The Theory and Practice of Hell (53 page)

Contractual obligations o f physicians and negotiations with cemetery authorities have often led to insurmountable difficulties. . . . For this reason I immediately com municated with Dr. Eberl, Medical Director o f the mental institution at Bernburg-on-Saale, P.O.Box No. 252, telephone number 3169. He is the physician who carried out 14 f 13. Dr. Eberl showed unusual understanding and courtesy. All current bodies o fprisonersfrom Schonebeck-Wernigerode were shipped to Dr. Eberl at Bernburg, where they were cremated even without a death certificate.

After January 1943, the SS Main Economic and Ad ministrative Office sought to have Operation 14 f 13 limited entirely to mental patients. But this had little practical significance in the concentration camps, where at this time one gas shipment after another was being assembled. Ausch witz, gas-chamber headquarters of Europe, had the easiest time of all. The death candidates merely had to be taken to nearby Birkenau, where ninety per cent of all incoming

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prisoners were immediately exterminated as a matter of routine.

No one familiar with Nazi aims and government policy will be surprised that the Nazi overlords extended their ex

termination program to persons suffering from tuberculosis. They had figures to show that in Poland there were some 25,000 cases of open tuberculosis and some 130,000 patients whom treatment might be able to cure. For the first group
Gauleiter
Greiser of Posnan and Heydrich in the summer of 1942 proposed to Himmler that a “ radical procedure” be adopted. Professor Blome, Deputy Chief of the Nazi party’s Main Office of Public Health, likewise favored the plan, but in a communication dated November 18,1942, he added:

Since some time ago the Fiihrer halted the program in the mental institutions, it occurs to me that he may not regard “special treatment
”
o f the hopelessly sick as politically feasible at the moment
.
In the case o f the euthanasia program, German citizens afflicted with hereditary diseases were involved
.
This time it would be in
-
fected members o f a subjugated nation. There can be no question that the proposed method represents the simplest and most radical solution. I f there were the assurance o f complete secrecy, all reservations, regardless o f the reason, could be withdrawn. But I regard such secrecy as downright impossible.

Blome proposed another solution—“ strict quarantine and institutionalization of all infectious, hopeless tubercular patients. This solution would tend to make the patients die off fairly rapidly. The necessary inclusion of Polish physicians and nurses would to some extent rob such institutions of the character of death camps.”

On December 3, 1942, Himmler instructed Greiser to “ select a suitable area into which incurable tubercular pa tients can be sent.” What happened to the plan in detail is unknown.

In some manner the number of tubercular patients in the concentration camps seems to have been limited by some cen tral agency in Berlin. At any rate, in the summer of 1941, Dr. Eysele suddenly announced that there were “ enough t.b.

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patients” at Buchenwald. He proceeded to kill whole groups of them by intravenous injections of sodium-evipan or by in jecting the drug directly into the heart. Eysele killed at least three hundred men in this operation. Most of the vic tims—there were whole wards at a time—were given a sedative before the fatal injection was administered. Oc casionally patients with particularly vigorous hearts survived as many as two injections, succumbing only to the third.

As were so many SS measures, this program directed against the tubercular was shot through with contradictions. It was limited to definite periods of time and was never truly comprehensive. For example, a so-called X-ray Battalion organized by the SS under the direction of Professor Hohlfelder traveled all over Germany to lay the scientific basis for an all-embracing anti-tuberculosis campaign among the German people. It even visited the concentration camps. X-ray photographs were made of every prisoner, and the cases that were diagnosed, far from being killed on the spot, were actually given medical treatment. But again, extreme caution was indicated in submitting to such treatment, in view of the arbitrary actions of certain Camp Medical Officers and con tradictory directives from headquarters! A great many prisoners, especially Russians, did die of pulmonary tuber culosis. In all the camps autopsies showed that tuberculosis was among the most common diseases. The proportion of the Russians afflicted ran as high as seventy per cent.

Department D of the SS Main Economic and Ad ministrative Office had a peculiar policy of consigning, from time to time, prisoners who were disabled or unfit for work, to special camps where they had little work or none at all. Dachau concentration camp had such an invalid camp for a long time. Not until the third year of the war did the SS, at first sporadically, then systematically proceed with the ex termination of aged and enfeebled prisoners, perhaps because it thought this might relieve the food situation. Wherever there were gas plants in the camps, these were used to liquidate the supemumaries; otherwise it was done by in jections. At Bergen-Belsen, which at times was actually and shamelessly referred to as a “ recreation camp,” the murder weapon was starvation. Late in 1944, Buchenwald was ad vised by the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office to

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make no further shipments of prisoners to Bergen-Belsen. Like other concentration camps, Buchenwald would “ have to solve its overcrowding problems itself.”

This is what the solution looked like:

There was a certain Building No. 61 in the Little Camp, a wretched wooden barracks released for hospital purposes after a long struggle with the SS. Building 61 was occupied by more than 800 patients from the Little Camp alone. SS Cap tain Schiedlausky gave orders that all invalids and weaklings from incoming shipments were to be taken there. From early 1944 to April, 1945, some 100,000 prisoners passed through the Little Camp, and from the fall of 1944, 20,000 and more were always quartered in its seventeen emergency barracks, while the rest were shipped on to subsidiary camps.

The Senior Block Inmates of the Little Camp were in structed to pick out men “ incapable of survival.” As a rule they picked those men whom they had reason to believe medical aid would be unlikely to keep alive. These selections took place two or three times a week, and from November 1944 to March 1945, they accounted for several thousand men. The precise number cannot be established, since the bodies were lumped together with those from the whole camp in the crematory.

These men were escorted behind the special barbed wire en closing Building 61, where they had to strip to the skin out in the open. They were then ushered into the building. Inside they were either sent to the ward, where they got the customary medical treatment, or into a small room behind a door marked B, where SS Master Sergeant Wilhelm or a prisoner administered a fatal injection immediately. The bodies were put aside and taken to the crematory on carts in the evening, during roll call. At times Wilhelm took his pick when the incoming shipments were still in the bathhouse.

' The camp underground saved hundreds of prisoners of every nationality from Building 61—Communists standing the best chance of rescue. On the other hand, dozens of men who were by no means seriously ill—who might even be in good health—were eliminated by way of Building 61, once they had been caught in the meshes of personal or political camp intrigue. The blame, if any, attaching to the prisoners who actually made the selection is less than that of the die-

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tatorial intriguers in the various barracks and among the various nationality groups, who were not above perverting for their own selfish purposes the machinery organized by the prisoners to protect themselves against the SS.

The “ normal” daily death quota in Building 61 ran be tween 15 and 30, but when special operations were under way it would rise as high as 500 a week. In most other con centration camps the problem of the disabled was “ solved” in similar fashion after 1943.

Special programs directed against pregnant women were carried out in the concentration camps as a result of general directives. Whenever women prisoners in outside labor details showed signs of pregnancy, they were shipped to Auschwitz, if they were Jewish, otherwise to Ravensbruck. They were told that only these camps had suitable maternity wards and nursery schools.

The following incident shows just what these nursery schools were. A Dutch physician who was Jewish had a non-Jewish wife, and the couple had a five-year-old girl. He was scheduled for shipment to Auschwitz from the Vught camp near Herzogenbusch. Entirely ignorant of the implications, he asked whether wife and child might accompany him. The SS gleefully assented, praising the “ nursery school” that was supposed to be available at Auschwitz. The wife immediately agreed to go, and actually departed with her child ahead of the husband. When the doctor reached Auschwitz, his first act was to inquire for the women’s home and the nursery school. With satanic laughter, the SS men pointed to the gas chambers. Wife and child were already dead. The husband himself perished within a few days.

When the gassings at Auschwitz were halted because of the impending evacuation of the camp, pregnant Jewish women, and later all other pregnant women, were shipped to the “ recreation camp,” Bergen-Belsen, where they were allowed to starve to death.

Such things could not be kept altogether secret, and as a

result pregnancies were covered up by every possible means. If a birth actually took place, mother and child suffered the same fate.