KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (74 page)

While Koch stood at the center of Morgen’s investigation, which spanned the former commandant’s reign over both Buchenwald and Majdanek, many other SS men were soon implicated, too. For example, Morgen found that almost all NCOs under Koch in Majdanek had become “completely corrupt,” openly stuffing valuables into their pockets. In the end, though, only close associates
of Koch were prosecuted.
272
Among them was Hauptscharführer Gotthold Michael, who was accused of running some of his master’s fraudulent operations, as well as stealing prisoner property for his own use, including valuable leather suitcases.
273
A more senior defendant was Hermann Hackmann, who had risen in the slipstream of his patron Koch to adjutant in Buchenwald and camp compound leader in
Majdanek, in a typical example of Camp SS nepotism. Hackmann was sentenced to death by an SS court on June 29, 1944, for persistent theft, but the judgment was not carried out and he was released after half a year in Dachau to fight against the advancing U.S. troops.
274

Meanwhile, the case against Karl Otto Koch dragged on. Himmler had authorized the use of torture to break those who might know
about SS corruption, and in March 1944 Koch was forced into a partial admission of guilt—the blind support from his superiors had turned him into a megalomaniac, he said—only to recant his confession.
275
Koch’s trial finally began in September 1944 before an SS and police court in Weimar, but it was quickly adjourned and only resumed on December 18, 1944. Ilse Koch, who had been accused of involvement
in the corrupt dealings, was found not guilty. But her husband was sentenced to death. SS leaders hesitated to carry out the sentence. Then, in early April 1945, just before the war ended, Koch was taken from the Weimar police jail to Buchenwald and executed by an SS firing squad. In a final gesture of bravado, he refused a blindfold, clinging to the macho spirit of the Camp SS to the very
end.
276

A Judge in Auschwitz

As evidence for large-scale corruption in Buchenwald mounted up in 1943, Heinrich Himmler authorized the extension of the internal SS investigation into several other KL.
277
By early 1944, a few dozen officials were working under Konrad Morgen, who led the investigative teams, and a special SS and police court had been established to deal with the more complex cases.
278
The reach of the corruption probe was limited, however, and Morgen’s team investigated no more than half a dozen concentration camps.
279
Much of the focus was on the occupied east, where the ready availability of “Jewish property” had resulted in “familiar manifestations of corruption,” as Morgen wrote in 1944.
280
A number of Camp SS men were arrested, including two commandants. Hermann Florstedt,
who had led Majdanek since November 1942, had initially been praised by his superiors for turning the camp around after Koch’s chaotic reign. By and by, Florstedt turned out to be no less crooked than his predecessor, and in autumn 1943 he was arrested on suspicion of embezzlement, among other charges. His case never came to court, though, and in late March 1945 he was still held on remand in
a Weimar police jail; his subsequent fate remains unclear.
281
In Plaszow, meanwhile, Commandant Amon Göth—notorious for his lust for gold—was arrested in September 1944, but like Florstedt, he was never sentenced by the SS.
282

From around autumn 1943, Konrad Morgen and several members of his team worked in Auschwitz to investigate SS larceny and fraud, following the aforementioned discovery of
dental gold posted by a medical orderly.
283
To stop Morgen’s investigation in its tracks, the Auschwitz SS leadership reminded its officials “one last time” that prisoner property—including gold and valuables—was out of bounds; all those who “sullied themselves with such a dirty deed” as theft would be kicked out and prosecuted.
284
But corruption was too deeply ingrained to cease on command. After
several months in Auschwitz—searching lockers and barracks, examining paperwork, and interrogating suspects—Morgen’s men arrested several people (twenty-three NCOs and two officers, according to a former investigator). Once more, however, the threat of draconian sanctions evaporated. Even major offenders got away with a few years of detention or less. Others were punished even more lightly. Franz
Wunsch, for example, an NCO in the Canada storage area who was caught carrying stolen gloves, knives, cigarettes, and more, only received five weeks in solitary confinement.
285

The SS investigation in Auschwitz continued well into 1944. There was even talk of broadening its remit: in June, Morgen heard that Himmler would ask him to head a major inquiry leading “from Hungary to Auschwitz.” Apparently,
the mass murder of Hungarian Jews in Birkenau, which had recently begun, yielded less bounty than the SS authorities expected, raising renewed suspicions of embezzlement; it is unclear, however, if this new inquiry ever got off the ground.
286
Ultimately, the most high-profile victim of Morgen’s corruption investigation was the head of the Auschwitz political office, Maximilian Grabner. The role
of political offices, which were closely involved in mass death and executions, grew sharply across the KL system during the Second World War, and nowhere more so than in Auschwitz, where its many tasks included the supervision of the crematoria and gas chamber complex. Grabner, who had joined the Camp SS from the Vienna Gestapo, carved out a powerful place for his office, almost independent of
Commandant Höss, and became perhaps the most feared SS man in the camp.
287
Using his privileged position, Grabner helped himself freely to the property of murdered Jews, sending home whole suitcases stuffed with loot.
288
His schemes eventually caught the eye of Morgen’s investigators, and on December 1, 1943, he was removed from his post.
289

Grabner’s trial before the special SS and police court
in autumn 1944 soon took an unusual turn, revealing the full absurdity of SS justice. Grabner was not only charged with corruption, he was the only Auschwitz SS man also to be indicted for arbitrary prisoner killings, outside the chain of command.
290
To Grabner, this must have seemed like a preposterous accusation: Had he not acted according to the general principles of Nazi terror? Some of his
old Auschwitz colleagues, called as witnesses, duly came to his defense. Rudolf Höss argued that Grabner’s deeds were hardly worth mentioning, in view of the daily mass murder all around the camp. One of Grabner’s former subordinates, Wilhelm Boger, went even further and is said to have exclaimed: “We have killed far too few for Führer and Reich!”
291
Such radical sentiments were probably shared
by Heinrich Himmler, who normally backed autonomous acts of Camp SS violence. Even on the rare occasion when he reproached individual SS officials for having gone too far, he was willing to accept that they had acted in the right spirit.
292
Predictably, given Himmler’s views and the all-out terror in the KL, it was impossible to prove that Grabner had overstepped his authority. The trial against
him was adjourned, amid general confusion, and never resumed.
293

Keeping Up Appearances

The fanatical Wilhelm Boger spoke for many of his Camp SS comrades, in Auschwitz and elsewhere, when he described Konrad Morgen’s investigation as “a ridiculous theater.”
294
And yet, most Camp SS officials did not feel like laughing, as Morgen’s commission was a potential threat; they relied on thefts and
fraud as a second income and were in no mood to compromise their lifestyles. These men feared and hated Morgen and did their best to obstruct, sabotage, and undermine his team.
295
It was surely no accident that, one day in December 1943, the Auschwitz barrack that held much of the evidence gathered by Morgen’s team mysteriously went up in flames.
296

Compared to most Camp SS men, Heinrich Himmler’s
stance on corruption was more ambiguous. He always presented himself as a paragon of propriety. And he was instrumental in launching the investigation into the KL, following the Holocaust-related rise in larceny. Himmler personally approved Konrad Morgen as the head of the anticorruption force and continued to back him, despite opposition from senior Camp SS officials. As late as summer 1944,
Himmler expressed his appreciation for the special SS and police court and asked for Morgen’s promotion to Sturmbannführer.
297
At the same time, Himmler’s threat of unforgiving punishment for corrupt Camp SS men was empty; behind the scenes, he was reluctant to push for harsh sentences. Himmler also had no desire to broaden Morgen’s small-time operation, since he must have realized that a more
systematic probe into SS sleaze would destabilize the entire KL system; after all, corruption was the glue that helped to hold it together. So why did Himmler support Morgen at all? Primarily, it seems, the investigation served a symbolic function. With other Nazi leaders only too aware of the allegations of corruption in the concentration camps, the Reichsführer’s willingness to castigate a few
Camp SS offenders was offered as proof of the purity, rigor, and decency of the SS.
298

If Heinrich Himmler was two-faced about corruption, his chief of the KL system was even more duplicitous. Officially, Oswald Pohl and his WVHA managers had no choice but to back the campaign against theft and fraud.
299
Pohl was even willing to sacrifice individual SS officers—especially if this strengthened
his own hand, as in the case of Loritz. But Pohl balked at a more far-reaching investigation of the KL and repeatedly torpedoed the anticorruption drive, complaining that it undermined prisoner discipline and war production.
300

There was an obvious reason for Pohl’s obstructionism: like other SS leaders, he was hugely profiting from Nazi terror. Divorced in 1938, Pohl had remarried on December
12, 1942, in Himmler’s East Prussian headquarters (Himmler had handpicked the much younger bride, Eleonore von Brüning, a rich heiress).
301
The couple enjoyed a feudal lifestyle. In Berlin, they occupied a large villa, “aryanized” from a Jewish woman who later died in Ravensbrück. The Pohls lived rent-free and made themselves comfortable in their new home; it was rebuilt by prisoners from Sachsenhausen,
and five inmates remained permanently on hand as servants.
302
Pohl joined the new Nazi nobility, which included other pompous leaders like Hermann Göring.
303
To announce his arrival, he even made up his own coat of arms, depicting a knight’s helmet with closed visor and a proud horse on its hind legs.
304

Above all, Pohl fancied himself as a landed nobleman—he lied to Himmler, claiming that he
came from a long line of farmers—and duly acquired not just one but two manors in the country. His wife had brought into the marriage a beautiful property in the Bavarian countryside, which was renovated by prisoners from Dachau, though the couple did not make much use of it until the closing stages of the Third Reich.
305
Instead, they spent time on the Comthurey estate in northern Germany, with
its vast grounds and roaring fireplaces. The estate was set up as a satellite camp of Ravensbrück, six miles or so away, with dozens of prisoners serving as slave laborers; some worked in agriculture, others waited on the Pohls, and still others landscaped the gardens and rebuilt the manor house, adding a sauna and other comforts. The bill for Pohl’s extravagance came to several hundreds of thousands
of Reichsmark, paid for by the SS.
306

His growing property portfolio also included a splendidly appointed apartment on the Dachau SS plantation, which he used during his wartime trips to southern Germany (Pohl was no stranger to Dachau, having lived in the SS settlement with his first wife in the prewar years). He was a workaholic, but in Dachau, of all places, he sometimes relaxed. Lounging
on a deck chair, he was served by prisoners, including a waiter wearing a white jacket; he also sampled meals prepared by his private cook and went on hunting trips, accompanied by his personal master of the hunt.
307

Oswald Pohl’s entire existence was enmeshed with the KL. To him, the camps were not remote abstractions. He lived and breathed them. During meetings and inspections, and during his
charmed private life, he was surrounded by prisoners, violence, and death. The Dachau inmate Karel Ka
š
ák, who observed Pohl close-up, described him as a typical Nazi upstart who acted like “a god and emperor.” Setting an example for local Camp SS men, Pohl treated prisoners as his personal property and thought nothing of walking around in his dressing gown while ordering them to shine his boots.
308
For him, prisoners were slaves to be exploited at will.

8

Economics and Extermination

Shortly after Heinrich Himmler put him in charge of the KL system, Oswald Pohl summoned the top Camp SS officials to a major two-day conference at his WVHA headquarters in Berlin-Lichterfelde. Brimming with confidence, Pohl used the meeting on April 24 and 25, 1942, to set out his agenda. His reign would be all about economics, he announced, with the immediate
goal of kick-starting armaments production. The only way to reach this goal, he added, was to drive prisoners until they dropped: working hours would be unlimited and lunch breaks reduced to the bare minimum. “To attain the utmost performance,” Pohl concluded, “this action must literally be exhausting.” Underscoring the order’s importance, Pohl put the responsibility for its implementation onto
the shoulders of individual commandants.
1
But his message went beyond economics. He also wanted to impress and intimidate his new subordinates. Facing a gathering of Camp SS veterans—led by Richard Glücks, and including commandants of all fourteen main KL in existence at the time—he was keen to put down an early marker. And although some officials grumbled about his ascent, Pohl swiftly established
himself as the overall head of the concentration camp system.
2