KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (71 page)

Especially important for the making of Holocaust perpetrators was their habituation to mass extermination. The Camp SS staff in the occupied east regarded bloodshed and murder as part of the job, with shifts and breaks, training and specialization.
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Genocide became routine, and even Camp SS officials not at the forefront of mass murder became immersed in it.
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It is particularly striking how
quickly novices fit in. Take the SS physician Dr. Kremer. During ten weeks in Auschwitz in autumn 1942, he participated in the murder of Jews on thirteen RSHA transports, as well as other prisoner selections and experiments; he also attended corporal punishments and executions. For a man like Kremer, extreme violence turned into an everyday event.
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Even SS officials who were initially shaken
by mass murder generally fell into line. A German soldier who spent a few days in Auschwitz in summer 1944 told an SS man that he could never participate in mass extermination. The man replied: “You will get used to it, too, everyone here becomes obedient and eats humble pie.”
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How this worked in practice becomes clear in the case of Dr. Hans Delmotte. A young SS physician, Delmotte suffered
a breakdown after witnessing his first selection at the Auschwitz ramp. He appeared paralyzed and had to be escorted to his quarters, where he got drunk and vomited. The next day, still dazed, he demanded to be transferred to the front, as he could not participate in mass slaughter. But Delmotte soon calmed down. He was placed under the wing of his experienced colleague Dr. Josef Mengele, who gradually
persuaded him of the necessity of mass extermination in Auschwitz. Delmotte was also reunited with his wife and before long, he had settled into his job, carrying out selections and even drawing praise from his superiors.
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The presence of his wife in Auschwitz may well have helped him to perform his murderous duties, turning the spotlight on another important aspect—the private lives of the
Camp SS in the east.

Happy Days in Auschwitz

In early 1947, as he was writing his memoirs in the Krakow prison, filling 114 double-sided pages with his small and neat script, Rudolf Höss looked back nostalgically at his family life in Auschwitz. Although he himself had been preoccupied with the camp, his family had enjoyed a great time, he remembered. “Every wish of my wife, of my children,
was met.” They lived together in a spacious villa adjacent to the main camp, mostly furnished in natural wood, the favored SS style. Here, Höss and his wife hosted many dinner parties for local SS men and other dignitaries. His children “could live free and easy,” Höss reminisced, while his wife “had her paradise of flowers.” Her gardener was a Polish prisoner, Stanis
ł
aw Dubiel, who grew exotic
plants for her, and Frau Höss used numerous female prisoners (including Jews) as personal tailors, hairdressers, and servants. Meanwhile, the four children (a fifth was born in September 1943) became attached to two female prisoners, elderly Jehovah’s Witnesses from Germany, who looked after them. Höss’s children liked to play with horses and ponies, and with animals caught for them by inmates,
like turtles, cats, and lizards. But their greatest pleasure, Höss remembered, was a swim “with daddy” in the Sola River or the paddling pool in the garden, no more than a stone’s throw from the main camp.
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The social life of the Auschwitz SS largely turned around the camp. Sports were particularly popular, reflecting the SS emphasis on physical exercise and competition. On July 14, 1944, Höss
even used his staff circular to congratulate an Unterscharführer Winter who had just been crowned the Upper Silesian champion in the shot put, discus, and javelin. Camp SS men also competed against teams from outside. On the afternoon of September 6, 1942, for example, they played a soccer match on the local athletic field against visitors from the Oranienburg SS (just a few hours after the game,
hundreds of Jews arriving from Drancy were gassed in nearby Birkenau). To relax after physical exercise or after a day inside the camp, SS men of all ranks could frequent the Commandant Staff sauna. And there was plenty of entertainment. An old theater on the camp grounds was used for shows featuring dancers, actors, acrobats, and jugglers (some of whom toured through different concentration camps).
As late as December 1944, just weeks before the camp was abandoned, Jupp Hussels, famous across the Third Reich as a film comedian and the sunny voice of German breakfast radio, arrived to entertain the Auschwitz SS troops.
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Music played an important part, too. There were several orchestras in the Auschwitz complex, including an eighty-strong symphonic orchestra and the only women’s ensemble
in a concentration camp (led by the prisoner Alma Rosé, the daughter of a famous Viennese violinist). While their main role was to play as the prisoner commandos departed for work (and returned), setting the tempo for all the marching columns, they put on regular concerts, as well. Many SS officials valued these occasions, not just for the music itself but also as signs of the supposed ordinariness
of Auschwitz. In addition, prisoners had to give private performances, just as in other KL, ranging from classical music for more high-minded officials to renditions of popular songs and dance music. The Dutch prisoner Richard van Dam, for instance, was frequently ordered to the Auschwitz political office, the scene of so much gruesome torture, where he had to sing jazzy American tunes like “I’m
Nobody’s Sweetheart Now,” accompanied on the accordion by Rottenführer Pery Broad, an SS official known as much for his sly interrogations as his musical skill.
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Diversions beyond the camp complex included a cinema in Auschwitz town, though the favorite stomping ground of the Camp SS and their guests was the Haus der Waffen SS, near the railway station, which offered rooms to visitors and a
large Germans-only bar and restaurant; female KL prisoners were forced to work as chambermaids and cooks. SS officers, meanwhile, had their own exclusive building, a little closer to the main camp, where they met in the evenings to eat, drink, and play cards. As a special treat, they could visit the Camp SS weekend retreat, the so-called Sola-Hütte. The rustic log cabin, built by prisoners on an
idyllic spot some twenty-five miles away from the Auschwitz main camp, accommodated around twenty people, who could swim in an adjacent lake in summer or go skiing in winter.
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Then there were the brothels for Camp SS men. Inside the German heartland, SS men normally frequented existing municipal brothels. As there were none in Auschwitz, the authorities set up a new brothel with German prostitutes,
in line with the order Oswald Pohl had given during his September 1942 inspection of the camp. SS leader Heinrich Himmler generally approved of such establishments, as he feared that his troops were becoming sex starved. But the new Auschwitz brothel was not open to all Camp SS men. Nazi racial thinking dictated that Ukrainian SS men had to visit another site, set up for IG Farben foreign
workers.
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Although the Auschwitz SS largely kept to itself, it did build up local contacts outside the camp. Told to avoid the Polish population, SS officials developed social contacts with other Germans in town, who arrived as part of the general “Germanization” program. The plans for Auschwitz town were vast, with big apartment complexes, major roads, parade grounds, and several stadiums.
As the Holocaust unfolded inside the camp, the nearby town was turned into a major building site (only a few projects were completed by the time the Germans fled in early 1945). The makeup of the local population was transformed, too. Nazi ethnic cleansing had led to the deportation of thousands of Poles and Jews and the influx of some seven thousand Germans by autumn 1943; most of them had been
attracted by the financial rewards of employment in the east and worked for IG Farben. The new civic elite built ties to the Camp SS, mingling during theater and variety evenings, Christmas celebrations, and dinner parties.
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The SS presence in Auschwitz town was hard to overlook. The SS settlement grew into a district of its own, as SS managers grabbed more and more buildings to accommodate
the swelling ranks. The nicest houses were reserved for officers, with most of the rank-and-file staff living in large barracks. Married officials received visits from their families, often for several weeks at a time. Sometimes whole families relocated to Auschwitz. Among them were children who had spent all their life in the Camp SS entourage. The son and daughter of the first Auschwitz camp compound
leader, Karl Fritzsch, for example, had been born in the Dachau SS settlement; after seven years, during which the children had attended the local SS nursery, the Fritzsch family packed up and went to Auschwitz, moving into the first floor of a large house. They soon met some familiar faces, including former neighbors from Dachau. In fact, so many families moved into town that the local SS
leadership put a stop to it in summer 1944.
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What made Auschwitz so attractive to the families of SS staff? Apart from the desire to be reunited with their loved ones, married SS men were keen to move from barracks into private accommodation. Their wives and children, meanwhile, often enjoyed greater peace of mind after relocating, as they felt safer from Allied bombing than deeper inside Germany.
Besides, life in the shadow of the camp often meant social advances: nobodies became somebodies. The families of Auschwitz SS officers occupied an elevated social status, and enjoyed a lifestyle well beyond their normal means. Men and women from humble backgrounds lived like members of the upper middle class back home, in lavish villas set in large gardens full of flowers and fruit trees,
waited on by servants.
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The presence of their families also made the job easier for some Camp SS officers, as we saw in the case of Dr. Delmotte. The company of children and wives provided stability and emotional support—some officers hurried home from the Auschwitz camp to eat lunch with their family—and helped to normalize their actions inside the camp. After his family moved out of the SS
settlement, leaving him behind, chief garrison physician Dr. Eduard Wirths wrote to his wife in December 1944: “When you and the little ones were with me in Au[schwitz], one could feel nothing of the war!”
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The camp was not taboo in the homes of the Auschwitz SS, despite an official ban on discussing their duties.
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True, there were some limits. When Rudolf Höss found his children playing
“Kapo and Prisoner” in the garden, he angrily ripped the colored triangles off their clothes; seeing his children enact the camp in his own private sanctuary was too much for him.
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Still, Auschwitz SS men frequently spoke about the camp to relatives and friends, just like SS officials in the other KL.
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Even Commandant Höss himself ignored his own orders and discussed the Nazi Final Solution
with his wife, who apparently referred to her husband as the “special commissioner for the extermination of Jews in Europe.”
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The lives of local SS families were inseparable from the camp. Food, furniture, clothes, and even toys came from the Auschwitz compounds, as did prisoners used as servants and handymen. The wives and children of SS men also attended official Camp SS functions, such as
Christmas parties, films, and puppet shows.
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As for the crimes in the camp, the smoke and stench from the Birkenau crematorium “permeated the entire area,” Höss later noted, including the SS settlement; when SS men returned home in the evenings, their uniforms and shoes gave off the camp’s distinctive smell of decay and death.
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Even the Auschwitz compounds themselves were open to relatives
of the Camp SS staff. Although it was forbidden, SS men regularly showed their wives or girlfriends around, perhaps to satisfy their curiosity.
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SS families made use of the SS medical facilities inside the camp—one located opposite the old crematorium, the other near the so-called Gypsy camp—and treated the prisoners as a source of entertainment. In summer 1944, Birkenau camp compound leader
Johann Schwarzhuber forced Soviet prisoners to dance at the electric fence, for the amusement of his family, who watched from the other side. Some children of SS men also entered the compounds, despite attempts by their mothers to protect them from witnessing abuses. In fact, such visits became so widespread that in July 1943 Commandant Höss banned unaccompanied children of SS staff from the camp
and its labor commandos. Any direct contact with prisoners, Höss noted sternly, was morally indefensible.
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In short, the truth about the camp was well known among Auschwitz SS families. This did not stop the wives from supporting their husbands and from enjoying their time in the SS settlement. In some cases, at least, such support was ideologically rooted. Several wives were fervent followers
of the Nazi cause. Frau Höss, for one, had met her husband on the far-right fringes during the 1920s. Several of these women may have treated individual prisoners rather humanely, but they stood behind the camps and condoned their husbands’ crimes, tacitly or openly. By performing their role as SS wives and creating a semblance of normality at the
anus mundi
, these women became complicit in the
atrocities.
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Part of the attraction of Auschwitz for the wives of SS officers was material gain; few, if any, of them ever lived in greater style and luxury. The same was true for SS wives in other KL in occupied eastern Europe. Talking frankly in the late 1970s, the widow of the former Plaszow commandant Göth looked back at her time in the camp with great sorrow—not sorrow for the crimes,
but for the “beautiful time” that had long since passed: “My Göth was the king, and I was the queen. Who wouldn’t have traded places with us?”
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Frau Höss, too, felt so happy that she stayed behind in Auschwitz with her children after her husband was transferred to WVHA-D headquarters (formerly the Camp Inspectorate) in Oranienburg in autumn 1943. Her lavish lifestyle was fed with riches taken
as a matter of course from local SS supplies and from Jews killed in Birkenau. Her wardrobe was filled with murdered women’s dresses and shoes, and her pantry was bulging with sugar, flour, chocolate, meat, sausages, milk, and cream. Even the gardening supplies for her exotic flowers had arrived from the camp. When the time finally came to leave the commandant’s villa in late 1944, as the Soviet
troops approached, the Höss family needed a couple of railway trucks to transport all their possessions to safety.
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Of course, they were not the only pilferers in the Camp SS; corruption was rife across the KL, and nowhere more so than in occupied eastern Europe.