Auschwitz (8 page)

One major obstacle now stood in the way of Władysław Bartoszewski's release—his physical state.

Having passed this cursory medical examination, Bartoszewski was taken to the camp chancellery where the clothes he was wearing when he entered the camp were returned to him. “They didn't give me back my golden cross,” he says. “They kept that as a souvenir.” Then, almost in a parody of a normal prison release, the SS men asked if he had any complaints about his stay.

Together with three other Poles who were released that day, Bartoszewski was escorted by a German guard to Auschwitz railway station and put on a train. As the train pulled away he felt keenly “those first minutes of freedom.” Ahead of him lay a lengthy journey home, back to his mother in Warsaw. On the train, “People shook their heads. Some women were wiping their eyes out of compassion—you could see they were moved. They just asked, ‘Where are you coming from?' We said, ‘Auschwitz.' There was no comment—just a look, just fear.” Late that night, Bartoszewski arrived at his mother's flat in Warsaw. “She was amazed to see me. She threw herself on me and embraced me. From above her I saw this white strand of hair on her head, which was the first change I noticed. She didn't look too well. No one looked very well at that time.”

Altogether, several hundred prisoners were released in a similar manner from Auschwitz. No one knows for certain why these individuals were chosen.
In Bartoszewski's case, however, it seems that public pressure might have played a part, because the Red Cross and other institutions had been campaigning for his release. That the Nazis were susceptible to international pressure over prisoners at this time is confirmed by the fate of a number of Polish academics arrested in November 1939.

As part of the purge of the intelligentsia, professors at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow were snatched from their lecture rooms and imprisoned in a variety of concentration camps, including Dachau. Fourteen months later, the surviving academics were released, almost certainly as a result of pressure from the outside world, including representations from the Pope.

Meanwhile, Auschwitz entered a new and crucial phase of its evolution as another German had a “vision” that would further affect the development of the camp. Dr. Otto Ambros of I.G. Farben, the giant industrial conglomerate, was looking for a suitable site for a synthetic rubber factory in the East. He was only searching for such a location at all because the war had taken a different course from the one anticipated by the Nazi leadership. Just as Himmler, in May 1940, had imagined it possible that the Jews could be transported to Africa because the war would soon be over, so did I.G. Farben imagine at that time that it was unnecessary to pursue the difficult and expensive process of producing synthetic rubber and fuel. Once the war was over—say, at the latest, autumn 1940—plenty of raw materials would be available from outside the Reich, not least from Germany's own new colonies seized from its enemies.

But at the time, November 1940, the war was demonstrably not over. Churchill had refused to make peace and the RAF had repulsed German air attacks during the Battle of Britain. Once again, German planners had to react to the unexpected. Indeed, it is a recurring theme of this history that the Nazi leadership constantly must contend with events they have not properly anticipated. They always are driven by a sense of enormous ambition and optimism—anything can be accomplished by “will” alone—and then they are pulled short either by their own lack of planning and foresight, or because their enemy is stronger than their own inflated sense of themselves ever acknowledged.

At I.G. Farben, expansion plans that had been shelved because of the expected
imminent end of the war were hurriedly dusted off and implemented. Although not a nationalized company, I.G. Farben was nonetheless hugely sympathetic to the needs and desires of the Nazi leadership. The Nazis' Four Year Plan had called for a Buna—synthetic rubber—plant to be built in the East and now, after much discussion, I.G. Farben agreed to site one in Silesia.
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Synthetic rubber was produced by taking coal and subjecting it to a process called hydrogenation, which involved passing hydrogen gas over coal at high temperature. Without lime, water and, crucially, coal no Buna plant could function. A necessary precondition of any site, therefore, was ready access to these essential raw materials. Additionally, I.G. Farben insisted on there being a developed transport and housing infrastructure in the area surrounding any proposed plant.

After poring over maps and plans Otto Ambros believed he had hit upon a suitable site for I.G. Farben's new Buna plant about five kilometers east of the Auschwitz camp. But the proximity of the concentration camp was not a major factor in the initial decision to locate the Buna factory in the Auschwitz area. I.G. Farben was more interested in using the incoming ethnic Germans as workers than in relying solely upon slave labor.

Himmler's attitude to the news that I.G. Farben was interested in coming to Auschwitz can best be described as schizophrenic. As Reichsführer SS, Himmler had doubts about the move. Up to that point, Himmler had ensured that prisoners in the concentration camp system worked only for SS-run enterprises. The precedent of prisoners working for private industry—with the money for their labor eventually routed to the Nazi state rather than kept entirely in the hands of the SS—was not one Himmler was keen to encourage. Even though the SS would make money selling gravel to I.G. Farben, Himmler clearly had more elaborate ambitions for his own SS-RUN concerns which this arrangement prevented.

In his capacity as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, however, Himmler was a good deal less discouraging. He knew about I.G. Farben's need for ethnic Germans, and was happy to try to provide them. Finding accommodation for the incoming workforce would not be a problem. The Auschwitz authorities were happy to “turn out”
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the Jews and Poles who lived in the town to make room. In the end, the final
decision was taken by Goering in his capacity as head of the Economic Four Year Plan—I.G. Farben would build its factory near the Auschwitz concentration camp and Himmler and the SS were expected to cooperate.
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This interest from I.G. Farben transformed Auschwitz from a minor camp within the SS system into potentially one of its most important components. Symptomatic of this change in the camp's status was Himmler's decision to make his first visit to the camp on March 1, 1941. In his memoirs and during his interrogation after the war, Höss supplied a detailed account of the visit, during which Himmler gave free rein to his megalomaniacal tendencies.

If Himmler's vision of Auschwitz as an agricultural research station had been ambitious in November, his dream in March was positively gargantuan. With his initial doubts about the wisdom of I.G. Farben's presence now firmly set to one side, Himmler breezily announced that the camp would no longer contain 10,000 inmates but be expanded to hold 30,000. The Gauleiter (regional leader) of Upper Silesia, Fritz Bracht, who was accompanying Himmler, raised objections to such a rapid expansion, and another local official chimed in with the received wisdom that the drainage problems of the site remained unresolved. Himmler merely told them that they should consult experts and solve the problem themselves. He summed up the discussion with the words: “Gentlemen, the camp will be expanded. My reasons for it are far more important than your objections.”
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Subservient as he was to Himmler, Höss felt so strongly about the difficulty of implementing his master's new vision that he waited until only he, Himmler, and the Higher SS and Police Leader for the Southeast (Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski) were alone in the car together, and then launched into a litany of complaints. He was short of building materials, he was short of staff, he was short of time—in fact he was short of everything, Höss objected. Himmler reacted in a predictable way, saying, “I want to hear no more about difficulties! For an SS officer there are no difficulties! When they come up, it's his job to get rid of them. How you do that is your business, not mine.”

What is significant about this exchange is not so much Himmler's response to Höss's grumbling, but more that Höss felt able to talk to the head of the SS in this way at all. In the Soviet system anyone who talked to Stalin
or Beria (head of the NKVD secret police and Himmler's nearest equivalent in Moscow) in such a manner risked his life.

Strange as it may seem at first, the Nazi leadership tolerated much more internal criticism from its supporters than did the Stalinist system. This is one reason why the Third Reich was the more dynamic of the two political regimes, with functionaries further down the chain of command free to use their initiative and voice their views. Unlike most of those who committed crimes under Stalin, Höss was never acting out of fear of terrible retribution if he questioned an order. He had joined the SS because he believed wholeheartedly in the overall Nazi vision, and this meant he felt free to criticize the details of its implementation. He was that most powerful of subordinates, someone who was doing his job not because he was told to, but because he believed that what he was doing was right.

Of course, feeling free to criticize your superior over detail and actually accomplishing anything through such criticism are two different things. Höss accomplished nothing by complaining to Himmler: The Reichsführer's vision for the expansion of Auschwitz concentration camp was to be implemented regardless. As Höss mournfully concluded, “The Reichsführer was always more interested in hearing positive reports rather than negative ones.”

In the wake of I.G. Farben's decision to build a Buna plant in Auschwitz, Himmler did not confine his grandiose ideas to the camp but expanded his vision to encompass the town and surrounding area. At a planning meeting in Kattowitz on April 7th, his representative announced: “It is the aim of the Reichsführer to create on this spot an exemplary Eastern settlement—special attention being paid to settling here German men and women who are particularly qualified.”
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Plans were drawn up for a new German town of Auschwitz to hold 40,000 people, and these plans went hand in hand with the expansion of the nearby concentration camp.

Around this time, Höss also came to recognize the potential usefulness of the relationship with I.G. Farben. The minutes of a meeting held on March 27, 1941
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between camp officials and company representatives reveal just how Höss sought to gain an advantage for the camp. After one of the I.G. Farben engineers asked how many prisoners could be supplied over the coming years, Sturmbannführer Höss pointed out the difficulties of accommodating
a sufficient number of inmates in the Auschwitz concentration camp, the main problem being that it is not possible for the construction of accommodations to proceed at full speed. What was preventing this, Höss declared, was a lack of raw materials. This was, of course, the same difficulty he had just been haranguing Himmler about and which previously he had attempted to solve himself by traveling the countryside and “pilfering” barbed wire. Höss now argued that if I.G. Farben would help to “speed up the extension of the camp” then “this would, after all, be in [its] own interest, because only in this way could the deployment of sufficient prisoners be achieved.” At last Höss appeared to have found an audience sympathetic to his difficulties, as the gentlemen from I.G. Farben agreed to “take on the task of finding out whether it is possible to assist the camp.”

During the same meeting, I.G. Farben agreed to pay a daily “all-inclusive” sum of three Reichsmark per unskilled worker and four Reichsmark per skilled worker and “work performance” (for each camp prisoner) was “estimated as being 75 percent of that of a normal German worker.” They also agreed on the price that I.G. Farben would be charged per cubic meter of gravel dug by camp inmates from the nearby Sola River. Overall, “the entire negotiations were conducted in cordial harmony. Both sides emphasized their wish to assist each other in every way possible.”

But vast as Himmler's and I.G. Farben's plans for Auschwitz were, they were dwarfed by the far-reaching decisions being made by Nazi strategists back in Berlin. For some months, officers of the High Command of the German armed forces had been working on plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union, code named Operation Barbarossa. At a meeting at his Bavarian retreat, the Berghof, in July 1940, Hitler had announced to his military commanders that the best way to bring a swift end to the war was to destroy the Soviet Union. He believed that Britain only stayed in the war in the hope that Stalin would eventually break the non-aggression pact signed with the Nazis in August 1939. If the Germans destroyed the Soviet Union, then, he thought, Britain would make peace and the Nazis would be the undisputed masters of Europe. This single decision would shape the course of the war and, indeed, the course of the whole history of Europe for the rest of the century.