The Theory and Practice of Hell (60 page)

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only ones who were the enemy’s match. In addition they had the most extensive camp experience. It is to be regretted—and was actually the cause of certain setbacks—that especially in the early years the Communists excluded anti-Fascists of per suasions other than their own, but in practice it could not be helped. The reasons for the Communist claim to exclusive power must be in part sought in old habits and convictions, in part in the special circumstances under which the struggle was waged. Because of their lack of contact with the realities of the outside world, most of the German Communists clung to the time before 1933 in their political and tactical thinking. They had their nineteenth-century concepts, inherited from the positivistic bourgeoisie; their traditional maxims which they regarded as articles of faith of the old party line issued by Moscow; and their so-called dialectical approach which per mitted them to proclaim as the immediate demands of reality any views and changing opinions they happened to hold. In this way they oversimplified the highly complex situation in the camps. Another factor was their need to concentrate their resources.

Within their own ranks the Communists were by no means unanimous, though they suppressed dissent with an iron hand, occasionally even by the murder of dissenters. Distrust ful of anyone not of like mind, they were out to support only unconditional followers of the prevailing Communist party line. Only gradually did they come to accept selective collaboration with others. Such instances were always rare, remarkable as they sometimes were. The middle group of Communists in camp, the rank and file, refused to learn and never really approved such individual or collective solidarity. The lowest Communist group consisted of opportunists and hangers-on. In keeping with people of such character, they were usually one hundred and fifty per cent extremists.

The positive achievement of the Communists on behalf of the concentration-camp prisoners can hardly be overrated. In many cases the whole camp literally owed them its life, even though their motives seldom sprang from pure altruism but rather from the collective instinct for self-preservation in which the whole camp joined because of its positive results. The main reproach to be made against the Communist party in the concentration camps is its reluctance to purge its own

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ranks, quick as it always was to lend a hand when men of dif ferent convictions were to be excluded. Only in very rare cases did it eliminate certain outright criminal types of Communists who got to be Senior Block Inmates or Prisoner Foremen—in any other way, that is, but by sending them into outside labor details, where they were able to do their dirty work with even less control. They were simply shunted out of the base camp and entrusted with authority over hundreds and even thou sands of fellow prisoners whose situation was bad enough as it was. This policy forfeited the Communists much of the sym pathy due to them for their unrelenting fight against the SS, darkening, if not altogether overshadowing, the credit earned by those in their ranks who were neither arrogant nor brutal nor corrupt.

Many of the convicts did not recognize the basic political principle of the reds—namely, that there was a sharp line beyond which a prisoner could not go without himself becoming an enemy and an oppressor. All they wanted in any case, was to do away with control and clear the way for their customary practices—corruption, blackmail, profiteering. At Buchenwald during 1938-39 the situation slowly improved because most of the convicts were shipped out to help in the construction of the Flossenbiirg concentration camp. But at the outbreak of the war the German police began to round up criminals on a huge scale, and thousands of convicts were ad mitted to the camp. In 1942, under the regime of Senior Camp Inmate Ohles, they once again won the upper hand at Buchen wald. This brought drastic consequences.

Before being appointed Senior Camp Inmate, Ohles had been foreman of the construction office. He instituted a diabolically clever scheme, using seventy-six green stool pigeons. It worked in this way: a short-wave receiving set was secretly installed in a sewerage duct under the prisoner Orderly Room. Night after night it was monitored by the elec trician in the construction office. The next morning he would pass on the foreign broadcasts to Ohles’s agents. They would see to it that the news spread among the political prisoners.

When Ohles had collected enough material, he reported to Officer-in-Charge Plaul that the political prisoners were passing foreign radio reports through the camp and therefore must be illegally listening to foreign broadcasts. The Political

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Department, which for reasons of its own was also monitoring foreign broadcasts, made an investigation and found that reports current in camp corresponded closely to the broadcasts. Since the illegal receiver was not located, Plaul simply removed fifty of the best-known red func tionaries from office, sent them to the penal company and zealously fostered their liquidation in the quarry.

But meanwhile a political prisoner in the electricians’ detail had uncovered the scheme of the greens. He reported the situation to a few key people. The Commandant’s barber took advantage of an opportunity to inform SS Colonel Pister. At the same time Officer-in-Charge Florstedt, who was opposed to the greens, was told of a trifling arrogation of authority by Ohles, who had certified a posted headquarters directive with his own name. The pressure on the two officials sufficed to bring the green interregnum to an end. Ohles was relieved and transferred to the quarry. He was dead the very next day. Even prisoners who wore the green triangle helped in the job of finishing him off, for Ohles’s clique had not shrunk from sending to the penal company any convict who did not play ball with them. Once the Senior Camp Inmate had fallen, the remaining members of his group followed in quick succession. The tragic interlude had still further after effects. It was im possible to restore a Communist to the job of Senior Camp Inmate at once. The candidacy of a former German Army of ficer named Wolff was therefore promoted, because no SS suspicion attached to him. Wolff, however, was a homosexual. He soon got into trouble with the camp un derground. To gain support among the prisoners, he tried to

establish liaison with the Poles through his “ Doll Boys.”

At the time, a few prisoners with very bad reputations had come from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, and they were deep in intrigues for power. The German Communists were afraid that another internal upheaval was in the making. Their suspicions were fortified by open threats voiced by the new Senior Camp Inmate. Wolff knew that a certain German Communist from Magdeburg was about to be released. He let it be known that he proposed to forestall the release by re porting the man for political activity in camp. This was an swered with the counter-threat that the SS would be informed of Wolff’s homosexual practices.

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The situation grew more and more tense and in the end the camp underground denounced Wolff to the SS, charging him with organizing a political plot! The consequences were disastrous for a number of Poles who, in my opinion, were quite innocent. They were given fatal injections by Dr. Hoven. Gustav Wegerer, an Austrian Communist who was foreman of the Pathology section, and I, managed to save the Polish physician, Dr. Marian Ciepielowski (later placed in charge of serum production in Building SO), by intervening with Dr. Hoven and Dr. Ding-Schuler. But W olff himself was transferred to an outside detail on the Baltic Sea, where he soon perished.

Henceforth there was no further attempt to break the ab solute hegemony of the political prisoners at Buchenwald. It was tantamount to the hegemony of the Communist party which now, true enough, ceased to reject altogether political prisoners of other shades of opinion. There had been too many instances of individual acts of solidarity, and news had slowly trickled through from the outside that Moscow had proclaimed the slogan of the “ Popular Front.” For a long time, however, this change in policy did not prevail among the bulk of the Communists in camp.

To survive, collectively and individually, we had to apply to the SS the same policy it used on the prisoners: “ Divide and Rule!” The underground camp leaders always had as one of their main purposes the demoralization of the SS, chiefly through corruption. This, of course, often resulted in im mediate material benefits to the prisoners, though the dangers were disproportionately great on their side. But among the more alert SS men, corruption could also lay the basis for shaking any ideals they might have or for uprooting them altogether as the situation at the fronts grew worse. The essen tial purpose was always to gain sufficient control over them to keep them silent and even to have them tolerate certain ac tions, especially those involving rescue from mortal danger.

More and more, in those camps where the reds held sway, actual power, insofar as it affected the internal workings of camp life, passed into the hands of the prisoners. This development was aided by wartime conditions, by the problem created by the influx of non-Germans and by the tight network of common interests that grew up. True, the in