The Theory and Practice of Hell (30 page)

Any investigation that may have resulted doubtless con sisted of nothing more than another exchange of letters—if in deed it took place at all at that late date—March 1945. Besides, there was, of course, honor among thieves. “ In the unlikely event of any irregularities” indeed! Those who know about Barnewald and Schiedlausky can only smile bitterly.

The insistent need for supplementing the subnormal official diet in some way or other enabled the SS to engage in a profitable sideline—the prisoner canteen. Until about 1943 the canteens were centrally supplied from camp headquarters at Dachau. Before the war they offered a considerable variety of stock for sale, even cake and fine canned goods. But for most of the inmates this had very little meaning, even if they had the requisite money. For them the good things were always “ out of stock” —the greedy and corrupt foremen with their connections and crooked barracks purchasing agents took care of that.

After the war broke out canteen stock grew scantier and

1 The Todt Organization was the nation-wide Nazi construction organization.—
Tr.

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scantier, until apart from occasional smokes there was only so-called “ Viking Salad,” a van-colored synthetic of doubt ful description, apparently based on potatoes and ground fish bones.

Tie-in sales were strictly prohibited throughout Germany, but they flourished in the concentration-camp canteens.

Tobacco was always at a premium, and usually cigarettes, pipe tobacco and cigarette paper were sold only in com bination with a pair of suspenders or a two-pound can of un salable mussels, spoiled herrings, red beets, or the inevitable Viking Salad. The greatest Buchenwald expert in this field was Master Sergeant Michael, a nephew of Commandant Koch. He coined the slogan: “ To each his own, and most of it to me!”

On one occasion he organized a collection among the

prisoners, to finance a bulk-purchasing expedition to the Netherlands. The collection netted fifteen thousand marks and Michael took off, traveling by first-class sleeper and spending two weeks in high living. He returned when he had almost been given up for lost. For every six or ten marks he distributed a few paper-wrapped cigars and low-grade cigarettes, a bar of chocolate and a can of condensed milk for every three men.

Michael was finally tripped up in another affair. Alcohol was strictly barred in camp, but on one occasion, in 1942, he smuggled 750 gallons of apple wine into the canteen, where it was cut to more than 2,000 gallons. It had been purchased for thirty-five pfennig a quart, but was sold at one mark and twenty pfennig. For this exploit he was reported by envious SS colleagues.

Canteen-purchasing was the prerogative of special Barracks Purchasing Agents. We need not waste many words on the ambiguity of this function. In 1942 a special canteen building was opened in Buchenwald—a similar one had long existed in Dachau. Few of the prisoners ever saw its inside.

To the credit of the Prisoner Canteen Office, it must be said that it succeeded in assembling considerable quantities of food through clandestine channels. This was on occasion made available to the individual details in the form of nourishing soups served on the side. These issues were made to all, regardless of the prisoners’ means. From 1944 on, at

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the initiative of the Buchenwald canteen foreman, light beer was sold fairly regularly.

When the food situation in the camps grew steadily worse in 1944, Red Cross mass shipments to certain nationality groups ensued, especially to the French, the Danes, and the Nor wegians. The SS profited vastly by such aid from abroad.

Understandably, despite the ever-present threat of beatings and the justifiable vigilance of the prisoners, who were fearful of the spread of disease, there were hundreds who time and again tried to ransack the garbage pails in search of edible offal, who gathered and boiled bones. Among the Ukrainians there were even cases of cannibalism, or rather necrophagy!

And outside the barbed-wire compound the pet dogs that most of the SS officers kept were fed on meat, milk, cereal, potatoes, eggs and claret; so fine a diet, indeed, that many a starving prisoner took advantage of every chance to work in the dog mess, hoping to garner some of the animals’ food.

Though originally the SS mess had three sections—enlisted men, headquarters staff, officers—the officers managed to have their own private cuisines at home. Excellent sources of supply to maintain their parasitic life of plenty were the sheep folds, poultry farms, angora rabbit hutches, truck gardens and farms located in the immediate vicinity of the camp. When the basement of the Commandant’s house at Buchen wald underwent repair, thirty whole hams were unearthed, together with more than fifty smoked sausages, hundreds of jars of fruit preserves and some six hundred bottles of choice French vintages. And such supplies sometimes proved a good source of income. On one occasion two hundred glass jars with preserved duck, belonging to Commandant Koch, sprang open. Afraid that the meat would spoil, Koch sold these preserves, a mere fraction of his stock, to the prisoners at two marks a portion.

There were sharp differences among the various official categories of SS food. The reservists who were located next door to the Officers’ Club, had to be satisfied with the official one-dish meals, unless they maintained very good con nections. But the Officers’ Club itself was a lavish restaurant in which regular SS officers were daily served the most ample food—poultry, steaks of heroic size, genuine coffee, choice wines, branded liqueurs from abroad. The required meat and

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fat were procured by black-market purchasing and slaughtering oh a large scale. For this purpose the Buchen wald pigsty detail always maintained between three and five hundred so-called “ headquarters hogs” and another five hun dred geese, ducks and chickens. This stock was fed from concentration-camp “ scraps.”

The SS officers by no means scorned the prisoner depots as a source of supply. Jan Robert, who was masseur to their lordships whenever they were in need of ministration, had as one of his clients Master Sergeant Hans Schmidt, the ad jutant, who was friendly with Dr. Hoven. At Hoven’s orders, Robert daily supplied Schmidt with eggs, butter and milk from the hospital mess. The adjutant was also eager for soap, jewelry and food from Red Cross packages. Often it took all of Robert’s cunning to evade such demands.

Schmidt headed the SS canteen—a nest of corruption

beyond compare. It had a record of years of fraud and em bezzlement. SS Major-General Eicke had personally organized the central canteen administration for all the con centration camps and Death-Head Units, the agency that governed central purchasing and selling. The Buchenwald SS canteen was part of this set-up. It had long been headed by a close confidant of SS Colonel Koch, a convict named Meiners, with a record of eighteen convictions for theft and fraud. He was a concentration-camp inmate, but had trusty status, wore civilian clothes and was not required to have his hair shorn. He had built the canteen into a private profiteering outfit for the “ sworn fellowship” for which he traveled freely about the countryside making monthly pur chases running up to 120,000 marks, collected from the prisoners.

Master Sergeant Schmidt, to say the very least, was Meiners’ equal in his capacity to “ cheat and lie and swindle, whether with dollar or with pound or mark.” This man was really a pathological case. One of his hobbies was to urinate in champagne glasses. This sinister figure had “ connections” all over Germany, with every SS headquarters, and his diversion of canteen supplies intended for the troops was on a systematic scale. Tobacco and wine were strictly rationed for the enlisted men, for example—a bottle of wine for every six men. But for the SS officers, champagne flowed in streams.

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Frau Koch, who had once been a stenographer in a cigarette factory, occasionally bathed in Madeira wine, which was poured into her tub. Once, when the Commandant, for his own purposes, confiscated several truckloads of lemons in tended for SS members, doling out only a little of the fruit to the higher officers, a rumor arose among the enlisted men that Frau Koch was having herself massaged with lemon juice by her prisoner masseur who had to “ treat” her every day. It did not happen to be true, but it shows the degree of demoralization carried into their own ranks by the corruption among the SS officers. Hundreds of thousands of cigarettes were made available to them for their private use by the can teen staff.

A special chapter was the social evenings of the SS which started at Buchenwald with a magnificent open-air celebration in 1938, subsequently taking place about once a month for the headquarters staff. They were eating and drinking sprees that almost invariably ended in wild orgies. Every table setting was flanked by six or eight wine glasses. During the war the required drinks were regularly procured in France and the Netherlands by SS Master Sergeant Rieger, at the time in charge of the motor pool. The man actually in charge was SS Master Sergeant Michael, already repeatedly mentioned. When Prince Waldeck or some other high SS officer paid a visit, there might be as many as six “ breakfasts” throughout the day. Among the profiteers from this revelry were the businessmen of Weimar.