The Theory and Practice of Hell (66 page)

286
EUGEN
KOGON

effort to interfere with the work of the minister and his associates. The lieutenant finally got drunk, in order to “ forget the misery at least overnight,” as he put it. On April 23 the cars with the remaining 3,000-odd prisoners moved on in the direction of Munich to be routed to Dachau.. . .

On the morning of April 8 there was a protracted air-raid alarm at Buchenwald, after which the entire camp was or dered to assemble for evacuation at twelve o ’clock noon. The expected truck from Weimar which was to take away the medical supplies from Building SO had not yet arrived! At last, around 12:45
p
.
m
.,
it rolled up, with four SS men who had no idea of what was afoot. The boxes were loaded aboard without incident, under Feld’s supervision. Four hours later the letter to the Commandant was posted at Weimar. It had its effect. Pister vacillated even more. Another 4,800 prisoners were evacuated on April 9, and 9,280 on the morn ing of April 10, mostly from the Little Camp. Some of .them had volunteered for shipment, while others were brutally rounded up. It was on this latter day that the Commandant found himself no longer able to postpone even more drastic measures, for SS Lieutenant-General Prince Waldeck-Pyrmont came to Buchenwald in person to “ whip Pister into line,’’ as he put it. Despite his duplicity, the Commandant had so far countenanced ruthlessness on only a partial scale. He had failed to take thoroughgoing measures for carrying out the orders he had received. Now that Prince Waldeck himself intervened it was already too late, for April 11 was to bring the issue to a head.

The action directed against the remaining Jews and the forty-six political prisoners had meanwhile been dissipated in the general confusion. Had there been a general evacuation, the remaining forty-five men might have been intercepted at the gatehouse and shot down—if they had appeared, that is! For like the sick and the administrative personnel, who were scheduled to remain behind, they were determined not to leave camp. They had decided to guard against the danger of being cut down at the very end by hiding out in safe underground shelters—Prince Waldeck had actually voiced the intention of blowing up the camp.

On Wednesday, April 11, 1945, there were still 21,000

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL
287

prisoners in Buchenwald. At this point conditions would have favored armed action. But the SS were no longer in a mood to attack. At 10:30
a
.
m
.
the First Officer-in-Charge announced that the camp would be surrendered. Some credence was given to the statement, though it was known that the SS had requested low-flying bombers from a near-by air base, on a mission to destroy the camp. All the forces inside the com pound remained in a state of complete alertness. About an hour and a half later the loudspeaker called on all SS members to report to their stations outside the enclosure immediately, and tension mounted to its climax. Soon afterward the SS began to withdraw.

The die was cast. Only the guards on the watchtowers remained behind, and shortly before three o’clock in the af ternoon, when the sounds of battle drew closer and closer, they retired to the surrounding woods. Members of the camp defense formations, who had been in cover fully armed, at once cut the barbed wire, occupied the towers and the gatehouse and broke out the white flag on the main tower. Thus the first American tanks, rumbling up from the north west, found a Buchenwald that had already been liberated. Aid from the direction of Weimar had become unnecessary. The city was taken by the Americans that same night.

There was tremendous enthusiasm among the 21,000 men who had been saved. The organization prepared by the Com munist party for taking over the camp was immediately put into effect. An international camp committee was created, with sub-committees for the various nationality groups. There were some 5,000 Frenchmen, 3,500 Poles and Polish Jews, 2,200 Germans, 2,000 Russians, 2,000 Czechs, 2,000

Ukrainians, 600 Yugoslavs, 400 Dutch, 300 Austrians, 200 Italians, 200 Spaniards, and some 3,000 members of other nationalities.The job of the committees was to co-operate with the officers of the Third U.S. Army who were arriving. What remained to be done was the formal restoration of liberty to men who, on April 12, 1945, for the first time assembled in the roll-call area not as slaves of the SS, but voluntarily, as free men! After eight years of slave life, the Buchenwald concentration camp, stinking site of barracks eloquent with misery and suffering, had ceased to exist.

288
EUGEN KOGON

But while the men who had been liberated made the air ring with their rejoicing, a remnant of the 26,000 men who had been shipped out of Buchenwald during the final weeks were starving and suffocating in fifty railroad cars on the outskirts of the Dachau camp—nameless, immortal victim s.. . .

f

I

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SS

*

. Psychologists are likely to find the story of the concentration camps studded with many strange phenomena, both among the SS and the prisoners. On the surface, the reactions of the prisoners appear far more understandable than those of their oppressors. The prisoners, after all, are recognizable as human beings; but there is something inhuman about the whole character of the SS. Actually the psychology of the SS is by far the simpler of the two. It differs little from that of the Praetorian Guard in ancient Rome, the followers of Moham med’s immediate successors, the Mongol shock troops of Ghengis Khan, the Janissaries, the dervishes of the Mahdi, and similar bodies of men known from history. Only in the matter of social origins did the SS bring a modern note into the picture.

Whether they were consciously attracted to SS ideals or not, the men who volunteered for Hitler’s Elite Guards were without exception of a type in whom a primitive psychological mechanism was at work. Their minds were enclosed by a hard shell consisting of a few sharply fixed, dogmatic, effortless, simplified concepts underneath which lurked a flood of in-

290
EUGEN KOGON

choate emotionalism. They suffered from no internal con flicts between instinct and reason. They acknowledged no universally valid standards of conduct.

The only form of soul-searching to which they submitted was in full accord with the primitive scheme of their minds. It amounted to no more than a check-up as to whether the direc tion of their instincts actually corresponded to the prescribed SS goals. In keeping with a certain tradition of Prussianism, they called this “ licking the inner son of a bitch”
(Schweinehund).
It did not by any means imply resisting their own inclinations. And what a gulf there was between Herr Himmler’s “ ideals of consecration,” and the parasite life of his Death-Head elite!

Nearly all the SS officers were married and had children, but they were quite fond of promiscuity as well. It was not always easy for the prisoners, whose fate often depended on the whims of this gentry, to tell who was having an affair with whom or a feud with someone else. Kurt Titz, one of the or derlies at Buchenwald, was often in serious difficulties on this account. No sooner had he awakened the Koch children at the prescribed hour, washed and dressed them and taken them to toilet, fed and walked the dog, brewed the coffee and brought it to Madame’s bed, on which she liked to lie uncovered, than Camp Medical Officer Hoven, nick-named “ Handsome Waldemar,” would put in his appearance—that is, if the Commandant was absent. And if Titz was not careful, he might be caught unawares at the nightly appearance of Officer-in-Charge Florstedt, who fled his own wife to join the Commandant’s. A slip of the tongue in mentioning Florstedt in the presence of Hoven might bring disgrace and death to the orderly. Titz actually did fall into disfavor, but managed to survive the camp prison and Flossenbiirg concentration camp.

It will occasion no surprise that the permanent beneficiaries of such a system showed not the slightest desire to give up their life of plenty, of drinking and whoremongering, in order to go to the front and fight for the vaunted German fatherland. The concentration camps became a paradise of shirkers from the Death-Head elite. The SS heroes never tired of thinking up new stratagems to keep them from shouldering

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL 291

rifles and entering the trenches. Agency after agency was created for the sole purpose of certifying that these gentry were absolutely indispensable.

As early as October 1941, for example, when the German

armies had not yet reached their peak penetration of Russia, an elaborate “ SS Building Inspection Office for Russia” was drawn up on paper. It included a host of regional offices located in cities that were not in German hands at the time or that were never captured at all (such as Moscow). After the battle of Stalingrad these locations were simply changed. Even when the German forces had been driven far back across the Dnieper, the rear-echelon SS officers refused to surrender their posts, simply moving their offices closer to Germany.