Scheisshaus Luck (40 page)

As historian Peter Hayes points out, evidence has not emerged to date to demonstrate that the initiative for requesting slave labor rested with I.G. Farben.
17

However, once committed to working with the Nazi SS, I.G.

quickly adjusted to the exploitation of Auschwitz labor. The project broke ground in April 1941, when the first prisoners trudged five kilometers to the building site under armed guard. The managers and German workers increasingly viewed the prisoners in SS terms, well before the first Jewish detainees arrived at the I.G. building site in July 1942. A comment by construction chief Max Faust about Polish civilian workers, in December 1941, indicated the pernicious effect of the SS on I.G.’s thinking:

Also outrageous is the lack of work discipline on the part of Polish workers. Numerous laborers work at the most 3–4 days in the week.

All forms of pressure, even admission into the KL [concentration camp], remain fruitless. Unfortunately, always doing this leaves the construction leadership with no disciplinary powers at its disposal.
According to our previous experience only brute force bears fruit with these men.

[Emphasis added.
]18

Much as I.G. Auschwitz was problematic without Germany’s reversals of fortune in the summer of 1940, it would never have been undertaken if agreements had not been made before the launching of Operation Barbarossa. Contrary to certain postwar claims, I.G. executives did not know about the Fu¨hrer’s decisions AFTERWORD

289

for aggressive war. Operation Barbarossa disrupted their timetables because the German army’s monopoly on the railways in the summer of 1941 cost almost four months of irreplaceable construction time when the start date for oil and rubber production was scheduled for the spring of 1943. With every passing month, the target slipped further away. Unrealistic timetables and frustration over the Krauch Office’s lack of empathy for local conditions contributed to I.G.’s willingness to resort to barbaric SS methods. The failure of Barbarossa in December 1941 led the Nazi regime to reassess its construction priorities, with the closure of projects in the early stages unlikely to contribute to ‘‘Final Victory.’’ Although the Auschwitz project had not progressed very far, it received strong endorsement from Go¨ring, Himmler, and Albert Speer.
19

For purely utilitarian reasons, I.G. managers alleviated some of the worst working conditions. In order to curtail the ten-kilometer daily march, a short railway line was built between the camp and the building site. To place some distance between sadistic SS guards and the prisoners, the building site was enclosed with a fence while the guards remained along the periphery outside the plant. The latter project took much longer to complete than anticipated because the Auschwitz-based SS Company, German Equipment Works (
Deutsche Ausru¨stungswerke
), was unable to deliver the fence in timely fashion. Shortly after the fence was erected, and only weeks after the first Jewish prisoners started to work on the job site, typhus
and
typhoid epidemics broke out in Auschwitz concentration camp. In late July 1942, Ho¨ss responded by quarantining the camps and murdering the infected. The epidemics were directly attribut-able to the SS and I.G. because prisoners were forced to endure inhuman conditions with vicious treatment, starvation diet, exhaustive labor, and unrelieved stress. In coping with the temporary loss of unskilled camp labor, I.G. allocated a fourth work camp, intended originally for civilian workers, to serve as a new Auschwitz satellite, Monowitz.
20

Erected on the building site’s periphery in what had been the demolished Polish village of Monowice, the new camp opened in 290

SCHIESSHAUS LUCK

late October 1942. From beginning to end, Monowitz’s population was overwhelmingly Jewish. The camp prominents included German criminals and a small number of German Jewish political prisoners removed from camps in the Old Reich. The latter prisoners were transferred on Himmler’s order to make ‘‘
Judenfrei
’’ (free of Jews) the older concentration camps like Dachau and Buchenwald.

Consisting mostly of Communist Party members, these Jewish prisoners formed the nucleus of the resistance and their actions made Monowitz far less deadly for the prisoners than it otherwise would have bee
n.21

Nevertheless conditions were lethal at Monowitz. Between November 1942 and January 1945, the death toll reached between 23,000 and 25,000 prisoners. This estimate excludes the losses of early Auschwitz prisoners in 1941 and 1942—that is, before Monowitz’s establishment. At Monowitz, the SS undertook periodic

‘‘selections’’ of weakened prisoners, known as
Muselma¨nner
, during camp marches. I.G. managers attended some of these selections.

The SS dispatched the selected to Birkenau for gassing or to Auschwitz for killing by lethal injection. On a smaller scale the selections continued in the infirmary, where SS doctors ordered the transfer for killing of those prisoners whose recovery would occupy bedding space for an indefinite period. Because Monowitz was built partly in response to Auschwitz epidemics, the firm took steps to ensure that new detainees had not been exposed to typhus. These measures were not always benign. After selection at Birkenau, new prisoners were taken to Monowitz and held in a quarantine camp for several weeks. While there they worked as a segregated labor detail at the construction site. The manifestation of typhus symptoms among any new arrivals led to the murder of the entire detachment.
22

By the time Mr. Berg arrived at Monowitz, the I.G. building site had assumed recognizable shape as a chemical plant, in spite of war-economy frictions and SS incompetence. In the fall of 1943, the plant began producing synthetic methanol, an alcohol derived from coal under immense pressure. Methanol was useful in the production of rocket fuel and explosives and constituted AFTERWORD

291

I.G. Auschwitz’s principal contribution to the German war economy. The plant also produced the explosives component, diglycol, and in the summer of 1944 was contracted to produce phosgene, a chemical weapon used in combat during World War I, but not World War II.
23

With increasing need for skilled laborers to outfit the partially finished buildings, many unskilled prisoners were redeployed from the autumn of 1943 in the construction of makeshift and permanent air-raid shelters. Previously, the firm had given air-raid protection low priority, but abruptly changed course with the Allied advances in Sicily and Italy in the summer of 1943. (The capture of southern Italy brought Poland within the theoretical bombing range of the U.S. Army Air Force.) The air campaign in the summer and fall of 1944 magnified the horrors of the prisoners’ daily existence, even as these attacks underscored that the Nazi regime’s days were numbered. At least 158 Monowitz prisoners were killed in the course of four U.S. daylight bombing raids between August and December 1944. The Soviets also attacked the plant at least twice in December 1944 and January 1945. The number of detainees killed in the December and January attacks is unknown, but all the air attacks disrupted water, food, and electrical power, even as they also raised morale
.24

By December 1944, the I.G. Auschwitz labor force included almost every European nationality. Its ‘‘paper’’ strength was 31,000, with 29,000 effectives at work. These workers included Italian civilians and Italian military internees, British POWs, Belgian and French contract workers, numerous Poles and Ukrainians (both forced and ‘‘free’’), and other non-Jewish Eastern Europeans. The status of workers, free or forced, depended upon the regime’s dictates and I.G. Farben’s assessment of their labor productivity. Theoretically, Monowitz comprised one-third of the total I.G.

Auschwitz workforce (just over 10,000 prisoners), but the number of forced laborers at the plant was smaller. In November 1944 the WVHA listed Monowitz as a new main camp, with responsibility for the almost forty Auschwitz satellites. The establishment of the 292

SCHIESSHAUS LUCK

Monowitz and Mittelbau (Dora) main camps was part of the last reorganization of the SS camp system.
25

For Monowitz’s prisoners, horrible days lay ahead. In January 1945, the Soviets began the Vistula-Oder Offensive and the timing caught the German army by surprise. The Red Army consequently captured the still unfinished plant with little damage. The SS evacuated Monowitz on 18 January, as part of the larger evacuation of the Auschwitz satellite camps. The ‘‘death march’’ that Mr. Berg describes so vividly had begun.
26

After four years of construction, I.G. Auschwitz remained unfinished. Under the Germans at least, it never produced synthetic oil or rubber, but wasted tens of thousands of human lives. The plant was a monument to a totalitarian dictatorship that enlisted private industry in the service of refashioning humanity along ‘‘racial’’ lines.

Notes

1. AndreŚellier,
A History of the Dora Camp: The Story of the
Nazi Slave Labor Camp That Secretly Manufactured V-2 Rockets,
foreword by Michael J. Neufeld, afterword by Jens-Christian Wagner, trans. Stephen Wright and Susan Taponier (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, published in associated with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2003); Yves Beón,
Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust
and the Birth of the Space Age
, introduction by Michael J. Neufeld, trans. Yves Beón and Richard L. Fague (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); Georges Wellers,
De Drancy aÀuschwitz
(Paris: E´ditions du Centre, 1946); reissued under the title of
L’e´toile jaune à
l’heure de Vichy: De Drancy aÀuschwitz
(Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1973); Paul Steinberg,
Speak You Also: A Survivor’s Reckon-ing
, trans. Linda Coverdale with Bill Ford (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2000), originally published as
Chronique d’ailleurs
(Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1996); Antoni Makowski, ‘‘Organization, Growth and Activity of the Prisoners’ Hospital AFTERWORD

293

at Monowitz (KL Auschwitz III),’’ in
From the History of KL Auschwitz
, vol. II, ed. Kasimierz Smolen, trans. Kryztyna Michalik (Krako´w: Panstwowe Muzeum w Oswiecimiu, 1976), pp. 121–195.

2. Lawrence L. Langer,
Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of
Memory
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991).

3. Primo Levi,
Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity
, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York and London: Collier’s, 1961), p. 66 (quotation).

4. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), RG-238 (War Crimes), microfilm publication T-301, Records of the United States Chief of Counsel for War Crimes, Nuremberg, Relating to Nuremberg Industrialists (NI), roll 84, NI-10186, frames 382–383, 565–566, Monowitz Hospital Book, 15 July 1943–27 June 1944, hereafter T-301/84/NI-10186/382–383, 565–

566. Pierre Berg telephone interview, 13 June 2004; Levi,
Survival
in Auschwitz
, pp. 39–50; on hospital blocks, Makowski, ‘‘Organization, Growth and Activity of the Prisoners’ Hospital at Monowitz (KL Auschwitz III),’’ p. 129. Two more blocks were added before Monowitz’s abandonment in January 1945.

5. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Moscow Central State
Osobyi
(special) Archives, Record Group (RG-) 11.001 M.03, Zentralbauleitung der Waffen SS und Polizei Auschwitz,
fond
(record group) 502,
opis
(inventory) 5,
delo
(file) 2, roll 70, Rundschreiben Nr. 8013/44, IG Auschwitz Werksluftschutzlei-tung, Du¨rrfeld, Betr.: ‘‘Sichtbares Warnsignal,’’ 25 Aug. 1944, p.

43; on the documented air attacks, see Joseph Robert White, ‘‘Target Auschwitz: Historical and Hypothetical Allied Responses to Allied Attack,’’
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
(
HGS
) 16:1 (Spring 2002): 58–59.

6. Steinberg,
Speak You Also
; White, ‘‘’Even in Auschwitz . . .

Humanity Could Prevail’: British POWs and Jewish Concentration-Camp Inmates at IG Auschwitz, 1943–1945,’’
HGS
15:2 (Fall 2001): 266–295.

7. For the nationality figures, see Michael Neufeld, ‘‘Introduction: Mittelbau-Dora—Secret Weapons and Slave Labor,’’ in Beón, 294

SCHIESSHAUS LUCK

Planet Dora
, p. xx; idem, ‘‘Foreword,’’ in Sellier,
A History of the
Dora Camp
, p. x; for the history of Dora, see also Joachim Neander,
Das Konzentrationslager Mittelbau in der Endphase der NS-Diktatur:
Zur Geschichte des letzten im ‘‘Dritten Reich’’ gegru¨ndeten selbsta¨ndigen
Konzentrationslagers unter besonderer Beru¨cksichtigung seiner Auflo¨sun-gsphase
(Clausthal-Zellerfeld: Papierflieger, 1997); and most importantly Jens-Christian Wagner,
Produktion des Todes: Das KZ

Mittelbau-Dora
, ed. Stiftung von der Gedenksta¨tten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora (Go¨ttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2001).

8. Pierre Berg, ‘‘Odyssey of a Pajama’’ (unpub. MSS, 1953); Berg, telephone interview, 13 June 2004.

9. Elie Wiesel,
Night
, trans. Stella Rodway, foreword by Franc¸ois Mauriac, preface by Robert McAfee Brown (New York: Bantam, 1986 [1960]); Levi,
The Reawakening
(New York: Summit Books, 1986 [1963]). On the Soviet occupation, see Norman M.

Naimark,
The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of
Occupation, 1945–1949
(Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belk-nap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995); and Antony Beevor,
The Fall of Berlin 1945
(New York and London: Viking Penguin, 2002).