Auschwitz (31 page)

Silvia Veselá herself did not escape the attentions of Professor Clauberg in Block 10:

In Block 10, not only did Schumann and Clauberg conduct sterilization experiments, but Dr. Wirths, Auschwitz's chief medical officer, medically abused women in pursuit of “research” into the functioning of the cervix. Medical experiments were also carried out on men in Block 28 of the main camp—a particular specialty here was to cover prisoners' skin with a variety of poisonous substances in an attempt to mimic possible tricks that might be used by those trying to escape service in the army.

Auschwitz prisoners were even “sold” to the Bayer company, part of I.G. Farben, as human guinea pigs for the testing of new drugs. One of the communications from Bayer to the Auschwitz authorities states that: “The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price.”
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These women, who had died in testing an experimental anaesthetic, cost the Bayer company 170 Reichsmarks each.

But, terrible as the suffering inflicted was, it is not Clauberg or Schumann or Wirths or even the Bayer company that has invaded the popular consciousness as the most infamous name associated with medical experiments at Auschwitz, but that of a handsome, thirty-two-year-old combat
veteran, holder of the Iron Cross, sent to Auschwitz in March 1943—Dr. Josef Mengele. More than any other individual, Mengele has become synonymous with Auschwitz. The reason is a combination of character and circumstance: character because Mengele reveled in the power he possessed at Auschwitz and the opportunities for heartless research the place offered, and circumstance because he arrived at the camp just as the Birkenau crematoria were completed and Auschwitz was about to enter its most destructive period.

The schizophrenic nature of Mengele's character as demonstrated at Auschwitz is remarked on by a number of former prisoners. As he stood before them, immaculately dressed in his SS uniform, Mengele could smile and be charming—or he could be unspeakably cruel. Witnesses saw him shoot a mother and child on the ramp when they caused him trouble, but others remember how he offered them only kind words. Vera Alexander,
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a Czechoslovakian inmate, saw this duality at close range when she was Kapo of a block that contained gypsy and Polish children: “Mengele used to come to the camp every day—he used to bring chocolate.... When I shouted and told the children off, they usually reacted [by saying], ‘We will tell Uncle you are bad.' Mengele was the ‘Good Uncle.'” But, of course, Mengele behaved in this way for a reason: These children were nothing to him but the raw material for his experiments. Vera Alexander witnessed how children could be returned to the block screaming with pain after a visit to their “Good Uncle.”

One of Mengele's chief areas of “interest” was the study of twins—he had previously specialized in “hereditary biology.” The rumor at the camp was that he was trying to understand the exact circumstances in which multiple births occur, and therefore wanted to undertake research that might eventually allow women in the Reich to have more children more quickly. But it is more likely he was chiefly motivated by the desire to understand the role of genetic inheritance in development and behavior—this was a topic that obsessed many Nazi scientists.

Eva Moses Kor
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was ten years old in 1944, and, together with her twin sister, Miriam, was subject to Mengele's attentions:

As Miklos Nyiszli,
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a prisoner doctor who observed Mengele closely, remarked, “This phenomenon was unique in world medical history. Two brothers died together, and it was possible to perform autopsies on both. Where, under normal circumstances, can one find twin brothers who die at the same place and at the same time?”

Eva Moses Kor managed to fight her fever and saved not just her own life, but that of her twin sister: “I was asked by somebody, ‘You're very strong?' And I said, ‘I had no choice. I overcame or I would have perished.'”

The story of Eva Moses Kor is not just a horrific one, it illustrates the truth at the heart of Mengele's life in Auschwitz—he could do to human beings whatever he liked. There was no restriction on the scope or extent of what he called his “medical experiments.” His power to torture and murder in pursuit of his own sadistic curiosity was endless. He experimented not just on twins, but also on dwarves and inmates with the form of gangrene of the face known as noma, which was common in the gypsy camp in Birkenau because of the appalling conditions in which they were held. But Mengele could just as easily have decided to take an interest in three—or thirty—other areas of research.

Before he arrived at Auschwitz he showed no signs of becoming a sadist; by all accounts he demonstrated bravery fighting in the East, rescuing two soldiers from a blazing tank, and before that he had led a relatively unexceptional life in the medical profession after studying at Frankfurt University.
It was the circumstances of Auschwitz that brought forth the Mengele the world was to know—a reminder of how hard it is to predict who, in exceptional situations, will become a monster.

Mengele was, in many respects, the archetypal Nazi officer in Auschwitz. Perfectly turned out on every occasion, he had utter contempt for the inmates. The idea of any form of intimate relationship with prisoners would have been anathema for him, the thought of sexual contact inconceivable. In this he was entirely consistent with the Nazi ideal. Because in Nazi racial theory those imprisoned in the camp represented a danger to the physical well-being of the Reich, sexual relationships between members of the SS and camp inmates were expressly forbidden. Such acts constituted a “race crime” for the Germans.

Indeed, one of the differences between the atrocities committed by the Nazis who were carrying out the “Final Solution” and many other war crimes of the twentieth century is the overt insistence by the Nazis that their troops refrain from sexual violence—not out of humanity but out of ideology. In many other instances—for example, the Turkish massacre of the Armenians during World War I, the Japanese war of colonization in China that began in the 1930s, and the more recent Serbian attempt to conquer Bosnia in the 1990s—sexual violence against the women of the “enemy” was widespread. From the Bosnian rape camps to the selling of Christian Armenian women into harems and the “bonding” gang rape of Chinese women by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese army, the conflicts of the twentieth century are redolent with instances of male sexual violence.

For the Nazis, however, the conflict in the East was a different kind of war. While on the Channel Islands or in France it was perfectly possible for German soldiers to have relationships with local women, the Jews and the Slavic population of the East represented, to the Nazis, racially dangerous peoples. Nazi propaganda trumpeted that one of the most sacred tasks for each soldier of the Reich was to ensure the “purity of German blood.” Slav and Jewish women (especially the latter) were absolutely out of bounds. A law had even been passed in pre-war Germany explicitly forbidding marriage between Jews and non-Jews.

All of this meant that there ought to have been no instances of sexual relationships at Auschwitz between members of the SS and Jewish prisoners.
Killing Jewish women was, it seems, a sacred ideological duty of the SS, but having sex with them was a crime. Nonetheless, as Oskar Groening points out,

And so, when the SS men were in charge of women prisoners, Groening did not find it surprising that “it happens that they stroked or kissed one another or had forced sexual relations.”

The women who worked in “Canada” were the most obvious targets for members of the SS willing to set aside their ideological convictions and commit rape. The majority of women in Auschwitz had their heads shaved, were malnourished, and were easily susceptible to disease. In contrast, the women working in “Canada,” had access to food that they could take from goods as they sorted them, and they were allowed to grow their hair. Additionally, the SS men mingled freely with the women who worked in “Canada,” not just to oversee their work but to pilfer goods for themselves. As a result, rape in “Canada” was not unknown, as Linda Breder confirms,

The SS man responsible was subsequently transferred out of “Canada” but escaped further punishment. Another SS man known to have had sexual relationships with Jewish prisoners in camp was one of the report officers at Birkenau, Gerhard Palitzsch.
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He was arrested but—almost certainly
thanks to the influence of Höss—was punished merely by being transferred to a sub-camp away from Birkenau.

Rape also took place in an area of Birkenau where, as in “Canada,” women were allowed to keep their own clothes and leave their hair unshaved. This was the so-called “family camp,” a separate, fenced-in area that (from September 1943) held Jews who had been deported from the ghetto-camp of Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Around 18,000 men, women, and children were imprisoned here until the camp was finally liquidated in July 1944. For these Jews there had been no selection on arrival: The Nazis planned to use them for “propaganda” purposes. They were instructed to write postcards home explaining how well they were being treated, in an attempt to dispel rumors that Auschwitz was a place of extermination. Unlike the gypsy camp (the only other location in Birkenau where families lived together), in the family camp men and boys lived in separate barracks from women and girls.

Ruth Elias was one of the inmates living in the women-only barracks of the family camp. She twice witnessed drunken SS men visiting the barracks and selecting women to take away: “The girls came back crying—they had been raped. They were in a terrible state.”

The fact that members of the SS raped Jewish women in Auschwitz, although appalling, may not upon reflection be so surprising. The SS men had these women in their power and believed that they were ultimately destined to be murdered. A combination of alcohol and the knowledge that the crime could be concealed served to overcome any ideological strictures. That such crimes have not received attention in most of the conventional literature on Auschwitz is perhaps not so strange either. This is an immensely delicate subject, and those who suffered at the hands of the SS might understandably wish to keep silent. As criminologists have long noted, the “dark” figure for rape—the difference between the number of offences reported and the number of offences that have actually taken place—is one of the highest for any crime.

If the knowledge that the SS men raped women in Auschwitz fits the pattern of behavior of many soldiers towards “enemy” women, however, then the fact that at least one SS man fell in love with a Jewish woman who worked in the camp surely destroys our preconceptions completely. Indeed,
the story of Helena Citrónová
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and her relationship with Franz Wunsch is one of the most extraordinary in the history of Auschwitz.

Helena arrived at Auschwitz in March 1942 on one of the first transports from Slovakia. Her initial experience of the camp was nothing out of the ordinary—a story of hunger and physical abuse. During her first few months she worked in an outside commando destroying buildings and carrying rubble. She slept on flea-infested straw and watched in terror as the other women around her began to give up hope and die. One of her closest friends was the first to lose her life. She “saw everything around her” and said, “I don't want to live one minute more.” She started to scream hysterically and was then taken away and murdered by the SS.

Helena realized—in common with others—that to survive she needed to find work in a less physically strenuous commando. Another Slovakian woman she knew already worked in “Canada” and offered Helena some advice: If Helena was prepared to put on a white headscarf and striped dress taken from one of the women who had worked in the “Canada” commando and had just died, then she could come to work inside the barracks where the clothes were sorted the very next day. Helena did exactly that but, unfortunately for her, the Kapo noticed that she was an “infiltrator” and told her that on her return to the main camp she would be transferred to the Penal Commando. Helena knew that this was a sentence of death, “But I didn't care, because I thought, ‘Well, at least one day under a roof.'”