The Theory and Practice of Hell (43 page)

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Herzog was a Viennese journalist.) Even the Jews who were released were first thoroughly plucked.

By the time this Little Camp was dissolved on February 13, 1939, the remaining 250 inmates being transferred to the camp proper, there had been some 600 deaths in the five barracks.

No additional Jews arrived until September 1939, when some 500 of them were admitted from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Maravia. They were victims of another large-scale campaign that brought thousands into the concentration camps. In October they were followed by 200 inmates of the Jewish Home for the Aged in Vienna, together with some 2,000 other Austrian and German Jews who had originally immigrated from Poland. The Jews at this time lived in seven different barracks.

On the night of November 8-9, 1939, an alleged attempt on Hitler’s life was made in the Biirgerbrau Cellar at Munich. During the morning of November 9, all Jews were suddenly recalled from their details and confined to barracks. One by one, each barracks had to line up, and SS sergeants Planck, Janisch and Warnstedt picked out twenty-one Austrian and German Jews, entirely at random, without any list. Most of them were vigorous young men. A lad of seventeen who hap pened to be coming back from the post office was included without further ado. The SS took the group out through the gatehouse and shot them at close range in the quarry. The remaining Jews were kept in their quarters for five days, with blacked-out windows and neither food nor drink, and in con stant, gnawing uncertainty as to what was to happen to them. On the fourth day they were put on half rations. This effort then got lost in another program of reprisals directed against the entire camp, ostensibly because of some stolen hogs.

In February 1941, the Jews in the Netherlands were cleaned out, and 389 of them, from Amsterdam and Rotterdam, arrived at Buchenwald. This measure was based on the Dutch general strike against the occupation authorities. The rough climate at Buchenwald severely affected the Dutch Jews. In addition, Dr. Eysele suddenly barred them from the hospital. Those who already happened to be in the hospital at the time were either given fatal injections at once or discharged as recovered in the nick of time.

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A short time later, when 341 of them were still alive, the Dutch Jews were ordered transferred to the Mauthausen con centration camp. Two political prisoners from Mauthausen who were later transferred back to Buchenwald—Adam Kuczinski, a Pole, and Ludwig Neumaier, a German—gave the following account of what happened to the Dutch Jews.

The shipment from Buchenwald arrived around midnight. In the morning the inmates at Mauthausen were not permitted to leave their barracks. Fifty of the newly arrived Jews were chased from the bathhouse naked and driven into the elec trified fence. All the others were herded into a barracks in which George Glas, a political prisoner from Landshut in Bavaria, was the clerk. The First and Second Officers-in- Charge—the latter was named Ernstberger—told Glas that the barracks would have to be “ cleared” in six weeks at the latest. Glas replied that he would sooner resign his function than lay hand on a prisoner. He was instantly relieved, got twenty-five or thirty-five lashes, and was assigned to the sock-mending detail, a favorite source for injection liquidations, when such were “ needed.” Glas, however, was successfully smuggled to another camp, and in his place a convict became clerk.

The second day after their arrival, the Jews where shunted into the quarry. There were 148 steps leading down to the bot tom of the pit, but they were not permitted to use these. They had to slide down the loose stones at the side, and even here many died or were severely injured. The survivors then had to shoulder hods, and two prisoners were compelled to load each Jew with an excessively heavy rock. The Jews then had to run up the 148 steps. In some instances the rocks immediately rolled downhill, crushing the feet of those that came behind. Every Jew who lost his rock in this fashion was brutally beaten and the rock was hoisted to his shoulders again. Many of the Jews were driven to despair the very first day and com mitted suicide by jumping into the pit. On the third day the SS opened the so-called “ death-gate” and with a fearful barrage of blows drove the Jews across the guard line, the guards on the watchtowers shooting them down in heaps with their machine-guns. The next day the Jews no longer jumped into the pit individually. They joined hands and one man would pull nine or twelve of his comrades over the lip with him into a

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gruesome death. The barracks was “ cleared” of Jews, not in six but in barely three weeks. Every one of the 340 perished by suicide or by shooting, beating and other forms of torture.

It should perhaps be mentioned that the civilian employees

at the Mauthausen quarry requested that these suicides by jumping be stopped, since the fragments of flesh and brains clinging to the rocks afforded too gruesome a sight. The quarry was thereupon hosed down and prisoners were posted to prevent men from jumping. The survivors were simply clubbed across the guard line to their death. When new batches of Jewish prisoners arrived, the SS had its fun by dubbing them “ parachute troops.”

Only one member of this group of Dutch Jews was saved—Max Nebig of Amsterdam. Dr. Eysele, Buchenwald Medical Officer, had arbitrarily performed a stomach re section on him. Subsequently he was to be given a fatal in jection, but the Hospital Capo substituted a harmless water syringe and had the dying man carried away before Eysele’s eyes—to the TB ward, where he was secreted until the liberation of the camp.

The Jews began to be transferred to the death camps as a general policy in October 1942. This phase lasted until the summer of 1943 and created a state of intense agitation which even men who had survived all previous ordeals were hard put to withstand. Reports that trickled through, together with the experience already gained, left no doubt as to the character of these new shipments. Actually only a very small percentage survived them, and often it was largely a matter of quick wit, presence of mind, resourcefulness and determination whether a man succeeded at the last moment in catching a life line by means of which he might be dragged back into the saving solidarity of his comrades.

With the exception of 200 Jews who were exempted and retained as skilled construction workers—they included lawyers, writers, physicians, and artists!—all Jews were removed from Buchenwald at that time. This was a nation wide policy. Virtually all the eastern ghettos were likewise emptied at this time—Kielce in July 1942, Warsaw on July 22, Lemberg in August, to mention but a few. At the same time a steady stream of Jews slated for annihilation reached the various ghettos and concentration camps from the remnants

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of the Jewish population in Germany and the other European countries under Hitler’s domination. This campaign con tinued until the Nazis were reduced to their last manpower resources and preferred using the surviving Jews as labor slaves to stuffing them into the gas chambers or mowing them down with machine-guns. It is to this circumstance that cer tain Polish and Hungarian Jews owe their survival. Some 18,000 Bulgarian Jews, on the other hand, were handed over to the German authorities and gassed, a fate also suffered by many Greek Jews. As late as the summer of 1944, 6,115 Hungarian Jews reached Buchenwald alone. They were followed in January 1945 by 5,745 Polish Jews, all of whom had to slave in the outside labor details to the point of exhaustion.

The best picture of what happened to the Jews at this time comes from the reports of those few who were in the ship ments but managed to escape death.

Dr. Ludwig Fleck, a college instructor, reports:

The Lemberg ghetto originally comprised as much as one-fifth o f the city. There were 140,000 Jews in Lemberg, or thirty per cent o f thepopulation. The ghetto lastedfrom thefall o f 1941 to August 1942, every day involvingfearful abuse. Whenever the armed forces or the SS needed anything, whether it was furniture, clothes or other ar ticles, they would simply requistion it from ghetto headquarters which had to provide itfree o f charge.

In August 1942, the Jewish mass liquidations began, un der the command o f SS Major-General Kazmann. Thefirst phase took about two weeks. Some 50,000 Jews, mainly the aged, sick and children, were carried o ff to Belie where, as later transpired, they were gassed. They included the entire personnel o f the hospital for contagious diseases
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physicians, nurses, orderlies. The operation was carried out by a special SS detail and was repeated every few weeks.

The ghetto was shifted to the outskirts o f the city, where there were practically no stone houses. Assignment was on the basis o f about twenty square feet o f living space per head. There were no shops—all food had to be smuggled in. Sanitation was dreadful. Some seventy per cent o f the

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Jewish population contracted typhus. Every day saw pillage and robbery on the part o f the SS, while individual reprisals and murders took place at night. A forced-labor camp was set up and healthy young Jews were sent to it. The aged and the sick, as well as women and children, were sent to a concentration camp near Betrec to be gassed. By thefall o f 1942 there were still some 15,000 Jews left in the ghetto—replacements were constantly shipped in from the countryside—and some 12,000 in the labor camp. It is known from reliable sources that the ghetto inhabitants at Lemberg continued to dwindle away under great deprivations, until the survivors were all massacred in March 1943, all the buildings being burned down.

Soon after the ghetto was liquidated the inmates of the labor camp were mowed down with machine-guns to the last man. A special detail of one hundred Jews is supposed to have survived and, curiously enough, to have been well treated later on. Nothing is known of their further fate. The Com mandant of the labor camp was SS Lieutenant Colonel Willhaus.