The Theory and Practice of Hell (26 page)

Living and working conditions in the outside details and subsidiary camps were usually indescribably bad, the food wretched. The workers often had no chance to change their clothes for four or six weeks on end. There was not even a change of underwear. Disease wrought havoc among the slaves. Only in rare cases was there any alleviation. (Here too much depended on the particular spot assigned to an in dividual, and whether he belonged to the tiny elite of “ big shots.” ) It is not necessary to think of these installations as penal details. In such places as the tile yards and clay pits of the SS-owned “ German Earth and Stone Works” one did not have to be beaten down by Prisoner Foremen. The labor itself was sufficient to finish off anyone in short order. The pottery works attached to these plants produced all manner of earthenware—utilitarian and luxury—for the SS.

The ordinary outside details and subsidiary camps were

murderous enough. At Ohrdruf near Weimar, one of Hitler’s numerous headquarters, with subterranean command posts, conference rooms, etc., had to be constructed, among other things. Some 10,000 prisoners, working in three shifts at a speed-up rate under the goading of the SS, of the Technical Emergency Auxiliary and of civilian supervisors, had to drive galleries into a mountainside. The very approach to the site represented a sizable distance. Yet footgear and clothing were

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issued in only inadequate quantity. During five months in 1944 the prisoners were given but one bath and disinfestation, and this only because typhoid had broken out in a neighboring camp. Of 1,000 men forming a single Buchenwald shipment to Ohrdruf at this time, but 200 escaped with their lives; of 1,500 from Flossenbiirg, men already in a wretched physical state, only a fraction survived.

When the distance to the work sites had grown to six miles and more, making it necessary to transport the prisoners in buses, the gasoline shortage induced the SS to create two new subsidiary camps, one at Crawinkel, the other a tent camp. There general conditions were even more unfavorable, food being extremely short. The prisoner hospital at Ohrdruf, to which numerous casualties were returned, lacked almost every facility—medical aid, drugs, even fuel. From time to time “ Invalid Shipments” were dispatched to Bergen-Belsen.

The dead were generally shipped to the base camp for cremation. Twice a week they arrived at Buchenwald from Ohrdruf. Of the 15,000 prisoners who, during two months in the fall of 1943, had been shipped to the subsidiary camp “ Dora” near Nordhausen (which after October 1944 became the SS base camp for a so-called “ Operation B” ), at times at least 100 bodies were received at Buchenwald every other day. The bodies were filthy, louse-infested, neglected. Their weight was seldom as much as ninety pounds. They were intertwined into knots that could hardly be separated. From December 1943 to May 1944, mortality at “ Dora” never fell below 1,500 a month—often it was much higher. The autopsies almost without exception showed a degree of credebility indicating that the men would have succumbed even to a cold.

The cost in lives that had to be paid to achieve a given job held little interest for the SS—none whatever when a record was at stake that might bring decorations, promotions or other advantages. An outstanding instance of this kind was Himmler’s order issued March 18, 1943, to run a rail line from Weimar to Buchenwald, as a traffic artery for the Gustloff Works, which had settled on the outskirts of the camp with thirteen huge sheds. Himmler ordered that the trial trip over this line must at all costs take place within three months, on June 21, 1943.

On with the prisoners! The soil consisted of clay with a

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strong admixture of rock and there was a difference in elevation of almost a thousand feet. Everyone realized that in so short a time even an emergency track could hardly be laid. The construction chief, SS Second Lieutenant Bertram, pointed out this impossibility. Berlin’s reply was to replace Bertram with a notorious slave driver and bully, SS First Lieutenant Alfred Sorge, a man with an evil reputation from Sachsenhausen that went back years. Sorge brought along two of his chief strong-arm men, SS Master Sergeants Baumann and Sohn. The project got under way.

In a day and a night shift of twelve hours each, with an un ceasing rain of blows and the assistance of the dog platoon, with no surcease on Sundays and holidays, the work proceeded at a murderous pace heretofore unknown. Ac cidents soon exceeded a dozen a day. It did not matter. The main thing was that the line had to be finished by the night of June 20. And the trial trip actually took place on June 21, in the presence of SS Major-General Kammler and a host of Nazi big-wigs. There was a hail of promotions and decorations. The SS staff and the civilians employed on the line celebrated with beer and
Schnaps
and also got a cash bonus. The prisoners had a “ good” day of their own. They were at last allowed to take a bath.

The deadline had been met. But actually the line was like the villages of Potemkin—it ran for a single day. No sooner had the trial locomotive passed when foundations began to sag. Actual completion of the line took another six months. It is unfortunate that there is not surviving record of the profits made by Nazi business houses of Weimar on this SS railway project. The bids which they were supposed to submit were ac tually received nine months after the work had started, precisely when it was finished!

Like everything the SS did, its “ War Manpower Utilization Program” was staged with a great show of organization. Plants were constructed everywhere, machinery was assem bled from all over Europe, managers and officers raced about, there were orders and deadlines, the slave host was whipped up—and relatively little or nothing emerged at the other end, except the dead and the maimed.

The growth of outside details and subsidiary camps brought

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much motion, back and forth, to the masses of prisoners. Liaison was established between camps and many prisoners had a chance to communicate with the outside world. All this did much to deprive the SS, by and by, of rigid control over the whole structure. As a result, while the situation seriously deteriorated almost everywhere, there were occasional ameliorations, achieved because the directives of the guiding security service spirits were no longer capable of execution.

Insofar as the SS with its limited forces was able to do so, labor was rigidly supervised. But of course the Detail Leaders and even the Prisoner Foremen could not be everywhere at once—though in the quarries they were able to occupy points of vantage that enabled them to exercise constant control. Ex cavation details often embraced more than a thousand men, distributed over several construction sites at distances of as much as a mile or two apart. As a result the universal policy among the prisoners was to reduce work and output to the ab solute minimum as soon as there was no supervision. The main thing was to “ work with the ey es/’ There was an ef fective warning system that went into instant effect as soon as one of the slave drivers put in an appearance.

In the peat-bog details of the moor camps it was possible to set a fixed output quota, but in most of the camps the nature of the work made that impossible and output remained at an irreducible minimum. In the construction, excavation, drainage and water-main details, entire columns stood stock still when there was no supervision, only to fall to at a mad pace as soon as the warning sounded.

An infinite expenditure of resourcefulness, pull and cor ruption went into the everlasting quest for a soft spot where work might be shirked “ by the numbers.” Under the pressure of necessity hundreds devised the most incredible stratagems to achieve their goal, many of them literally never lifting a finger until they happened to “ attract attention” —unless it was to fry some stolen potatoes over a secret fire, while only a few hundred paces away their comrades were driven to the brink of utter exhaustion.

The SS system of slavery was a liberal education in how to shirk work. A rational labor system, using incentives and humane treatment, might well have achieved two or three

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times the actual output, with one-fifth of the labor force. But of course the SS did not really care about output. It was out for blood.

If the struggle for tools started the workday, the struggle for stones ended it. Every member of an outside detail had to lug a stone with him back into the compound. The required quota was five bricks or a rock weighing at least ten pounds. In the final minutes before knocking off work it was necessary, at considerable risk, to be on the lookout for a suitable stone, one that looked large and heavy enough, that was free of sharp edges and clean enough not to ruin one’s clothing. Loaded down in this fashion the slave columns marched back to camp at the onset of darkness, carrying their casualties with them, to face the endless ordeal of roll call.