingly desperate to hide the evidence of the slaughter.

“In May,” said Richard Glazar, “Karel and I were transferred to a special ‘camouflage’ unit: our job was to bring in huge branches from the forest to camouflage the new fences. Our foreman was Heinrich Kleinmann, a former Czech civil servant – a quiet, polite, bespectacled man, a curious choice of foreman for our tough little gang of dare-devils.

“We were called the ‘smugglers’ because, being the only people who were ever allowed out of the camp, we made full use of our many opportunities to smuggle things in. As weeks went by and transports were a rarity, it was increasingly important to bring in food for those who were particularly essential to us, some of whom were ill and dangerously weak. Of course, we had nearly unlimited supplies of money; the Ukrainians we paid and paid and paid. And the Poles-well, in May 1943 the going rate for two white rolls, three-quarters of an ounce of sausage and two-thirds of a litre of vodka was between ten and twenty dollars – often more.

“We knew that Zhelo was still alive, because some time in the late spring, one of the ss, a man called Poltzinger who worked up at Camp II, came to our shop and asked which were ‘Karel and Richard’, and when we said it was us, he said he’d brought a message from Zhelo: he was ok and would we like to send a message back to him. We always thought the
SS
up there were better than ours, probably because, after all, they had to live through the same unspeakable horrors as the slaves up there. If our latrines smelled pretty bad, this was nothing by comparison to the ever-present sweetly sick smell of the burnings. If we found it hard to bear it down where we were-imagine what it was like for the people who lived up there.…”

12

AS IT
happened, two of the former
SS
men I met had worked “up there”: Otto Horn, in charge of the incineration of the bodies, and Gustav Münzberger, in charge of the gas chambers. “Münzberger?” said Otto Horn (who had also testified to this effect at the Treblinka trial in 1965). “One of his jobs was to stand at the door to the gas chambers and drive them in. He had a whip of course. He did that, day after day. He was drunk most of the time. What else could he do? Could he have got out of that job? I don’t know. I think finally he no longer cared – he drank.”

Oberammergau, famous for its passion-play festival every ten years, lies two hours south of Munich, deep in a lovely valley surrounded by pine-clad hills and friendly rather than forbidding mountains. Unterammergau, one station – four minutes – earlier on the single-track railway line, is tiny by comparison: the station, a road, two streets, a general store, an inn, and perhaps fifty houses, all of them brilliantly white, with brilliantly green or striped shutters, window-boxes, scrubbed children who smile and say “
Grüss Gott
”, and the smell of tar, manure, meadows, pine trees and freshly cut timber.

Gustav Münzberger, sixty-eight when I met him in the spring of 1972, is a big man who often looks ten or fifteen years older. He sits at the kitchen table, his body slack, his head bowed. He is clean-shaven but looks stubbly; he is immaculately dressed, but looks as if he cannot button his own shirt.

Sentenced to twelve years in prison in 1965, he came out, with the usual remission for good behaviour, in July 1971. His son Horst – a master cabinet-maker – and Horst’s wife, had meanwhile built up a workshop in Unterammergau and divided their house into two self-contained flats, downstairs for themselves and their three children, upstairs a kitchen/living room, bedroom and bathroom for Horst’s parents.

“What else could we do?” said Horst. “They are my parents; he is my father.” His wife’s father, an old socialist, really
was
a known anti-Nazi during the Third Reich and the family had a rough time of it. Even so she agrees. “We had to have them. There was no other way.”

The Münzbergers came originally from a town in the Sudetenland, the border of Saxony.

“Where we lived in 1938,” said Horst’s mother, “we knew nothing, we heard nothing about politics.” She is a big woman, with a flowered dress, an apron, and big bare arms. “Of course, we were Germans in Czechoslovakia, that’s true. But no, we never heard any of their propaganda. My husband – he was just interested in the gym society, that’s all.”

“I don’t like contradicting you, Mother,” said Horst gently, “but young as I was, I remember that time. I remember on my way to music school when I was eight, I had to pass the synagogue. And I remember that, after the
Kristallnacht
it was destroyed. So we weren’t all that untouched by their ‘propaganda’, were we?”

Later, when we were alone, Horst said thoughtfully: “At home, in the Sudetenland, my father was … well … a joiner, neither very good, nor bad-you know. But I can remember when he got that black
SS
uniform: that’s when he began to be ‘somebody’ I suppose, rather than just anybody. And then, in Treblinka – it is inconceivable, isn’t it, what he suddenly was: the scope, the power, the uniqueness, the difference between himself and all those others – imagine.… No, it is unimaginable.

“I wish he would speak to you. For me it was like lightning when they came to arrest him. Oh, I had an idea that everything hadn’t been as it should have been. And when he was arrested, of course, the wildest rumours went about. But I didn’t know anything. I wish he had prepared me, talked to me, told me the truth.…Yes, I know now what he was accused of and sentenced for; I read the indictment. But I don’t know it from
him.
Now I just wish, for his sake, that he could ease his mind by talking about it.…”

Münzberger, a non-commissioned officer in the
SS
, came to Treblinka after having served in the euthanasia institute at Schloss Sonnenstein in Pirna – also called
Die Sonne.

“After he was called up,” said Horst, “he often came on leave, very often. But never in uniform. I never saw him in uniform again – always in civvies. We had very good holidays, yes, we had it very good, I remember. Yes, I think people at home knew about him. I remember the father of a school friend saying to me once, ‘You wait. Your father – we’ll get him one day.’ He was a Czech. At the time, of course, I didn’t know what he meant, but I think he knew. But my mother didn’t say anything.…”

“Well, I knew after a while what he was doing,” said the old Frau Münzberger. “He wasn’t supposed to say of course, but you know what women are. I probed and probed and finally he told me. It was awful of course, but what could
we
do?”

“My mother and I visited him in Pirna,” said Horst. “There was a special building, with ‘common rooms’, you know, for the staff, where we saw him. I remember, there were a lot of Baits around in the grounds, women and children too.”

“The Baits,” said the old man as if he was only just coming to. “Oh, they were just
Umsiedler
[resettlers] – they had nothing to do with what was being done at Pirna. It was so big you see – they just used part of the grounds as a reception centre for these Baltic-Germans. Did I think what they were doing at Pirna wrong? I don’t know,” he said wearily. “Some of them, the people who were brought there were so … it was so dreadful – it really was a mercy for them to die. Did I try to get out of it? Away from Treblinka later? When they sent me to Treblinka there was some administrative mix-up I think, and they gave me two different postings you know, two different pieces of paper. So I went to Wirth when I got to Treblinka and showed them to him and said could I please request permission to go to the other posting. But he sent me packing in no uncertain terms. He said the posting to Treblinka was more important than anything else – it overrode any other orders.

“We up at the
Totenlager
,” he said, “we didn’t have any whipping-posts or anything like that. I was just glad every night when I could go down to my room and have peace. Oh yes, our quarters were down in the lower camp. What did I do at night?” He shrugged his shoulders and made the gesture of lifting a bottle to his lips. His wife smiled sympathetically. “I worked for years for the Steins,” she volunteered. “Jews in our home town. And Gustav, he had many Jewish customers.”

“Anyway, before the war a quarter of the population were Jews,” he interposed.

“We had nothing against them,” his wife continued. “In my school I sat cheek by jowl with I don’t know how many Jewish girls. What did we know, what did we care? They went to the synagogue, we went to church, that’s all.…”

Gustav Münzberger’s face changes from moment to moment, from an old man’s ever-present, ever-running tears, to resignation and to weariness. And then – as if by some sleight of hand – there is a sudden momentary glimpse offeree, of what he may have been like in the past. This is physical, not moral or spiritual strength. He was, no doubt, a tall broad-shouldered man, with a fine head and blue eyes, the sort of man a woman like Horst’s mother, in that small Sudetenland town, would have fallen in love with. But, even though there sat a man who by the very fact of still being alive sullied all he touched – he was a “small man”, one of the proverbial cogs in the wheel.

“Did I have any personal contact – relationships you ask, with the people at Treblinka?” he said in his broad Bavarian-Sudeten accent and in a slightly quavering voice. “With those naked ones? How? Oh … you mean the work-Jews? No, they had their Kapos,
they
organized them.…”

“And then there were your Ukrainians, weren’t there, didn’t you say?” his wife prompted quickly.

“Yes, the Ukrainians too.
We
didn’t have to do anything. There wasn’t really anything for us to do. Yes, we just had to be there; that’s right; that’s all.”

“When they informed us that he was to be released from prison,” said his wife, “I said I’d take the train to Münster to get him. But Horst, he said, ‘Stay home, get things ready for Father – I’ll get him.’ Without Horst, I don’t know what we would have done. He has given us everything. Built us our rooms here, given his father work – that’s what’s keeping him going now – working. The nights are hard for him: no sleep before two or three, and even then, never without pills.”

Horst Münzberger is thirty-eight but looks thirty. His wife, although they have three young children, the oldest – when I met them – eight, the youngest three, looks like a young girl. Their house, at the end of the road from the village, is a gem of traditional Bavarian craftsmanship, inside and out.

“I think”, said Horst later, downstairs in their living room, “one can make someone weaker than he is, by telling him all the time he is weak and tired. That is what my mother does. I think my father is much stronger than he seems. You know, these tears he sheds, they are not all that new. I remember when I was a boy and he spanked me; he cried more than I did; he really did. I remember it well.

“Of course, he was always a very thorough man; thorough in his work and in his habits. Did they
select
people because of special qualities, or perhaps special vulnerabilities? I don’t know. I wish I did. I can’t really imagine that they chose them at random. In our village, for instance, they took two for this awful thing – my father and a neighbour. Two out of – I think there were twenty of that age and of the same status. Why just them? Why, too, did so many of the men who worked these terrible places come not from Germany proper, but from one of the annexed states – Austria, the Sudetenland, Ukrainians, Lithuanians?

“My father – I can quite imagine that he would have approached Treblinka with the same thoroughness with which he approached his carpentry at home: it was his principal quality as a craftsman.”

The fact that many of these men were not from the
Altreich
was also emphasized by Dieter Allers, former administrative director of T4, who continues to insist that the men had not been deliberately picked for these jobs, that the majority of them had not been drafted into T4, but had volunteered.
His
purpose – conscious or unconscious – was to convey that it was these morally inferior semi-outsiders who competed for these assignments, not “real” Germans. I am inclined to take a different view. Although, at least as far as the original recruitment for the Euthanasia Programme was concerned, I think he may be telling the truth in claiming that many of the people who joined did so voluntarily, for the additional benefits and the chance of not having to go to the front; and although the number of Austrians who occupied leading positions in just this area of Third Reich policies cannot be ignored; nevertheless I believe that accepting so many “volunteers” from outside the
Altreich
was a deliberate part of the system. Psychologically, these were men who could be expected to feel less secure and therefore could be made to feel more dependent, more anxious to prove their new national allegiance. In a practical sense, therefore, they were more vulnerable to pressure. And when it came to the selection of the ninety-six
SS
who were to run the
Aktion Reinhard
in Poland, these men, I am convinced, were chosen very carefully from the ranks of the original four hundred T4 personnel, for specific qualities observed during their “apprenticeship” in the Euthanasia Programme. It is of considerable significance here that while the files of German army personnel in general, and most of the
SS
in particular, did survive the war, the files (
Kartei-Karten
as Dieter Allers described them) of these ninety-six men which were kept in the offices of T4, as well as other T4 files have disappeared.

Earlier I had asked Horst’s father whether, when he was first ordered to report to T4 in Berlin, he too (like Stangl) had signed a paper renouncing the Church and stating that he was a
Gottgläubiger.
“No,” he had replied at once.