The Theory and Practice of Hell (25 page)

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glasses of beer apiece as to who could kill a prisoner in a given group by throwing stones from above. When their throwing marksmanship grew poor, they lost patience and simply started shooting. The result of this “ pastime” was seventeen dead and wounded. “ Shot while attempting to escape,” as the official reports read. In every camp the number of such mass murders was legion.

At the Buchenwald quarry Master Sergeant Hinkelmann was inexhaustible in devising new tortures. He forced older men to climb trees, which he then had shaken—to his satanic glee—until the poor wretches fell off and broke their necks or were mortally injured, to die miserably in the hospital. Most of the quarry foremen were no better, and sometimes they were worse. Vogel, a homosexual sadist, sought sexual gratification in mistreating his fellow prisoners. It was to him that Roll Call Officers Kent, Petrick and Stribbel handed over for “ liquidation” at least fifty political prisoners who seemed dangerous to them.

A Dr. Gerdes, a high government official, had in civilian life been engaged to marry a daughter of the Austrian President, Miklas—reason for him to draw odium in camp as “ Miklas1 son-in-law.” Vogel demanded three hundred marks of Gerdes. Gerdes was unable to raise the money quickly enough, whereupon the foreman, with his assistant Wittvogel, ordered the “ black dog” (a reference to the prisoner’s clerical affiliations) to be driven into the guard line—which was promptly done.

During 1942 the quarry was in charge of a Prisoner Foreman named Mailer who became the tool of Second Officer-in-Charge Gust. Gust visited Mailer almost every day, bringing him cigarettes and stolen packages and ordering him to do away with certain prisoners. Power completely cor rupted Mailer. A man without character, he developed into a terrifying sadist. Later on he and several others volunteered for a Buchenwald outside labor detail in the Rhineland, where he was strung up by his own comrades.

In the course of the summer of 1943, the number of prisoners “ shot while attempting to escape” rose alarmingly, and as a sort of camouflage a number of prisoners were ap pointed auxiliary guards, ostensibly to dissuade their comrades from running into the guard line. The guards were

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relieved at nine o’clock in the morning. It was agreed that one prisoner would be provided before nine, and one after. There was a fixed agreement between Muller and the SS guards. In return for smoking and chewing tobacco, he furnished the desired victims. The guards agreed among themselves who was to do the shooting and thus earn bonus and furlough. Day after day at least one prisoner was driven into the guard line, sometimes two. Muller thus insured his tobacco supplies during a period when tobacco was very scarce.

Muller’s softening-up methods varied. Sometimes he would torment his victim to such an extreme that the man would voluntarily run into the muzzles of the guns. Or he would dispatch a prisoner across the line to gather kindling wood. Or he would personally escort a prisoner on the verge of exhaustion, telling him that he could lie down and take a nap beyond the line, and asking the guard to let the man pass. After a few paces the guard would simply shoot down the prisoner. A commission consisting of the adjutant or his deputy, the Camp Medical Officer, and a third SS officer would then establish that “ another prisoner tried to take it on' the lam.”

On one occasion such a commission was still conducting its inquest, when another prisoner approached and stood hesitantly behind a bush. One of the SS men asked him what he wanted. The prisoner replied that he desired to be shot. “ Wait a moment!” said the SS man. The commission mounted its motor-cycles and rode off a little distance. The prisoner was shot, the commission returned and straightway established another “ attempted escape” !

Such was labor in the concentration camps.. . .

Not everywhere and at all times. The headquarters details, for example, were better off than any of the other outside details. Often they worked but a few feet away from the scenes of these fiendish crimes, yet their life was paradise compared to that of their comrades. They enjoyed many ad vantages. In particular, they were able to relieve the SS of treasured articles. Some of them exploited this solely for their own benefit, while others smuggled into camp as much as they could, to help their fellows. This entailed grave risks, and many a prisoner was whipped in reprisal and relieved.

Whenever the distances that the outside labor details had to

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traverse to their work grew too great, or when special con ditions in SS plants, mines and shops called for it, such details were invested with a limited degree of independence. They had to build their own subsidiary camps, though remaining within the organization of the base camp. When such camps grew in size and when circumstances within the total framework of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office allowed it, such subsidiary camps were completely separated from the base camps, becoming in turn bases for subsidiaries of their own. This trend increased especially during the war, when the SS began to farm out tens of thousands of its concentration-camp labor slaves to German industry for the construction and operation of plants. In the end, Buchenwald construction brigades were dispatched as far as the Channel Islands, while thousands of Buchenwald prisoners slaved in plants and on fortifications on the Rhine. In the north, Buchenwald sub sidiaries extended as far as Magdeburg; in the east, to beyond Leipzig.

Most of the new installations were called for in the so-called “ Closed Areas” of the SS. These areas were often of con siderable size—many dozens of square miles. “ Closed Area B,” for example, lay in the vicinity of Nordhausen, some fifty miles north of Buchenwald. In this area alone, counting all foreign workers and German civilians, some 150,000 men were engaged in the construction of underground plants for the Junkers Works at Dessau and several other German in dustries. Conditions in these closed areas can be described only as utterly inhuman. Outside the Harz area, they were most numerous in Bavaria, Saxony and Bohemia. They were in charge of SS Major-General Kammler, who was stationed in Berlin, from where he ranged the country like a wild man. The great base camps were called upon for ever new con tingents of slave laborers. Toward the end Sachsenhausen had several dozen subsidiary camps, Dachau around fifty, Ausch witz almost forty, Buchenwald more than seventy (fifty for men, more than twenty for women). The SS economy had an extraordinary appetite for expansion, and its ties with Ger man industry were very close. Nor did the ties between the concentration camps and German industry spring solely from the SS drive for power. Industrialists, suffering from the man power shortage, scorned no method of keeping ahead of their

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competitors. The crucial element to achieve this was an adequate labor pool, and the SS received many applications, all arguing that in this way alone could the “ patriotic duty” of maximum contribution to the war effort be fulfilled.

All manpower utilization involving concentration-camp prisoners in outside details was directed by the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. Whenever a private or public agency sought prisoner help, it had to apply to Oranienburg. If the application was approved in principle, the Manpower Utilization Officer of the nearest concentration camp—sometimes, if the resources of one camp were inadequate, a whole group of camps—was ordered to check the situation on the spot, the results to be reported to Oranien burg.

These investigations were not always conducted by experts. In Buchenwald, for example, the leader of the SS band platoon, Captain Schenk, occasionally pinch-hit in this capacity. The SS Main Office would approve or disapprove applications on the basis of these reports. When specialists were requested, plant engineers might actually come into camp to select suitable skilled workers. The firms were required to pay a daily wage of four marks for an unskilled worker, six to eight marks for a skilled worker. This was payable to the camp that farmed out the worker.

If a firm was unable to provide the requested prisoners with shelter, a so-called advance squad was dispatched from the base camp, in order to build barracks. When these were com pleted the subsidiary camp would be filled up with the authorized quota of prisoners.

The prisoners were selected by the Labor Records Office of the base camp on orders from the Manpower Utilization Of ficer. In theory good physical health was a fundamental prerequisite, though in practice this condition was a mere farce. It sometimes happened that the Camp Medical Officers examined as many as 1,100 prisoners in two hours—in other words, at the rate of almost ten per minute—exempting only a couple of dozen as unfit for travel, though hundreds suffered from chronic malnutrition at the very least.

In certain cases the Political Department or other camp agencies ordered prisoners shipped to subsidiary camps of particularly bad reputation by way of penalty. Certain details

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were composed solely of Jews, others of convicts or “ shiftless elements.” Prisoner functionaries for the subsidiary camps

—Senior Camp and Block Inmates, mess and clerical per sonnel, etc.—were nominated by the Senior Camp Inmate of the base camp and approved or disapproved by headquarters or by the Manpower Utilization Officer.

Every SS officer in charge of an outside detail had to give a daily accounting of hours worked. These reports were filed with the Labor Records Office and served as the basis for the monthly bills which the SS rendered the firms in order to collect payment for the slave labor of the prisoners. In the case of private industry, the money had to be paid into an SS bank account. With government agencies a clearing arrangement was in force. At Buchenwald total SS revenue for prisoner labor farmed out ran between a million and a million and a half marks a month. It goes without saying that the prisoners never saw a single penny of this money.