Auschwitz: A History Page 3
Once they had been handed over, the systematic humiliation began. Trucks brought the prisoners straight to the camp gate; smaller transports collected the SS from the station 2 kilometres away. Later, trains stopped at a spur where some loading ramps had been set up; one reached as far as the camp. Upon registration, each prisoner was given a number, which from that point onwards replaced his or her name. The prisoners had to undress, their heads and bodies were shaved, and they were beaten all the way to the showers. They changed their clothes for striped suits made of coarse canvas, a thin set for the summer, and a thicker, but barely warming one for the winter; they also received heavy wooden shoes. They had their photographs taken, in police style; but when they ran out of film the SS soon started photographing only Reich Germans.
A scrap of fabric with the prisoner’s number was worn at chest height on the left of the jacket. Below it was a triangle, known as a Winkel, point downwards, the colour of which (standardized in all camps from 1937 to 1938) showed the prisoner’s category, and it was also applied to the hem of the right trouser leg. A red triangle indicated that the reasons for imprisonment were political. Green Winkel were worn by ‘criminals’ and also by ‘prisoners in preventive custody’, known in the jargon of the camp as ‘professional criminals’. The colour black stood for ‘anti-social types’, meaning prostitutes and also Sinti and Roma. The triangles of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, known as Bibelforscher or ‘Bible-researchers’, were purple. Homosexuals wore pink Winkel, emigrants blue and Jews, who formed a category of their own regardless of nationality, yellow. A letter on the triangle gave the nationality of non-Jews: ‘P’, for example, meant Pole; Reich Germans – most of them falling under the category of ‘criminals’– were not obliged to wear a letter. Jews had to wear a different-coloured Winkel over the yellow one according to the reason for their imprisonment, so that their clothes were adorned with a kind of star of David; from mid-1944a yellow strip over the Winkel replaced the second triangle.
The prisoners’ hierarchy ran along racial lines: only Reich Germans were assessed as Bevorzugte Häftlinge (‘preferred prisoners’), a category that granted all kinds of privileges. Those who were bevorzugt,or BV, and who were among the so-called camp elite, were permitted to go for a walk outside the camp grounds under SS supervision and wear civilian clothes, grow their hair and wear a wristwatch. After the Reich Germans came the non-Jewish prisoners of other nationalities. Their positions rose with the duration of their imprisonment: the longer prisoners had survived in the camp (identifiable by their low prisoner number), the better was their position, even where the SS were concerned. At the bottom came Jews, who were refused positions within the camp hierarchy until 1943–4, by which time hardly any ‘Aryan’ camp inmates were being delivered.
Erziehungshäftlinge (‘re-education prisoners’), who were sent to Auschwitz from mid-July 1941 and placed in special blocks redesigned as labour re-education camps, were identified by a large ‘E’ rather than a Winkel. Most of the prisoners falling under this category, chiefly on grounds of a ‘lack of labour morale’, were Poles from the Kattowitz government district. Labour re-education prisoners, of which there were about 12,000 in Auschwitz, including 2,000 women, came under the auspices of the Gestapo throughout the Reich, and were for that reason assigned to the political department in the camp. Their sentences were officially limited to between forty-two and fifty-six days, but in fact often lasted from three to six months. Prisoners who had been released went home and were vowed to silence. But many did not survive their imprisonment.
The ‘quarantine period’, as it was called, that immediately followed the delivery process for all prisoners meant isolation, harassment and murderous drills. Anyone too weak to endure humiliating insults while standing to attention or exercising for hours at a time was punished by the SS, with blows, buckets of ice-cold water and hard work. Weak and humiliated, many took refuge in suicide. But those who managed to survive the first few weeks clung to the hope that things might get better in the work units. They were to be sorely disappointed, because these units had to do at least ten hours’ forced labour every day, first in the construction of the camp, and later for German industrial companies.
After being woken – in summer at half-past four, in winter an hour later – the prisoners were herded to the washrooms, and then hurried to morning roll-call. Often the work units left the camp to the sound of the prisoners’ orchestra, which was forced to play. The construction site, the gravel pit and the timber yard were particularly feared as units that hardly anyone survived. In the evening the roll-call could sometimes last for hours, particularly if there had been deaths during the day; in such cases lights-out, scheduled for nine o’clock, did not come until long after midnight.
‘Offences’ such as a missing button, an unsuitable facial expression or a sloppily washed food bowl were subject to many different penalties: punishment by beating, fatigues, detention. Strict detention meant solitary imprisonment with bread and water; prisoners might also be kept in darkness or in cells where they could only stand, or they were hung from posts with arms raised high and tied behind their back. One of the worst penalties, applied for example in cases of attempted escape, was the punishment unit, because hardly anyone survived the digging and building work. Prisoners in the punishment units were specially marked: apart from the coloured Winkel, they wore a black dot on their clothes; those suspected of planning an escape had to wear a red dot and the letters iL, for im Lager (‘in the camp’).
On Sundays, when no work was done, the prisoners were allowed to write to their families. For one Reichsmark they had to buy a preprinted sheet of writing paper and stamps in the camp canteen. They were able to receive small amounts of money (and later also food parcels) from their relatives. But anyone without money had to trade bread for paper and stamps. Anyone who needed the help of a fellow prisoner to write in German, the required language, had to pay with their bread ration as well. The SS censored the letters, cutting out unacceptable passages or making them illegible in some other way. One sentence was always to be included: ‘I am healthy, I am fine.’
The prisoners lived in wretched conditions. They slept tightly crammed together, initially on sacks filled with straw, on the floor. Several thousand shared two wells for washing, and a single latrine trench. Sanitary equipment was not installed until February 1941: there was one latrine room per prisoner block, and one room with a channel for washing in. After wooden bed-frames had been set up, six prisoners and more had to share a bunk-bed designed for three. In the morning there was unsweetened coffee substitute or herbal tea, and at lunchtime watery soup with no meat, but with parsnips, potatoes or millet, and at dinnertime bread which was usually old and dry and often mouldy, and which had to do for breakfast the following morning as well. Weakness, exhaustion and illness were the consequences of malnutrition. Those who were reduced to skin and bone and barely capable of life, and had to resort to eating leftovers, potato peel and rotten turnips, were known in prison slang as Muselmänner (‘Moslems’) and avoided.
Neither in Auschwitz nor anywhere else did the camp inmates form a homogeneous ‘community of prisoners’; they differed too greatly in terms of national origin, and of social, political and religious affiliations. Because of the many kinds of pressure they had to endure, because they were in the hands of the SS, and because there was so little room for manoeuvre, the prisoners were often in competition with one another. Their everyday life was informed by strenuous attempts to cope in the camp, and unwritten laws governed the internal power structures.
The so-called prisoners’ self-administration, an SS system of patronage defined by the arbitrary use of power, further stirred up conflicts between the prisoners. In their positions as the most senior prisoners in the camp or the blocks, as Stubendienste (‘barrack-room orderlies’), Blockschreiber (‘block clerks’), Kapos (‘overseers’) and Kommandierte (‘trusties’), the prisoners who acted as Funktionshäftlinge (‘functionary prisone
rs’), and who were mostly ‘Aryan’, formed the so-called Lagerprominenz – the camp elite. It was their task to keep watch over fellow prisoners and, in the interests of the SS, to ensure the smooth day-to-day running of the camp. Only a very few prisoners tried to use their positions to the benefit of their fellow prisoners. The ‘functionaries’ enjoyed privileges, were barely threatened with violence and harassment, and had better accommodation and food than anyone else. An SS-controlled camp hierarchy came into being; in Auschwitz it remained for a long time in the hands of mostly Reich German prisoners, who had been detained as ‘prisoners in preventive custody’, and who occupied the coveted ‘functionary’ posts even in the early days of the camp.
On 6 July 1940 Tadeusz Wiejowski from Tarnów was the first prisoner to succeed in escaping. He managed to get out by a side exit from the camp, ran towards the station, climbed aboard a freight train and fled. The Polish population in the surrounding area were immediately suspected of helping a fugitive, because the Polish civilian workers of one of the construction companies had given aid to Wiejowski. So for weeks the locals were subjected to reprisals. Houses were torn down and their inhabitants transported to the Old Reich to form forced-labour units.
Civilian workers were the most important connection between the prisoners and the outside world; at times there were more than 1,000 of them based in the camp, employed as bricklayers, fitters, bulldozer drivers and foremen. They were identified by special papers, green armbands bearing the name of their company and a staff number. It was through their help that letters left the camp, and thanks to them that many prisoners managed to escape. Two thirds of all attempted escapes took place during the major expansion of the camp between 1943 and 1944. More prisoners escaped from Auschwitz than from almost any other camp. Half of those who attempted an escape were Poles. Of a total of 802 escapees of all nations (757 men and 45 women), 144 are known to have got away; most of the others (at least 327) were picked up, and many were shot.
Whenever a prisoner had escaped, the whole camp had to appear for a punitive roll-call, and the police force in the Kattowitz district took up the search, using all its resources, including motorized SS units and men with trained tracking dogs. SS guards then set up posts surrounding the camp grounds at a distance of a few hundred metres, and the outer cordon remained in position even during the night. If a prisoner was caught after a break-out, he could expect to be executed. But each time this happened the price was also paid by ten to twelve prisoners from the escapee’s work unit, whom the SS either placed in a punishment unit to intimidate the others or simply shot. Polish civilians caught helping escapees were immediately sent to the camp; if they could not be found, the SS arrested their families.
Despite the severe punishments, the inmates of the camp could expect help from the Polish population. Prisoners who were employed on survey work, road-building, river management, demolition and in the carpenter’s yard of the Salesian monastery in the town of Auschwitz managed to establish contacts. Bread, medication, money, clothes and newspapers were given to the prisoners by local civilians, the smuggling of secret messages and letters flourished, and reports of the crimes being perpetrated in the camp circulated.
In Auschwitz, Brzeczsze and other towns in the surrounding area these relief efforts developed into an organized network, formed chiefly of political resistance groups and considerably influenced by the Catholic parish of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in the town of Auschwitz. These actions on behalf of the prisoners were a manifestation of massive resistance against the occupying regime. With the concentration camp – the instrument of their oppression – right before their eyes, hundreds of people took part in a patriotic campaign – often at great risk to themselves. Help was at first offered by individuals, and then also by whole families and groups that rapidly formed, including the Armed Struggle Association (later the Armia Krajowa), the Peasants’ Party, the Polish Socialist Party, conservative peasant battalions, a peasant liberation organization, the Communist Polish Workers’ Party, the scouting community and the local unit of the People’s Army.
These actions were astonishing, given the difficult conditions that prevailed, because unlike in the General Government the rigorous ‘Germanization policy’ in the annexed Eastern regions meant that the structures of the Polish administration had not been preserved; Polish staff were not tolerated even in lowly official positions. Against this background the activities of the resistance groups in Auschwitz are all the more significant. Although the organizations had no opportunity to use armed force until the end of the war, their struggle was important because it showed that the population would not allow itself to be obliterated even in an area where the occupying forces employed extreme measures of control and punishment.
Despite the SS terror, organized resistance also developed within the camp, sustained at first by socialist and nationalist inmates who formed into a unified organization early in 1942. With the number of prisoners dispatched there, the in-camp resistance movement fragmented into various national and religious groups, most of them led by socialists and communists. French, Yugoslavian, Austrian, Russian, Czech and Jewish prisoners all formed their own conspiratorial circles within the growing camp conglomerate of Auschwitz, at first acting independently, but soon seeking to cooperate with one another. Under a common leadership, ‘Combat Group Auschwitz’ arose, decisively held together by Hermann Langbein, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War from Vienna, who had been deported to Auschwitz in August 1942. Cells, groups and sections arose, and the members of the resistance group gradually came to occupy posts in the prisoner hierarchy, including positions in the commandant’s office and the political department, the prisoners’ writing room, the Arbeitseinsatz (‘labour deployment’)office and the prisoners’ sick bay. Many forms of self-help were developed, food and papers were acquired, escape attempts organized, acts of sabotage initiated. Contact was made with the outside world. SS documents or copies of them got out and documented the crimes being committed in the camp.
The conspirators had had as their goal an armed uprising since the spring of 1942. But the Polish underground movement warned against such an action, because given the German position of power support from the Allies was barely conceivable. So a jointly organized revolt never occurred, but spontaneous rebellions prompted by the immediate threat of death, and ad hoc attempts at uprisings, did take place. Although these revolts were brutally suppressed, they did demonstrate the will of the prisoners not to take the crimes of the Lager-SS (Camp SS) sitting down.
The Lager-SS
The first camp guards came from an SS cavalry unit based in Cracow, but soon trained troops from Buchenwald and other camps served in Auschwitz. The SS men were at first housed in barracks and schools, but gradually houses and whole streets in the town were commandeered for them. If the SS guard units still numbered around 700 people in March 1941, by June 1942 there were three times that number. In August 1944, after the evacuation of the camp had begun, more than 3,300 were serving in Auschwitz. The peak of almost 4,500 SS men was reached in January 1945 during the final phase of the evacuation. By the end of the war a total of about 7,000 people attached to the SS had been working in the camp, including – as guards, SS messenger girls and medically trained SS nurses – some 200 women. Unlike men, women were not allowed to wear SS rank insignia, received no battle decorations and were employees rather than members of the SS. A great variety in terms of age, level of education and origin was just as characteristic of the camp staff as were changes in personnel. In the five years of the camp’s existence, the members of the guard units were changed about twice on average.
The SS settlement in Auschwitz soon expanded into a district of its own. Life in the new quarter was supplied with many modern comforts. There were a coffee house, a swimming-pool, a library, kindergartens, schools, and medical and dental practices. The medical care provided by the camp department doctor was highly valued by the SS forces and their families. SS doctors
ran a hospital with in-patient facilities, ‘family doctors’ held ‘family consultations’. Many fiancées and wives with children followed their husbands to Auschwitz. SS families kept concentration camp prisoners as servants in their houses and gardens. So many people moved in, however, that the camp administration soon refused to assign any more living-space. In order to control this development, Höss decreed that special permission was required for any further visits.
Rudolf Höss lived with his wife Hedwig and, at first, four children (a fifth was born in 1943), only a hundred metres or so outside the camp grounds in a house that had belonged to the Polish administrator of the former military base. The ‘first family’ in the hierarchy of the SS settlement, the Höss family lived in thoroughly pleasant conditions. They were not affected by the economic misery of the region, because the commandant helped himself from the concentration camp stores – secretly and without paying.
In Auschwitz a wide variety of cultural events kept all the SS men in a good mood. Light entertainments, pleasant music and jolly gatherings provided distraction and amusement. Every two to three weeks events for the benefit of the troops took place in the old theatre building in the camp grounds. The camp administration set up its own concert wing, and theatre ensembles from Silesia and many of the towns in the Old Reich played for the SS. The entertainment offered extended from a theatrical genre called Diebeskomödien (‘thief comedies’) via cheerfully frivolous farces with titles like ‘A Bride in Flight’ and ‘Disturbed Wedding Night’, to ‘Merry Variéteś’ and soirées under the motto ‘Attack of the Comics’. And there was no shortage of classics in Auschwitz: in February 1943 the Dresden State Theatre presented a programme entitled ‘Goethe Then and Now’.
The ‘German House’ on the Bahnhofsplatz was the local SS pub. Directly opposite the station, and reserved for Germans only, it served – from the beginning of 1941 it was known as the ‘Waffen-SS House’ (Waffen-SS: ‘Armed SS’) – both as a pub for the Lager-SS and as a hotel for high-ranking outside guests of the camp administration; female Jehovah’s Witness prisoners were employed in the kitchen and as chambermaids. In the summer of 1943 preparations for a very special guest were made on the upper floor: Heinrich Himmler had his own apartment set up there, with a study, a bedroom and a bathroom. He never actually moved into this accommodation, but he clearly did intend to stay there for a lengthy period of time, because the plans for the apartment coincided with the time when Auschwitz was fast becoming the central showpiece of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ within the state extermination programme – a development that the Reichsführer-SS clearly wanted to observe from close up.