Auschwitz (7 page)

From the beginning, this was business of an unusual kind. Himmler did not want to form a capitalist enterprise, but more a series of companies that would operate according to Nazi philosophical ideas in the service of the state. The concentration camps would provide the raw materials for the new Germany—like the vast quantities of granite that were needed for Hitler's gigantic new Reich Chancellery in Berlin. In pursuit of this goal, after the Anschluss with Austria in 1938, the SS opened a new concentration camp at Mauthausen specifically to be near a granite quarry. It was thought particularly apt that the opponents of the regime should contribute to its
growth. As Albert Speer, Hitler's favorite architect, put it: “After all, the Jews were already making bricks under the Pharaohs.”
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Himmler's enthusiasm for industrial production did not stop at providing building materials for the Reich. He gave his blessing to a whole host of other projects as well—an experimental unit was established to look into natural medicines and new forms of agricultural production (two subjects close to Himmler's heart), and soon the SS also was involved in the production of clothing, vitamin drinks, and even porcelain (making figurines of goatherds and other racially suitable subjects). As recent research has shown,
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the SS managers of many of these enterprises were incompetent—almost comically so, were the subject not so bleak.

No sooner had Pohl demanded that Auschwitz produce sand and gravel for the Nazi state than the camp gained another function. In November 1940, Rudolf Höss had a meeting with Himmler, and the plans for Auschwitz that Höss produced during this encounter caught his boss's imagination. Suddenly, their shared interest in agriculture forged a bond between them. Höss recalled Himmler's new vision for the camp:

This meeting between Höss and Himmler, long eclipsed by the even greater horror that was to develop at Auschwitz, gives an insight into the mentality of the two key figures in the history of the camp. It is too easy—and simply wrong—to dismiss them as “madmen” motivated by irrational feelings that we can never understand. Here, at this meeting, we can see them as two enthusiasts—almost cranks—who, in the context of war, were able to pursue visions that in peacetime would only be pipe dreams. As a result of Nazi aggression, however, Himmler, as he sat there poring over the plans of Auschwitz with Höss, was a man who had already had direct experience
of turning his dreams into reality. He had swept his hand across a map and reordered the lives of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans and Poles. In the process, he had pronounced judgments in the most sweeping terms imaginable.

It is vital to remember that all the time Himmler was speaking in such grandiloquent terms of his desire for Auschwitz to become a center of agricultural research, he was doing so in pursuit of a coherent vision—a repulsive vision, of course, but nonetheless a coherent one. At this November 1940 meeting he was enthused by the vision of Silesia as a German agricultural utopia—almost a paradise. Gone would be the tawdry Polish homesteads of the south; in their place would rise solid, well-managed German farms. Höss and Himmler had been farmers themselves; both had an emotional—almost mystical—attachment to nurturing the land. The idea that Auschwitz could be developed in a way that could further agricultural knowledge therefore must have been hugely attractive to both of them.

In the pursuit of this sudden enthusiasm it was a matter of little consequence to Himmler that Auschwitz concentration camp was in precisely the wrong place for such an enterprise. Sited at the confluence of the Sola and Vistula rivers, the camp lay in an area notorious for flooding. Nevertheless, from that meeting until the day the camp closed, Auschwitz prisoners would labor in pursuit of Himmler's vision, digging ditches, draining ponds, shoring up riverbanks—all because it was much more exciting for the Reichsführer SS to dream a dream than to discuss practicalities. Thousands would die in the process, a thought that would scarcely have flitted across Himmler's mind as he enthusiastically outlined his fantasy in front of his faithful subordinate Rudolf Höss.

By the end of 1940, Höss had established many of the basic structures and principles under which the camp would function for the next four years: the Kapos who effectively controlled the prisoners from moment to moment; the absolute brutality of a regime that could inflict punishment arbitrarily; and a pervasive sense within the camp that if an intimate did not learn quickly how to manipulate himself out of a dangerous work commando, he risked a swift and sudden death. But there was one final creation in those early months that symbolized the culture of the camp even more appropriately—Block 11.

From the outside, Block 11 (at first called Block 13, then renumbered in 1941) looked like any of the other red brick barrack-like buildings that ran in straight rows throughout the camp. But it served a unique purpose—and everyone in the camp knew it. “I personally was scared to pass by Block 11,” says Józef Paczyński.
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“I was really afraid.” Inmates felt this way because Block 11 was a prison within a prison—a place of torture and murder.

Jerzy Bielecki was one of the few who experienced what happened in Block 11 and lived to tell the story. He was sent there because one morning he woke up so sick and exhausted that he felt unable to work. In Auschwitz there was no possibility of asking for a day's rest to recover, so he tried to conceal himself in the camp and hope his absence would not be noticed. He first hid in the latrines, but he knew there was a strong risk of capture if he spent the whole day there, so he left and tried to pretend he was cleaning up around the camp. Unfortunately he was caught by a guard and sent to Block 11 for punishment.

He was led up the stairs to the attic. “I walked in and the [roof] tiles were hot,” he says. “It was a beautiful day in August. And there was this stench and I could hear someone moaning, ‘Jesus, oh Jesus!' It was dark—the only light came through the tiles.” He looked up and saw a man hanging from the roof beam by his hands, which were tied behind his back. “The SS man brought a stool and said, ‘Climb on it.' I put my hands behind my back and he took a chain and tied them.” Once the SS man had attached Bielecki to the beam by a chain he suddenly kicked away the stool. “I just felt—Jesus Mary—it was terrible pain! I was moaning and he told me, ‘Shut up, you! You dog! You deserve to suffer!'” Then the SS man left.

The pain as he hung suspended with his hands and arms pulled behind him was appalling, Bielecki said,

Jerzy Bielecki remembers little more until the same SS man returned.

Jerzy Bielecki's story is remarkable for a number of reasons, not least his own personal courage under torture. But perhaps what is most surprising is the contrast between the two SS guards—the one who without warning sadistically kicked away the stool he was standing on, and the “compassionate” guard who helped him down after the torture was over. It is an important reminder that, just as the Kapos could vary widely in temperament, so could the SS. A common theme among the reminiscences of camp survivors is that there was no typical, generic captor. Crucial to surviving in the camp was the ability to read the different characters, not just of the Kapos but of the SS as well. On such a talent could rest your life.

Even though Jerzy Bielecki emerged crippled from Block 11 he was still fortunate, because it was very likely that whoever walked up those concrete steps and in through the front door would never emerge alive. During interrogations the Nazis tortured the inmates of Block 11 in a variety of horrific ways—not just using the back-breaking method of hanging suffered by Bielecki, but also by whipping prisoners, practicing water torture, putting needles under their fingernails, searing them with a red-hot iron, and pouring petrol over them and setting them on fire.

The SS at Auschwitz also used its initiative to devise new tortures, as former prisoner Boleslaw Zbozień observed when an inmate was brought to the camp hospital from Block 11.

In those days, Block 11 was the empire of SS Untersturmführer (2nd lieutenant) Max Grabner, one of the most notorious of the camp personnel. Before joining the SS Grabner had been a cowherd; but now he had the power of life and death over the prisoners in his block. Every week he would “dust out the bunker”—a process which consisted of Grabner and his colleagues deciding the fate of each of the prisoners in Block 11. Some would be left in their cells, others sentenced to “Penal Report 1” or “Penal Report 2.” Penal Report 1 meant a flogging or some other torture. Penal Report 2 meant immediate execution.

Those sentenced to death were first taken to the washrooms on the ground floor of Block 11 and ordered to undress. Once naked, they were taken out of a side door into a secluded courtyard. The yard between Block 11 and Block 10 was bricked off from the rest of the camp—the only space between blocks treated in this way. In this courtyard prisoners were murdered. They were taken to the brick wall—known in camp jargon as “the screen”—furthest from the block entrance with their arms held tight by a Kapo. Once they reached the far wall a small-caliber gun (used in order to minimize the noise) would be held close against their head by an SS executioner and they would be shot.

But it was not just the inmates of Auschwitz who suffered in Block 11—this was also the location of the Police Summary Court for the German Kattowitz (the former Polish Katowice) area. Thus, it was possible for Poles arrested by the Gestapo to come straight to Block 11 from the outside world without passing through the rest of the camp. One of the judges in such cases was Dr. Mildner, an SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) and State Councilor. Perry Broad, a member of the SS who worked in Auschwitz, described how the sadistic Mildner liked to conduct his business.

According to Broad, Mildner particularly enjoyed talking to women immediately after he had sentenced them to death: “He would tell them in the most drastic manner about their imminent death by shooting.”

Yet, despite the horrors of Block 11, Auschwitz—at this stage of its evolution—still clung to some of the attributes of a traditional concentration camp such as Dachau. Nothing illustrates more clearly this lack of conceptual difference than the fact that—contrary to popular myth—it was possible in those early months to be incarcerated in Auschwitz, serve time there, and then be released.

Just before Easter of 1941, Władysław Bartoszewski,
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a Polish political prisoner, was in the hospital in Block 20 when two SS men approached him. “They told me, ‘Get out!' I didn't get any explanation, didn't know what was happening. It was a shock, because there was a change in my situation, and my colleagues around me didn't know what was going to happen. I was terrified.” Bartoszewski soon learned that he was to be taken to appear before a panel of German doctors. On the way to see them a Polish doctor—an inmate—whispered to him, “If they ask you, say you're healthy and that you feel well, because if you say you're sick they won't release you.” Bartoszewski was shocked at the sudden news that he might be able to leave the camp. “Are they to release me?” he asked the Polish doctors in wonder and excitement; but they just replied, “Shut up!”