Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz
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low-level position in the Political Department. Once he observed a young col-
league beat an older woman at an interrogation and screamed at him, ‘‘What
are you doing, you snot-nosed kid? Don’t you have a mother? Have you no
shame?’’ After this incident Lorenczyk was transferred.
The younger a person was, the easier it was to violate his inner nature. Sur-
vivors of the women’s camp tell about a young thing who had recently arrived
as a warden. After seeing what everyone saw in Birkenau, she broke down in
the inmate office and kept repeating that she could not stand this, that she
was going to run away, that she would kill herself.The prisoners tried to calm
her down and urged her to stay, for the inmates needed people with compas-
sionate hearts. The warden stayed and in a short time yelled and beat people
just like her colleagues.
n If a prisoner had a good experience with a guard, this made a deep im-
pression on him. A story told by Stefan Boratynski proves how relative the
concept of good was. He was once locked up in the stand-up bunker with his
hands tied behind his back. They remained tied even when food was placed in
his narrow cell, and thus he had to kneel and bend over the bowl in order to
eat. ‘‘The block leader Hugo Müller displayed some heart,’’ said Boratynski.
‘‘He held his boot under my chin when I fell on the food face down.’’ This
movement of his foot qualified Müller as ‘‘good’’ in Boratynski’s eyes.
Even among the guards of the Sonderkommando there were ‘‘good’’ men.
The strictly isolated inmates on this detail had contact with the camp only
when the food was picked up. Dov Paisikovic remembers a guard of about
fifty who frequently escorted them to the kitchen. He was hard of hearing and
therefore known as der Taube (the deaf man). When he was on duty, Paisikovic
was able to throw bread to his comrades in the camp because the ‘‘deaf man’’
deliberately looked the other way. Paisikovic never saw this older ss man in
the undressing room that adjoined the gas chamberorat executions. ‘‘Heliked
gold.’’ With this remark Paisikovic intimates that the ‘‘deaf man’’ did not tol-
erate the smuggling of food out of pure humanitarianism. Others loved gold,
too, but did not look the other way when help was needed.
Because of his brutality, ss roll call leader Fritz Buntrock was called ‘‘Bull-
dog.’’ When theTheresienstadtfamilycampwas closed, itsinmates were mur-
dered, and only some youths who appeared to be fit for work were spared.
Otto Kulka, who was only eleven at the time, attempted to make his way to
a group of bigger boys. Buntrock noticed this, summoned Kulka, and asked
him his age. The camp-wise Kulka quickly made himself older and answered,
‘‘Twelve.’’ The ss roll call leader lit into him: ‘‘Why are you lying?’’ But then
right away he said, ‘‘Get lost!’’—thereby permitting Kulka to return to the
group of bigger boys and to stay alive.
424 n the jailers
On another occasion Buntrock’s feelings also overcame his ss discipline.
Beforethe gassing of thesecond transport housed intheTheresienstadt family
camp, several able-bodied prisoners were pulled out and taken to other sec-
tions of the camp before the general annihilation. Among them was a woman
who had recently given birth. She gave the three-month-old baby a sleeping
potion and smuggled it through the gate in a handbag. When all the women
had to undress in the sauna where they had been taken, the baby was discov-
ered. A guard was so touched by the mother’s deed that she wanted to let her
keep the baby, but she did not dare not to report this incident to the ss roll
call leader. Buntrock made the same decision as the guard. That the two were
not able to save the baby boy was Boger’s fault. While checking the number
of those who had been gassed or transferred to other sections, he calculated
that there was a deficit of one person. He found out who that person was and
sent both the mother and her child to their deaths.
Buntrock did not always act that way. Before the gassing of the inmates at
the Gypsy camp, the ss roll call leader of that camp, the ethnic German Paul
Bonigut from Croatia, called in sick because he did not want to participate.
Buntrock took his place and directed the transport of the Gypsies to the gas
chamber. According to the clerk of the Gypsy camp, Tadeusz Joachimowski,
Bonigut had at an earlier date delayed the liquidation of the camp, thereby
saving many who were transferred before the final liquidation.
Oszkár Betlen characterizes ss Sergeant Swenty as ‘‘one of the most agree-
able ss men I have met.’’ On the evacuation march the same Swenty shot three
inmates who had stayed behind in a shed—even though he was alone when
he ferreted them out, no one had directly ordered him to commit this murder,
and he did not need to fear any evidence that he had discovered the three men
and let them live. One should remember this example when one learns about
good deeds of a guard.
Even small gestures could become of great significance to the prisoners.
Eva Korngold writes: ‘‘There was only one thing that gave us courage. Every
time we passed our friend, the elderly soldier (on the march to theworkplace),
he whispered a few friendly words to us.’’ The girls called this member of the
Wehrmacht ‘‘Grandpa.’’
n A noticeably small number of ss men availed themselves of the logical way
of getting out of Auschwitz: volunteering for frontline duty. Only a few in-
stances have become known.
Hans Bauernschmidt was posted to Auschwitz in October 1942, and he im-
mediately explored possibilities of being transferred again. When he heard
that it was possible to sign up for leadership training, he did so and was trans-
ferredaftertwo or three months.When I questioned him about this, he replied
Reactions of Human Nature n 425
that at that time only two other noncommissioned officers asked to be trans-
ferred, because it was known that those who completed the course were sent
to the front.
Fritz Karl Ertl testified as follows about how he managed to get out of
Auschwitz. ‘‘As early as the end of 1942 I saw how things were developing in
the camp, and so I and a number of other comrades decided to apply for a
transfer from Auschwitz. After the defeat at Stalingrad there was a favorable
opportunity for this. Everybody was examined for his fitness foractive service.
We did not even wait for this examination but volunteered for such service,
whereuponI was transferred toa reserve unit in Dresdenon February 3, 1943.’’
This transfer meant that Ertl lost his rank as an ss leader; as an architect he
had held the rank of a specialized leader in the central construction office of
the Waffen-ss and police, but now he was only an ss sergeant. Ertl did not
name those who had joined him in taking that route out of Auschwitz. There
could not have been many because otherwise these applications for a transfer
would have become better known.
Kurt Leischow was asked by the presiding judge in Frankfurt why he had
volunteered for frontline service to get away from Auschwitz. ‘‘Just imagine
what you have to see every day,’’ he replied. To be sure, Leischow did not take
this route until the late spring of 1944, and he is reputed to have shown the
inmates no mercy in the early period in Auschwitz.
Otto Graf, an ss sergeant and the head of the Canada Commando, where
he incurred a lot of guilt, was sent to a frontline unit in September 1944. He
had been classified as unfit for service at the front because of an injury suf-
fered in the early phase of the war, but ‘‘after July 20 (the failed attempt on
Hitler’s life) it was possible to apply for a transfer, and everyone was accepted
without a lengthy investigation,’’ as Graf put it. Nevertheless, only two others
joined him in making such an application.
More consequential behavior was displayed by a physician who was an ss
leader and thus had greater opportunities than the rank and file. Dr. Otto
Wolken has given the following account of this: ‘‘One time an ss physician by
the name of Bartzel was transferred to Birkenau. In the Gypsy camp he en-
countered Professor Epstein, who was working there as an inmate physician,
and said to him, ‘But I know you! What’s your name?’ Epstein told him, and
the ss physician said: ‘Sure, you’re Epstein the pediatrician! I studied under
you in Prague. No, this here is no business for my mother’s child.’ Thereupon
he left and was never seen in the camp again.’’ Unfortunately there is no fur-
ther information about this man, and Wolken is not even sure that he has
remembered his name correctly.
Vera Foltynova describes a similar episode that occurred in the construc-
tion office.When Schosenow, an sscaptain from Latvia who had recently been
426 n the jailers
transferred to the construction office, looked out the window, saw the great
processionsof victimsin thedirectionof the crematoriums,and learnedabout
the fate that awaited them there, hesaid, ‘‘I am not a murderer, I am a soldier.’’
According to Foltynova, he was sent to the front a few days later. From the
very beginning this ss captain was different from all the others; he addressed
the inmates with the polite ‘‘Sie,’’ brought them clothes, and even introduced
them to his wife and his son.
Dr. Roland Quästl (possibly Questel or something similar) applied to be
transferred from Auschwitz to the front even though as the holder of a doc-
torate in biology he was employed in the agricultural experimental station at
Rajsko and had no direct contact with the machinery of destruction. As Eva
Gabanyi reports, Quästl at first kept away from the female inmates who were
working in Rajsko. Later he told them that he had at first thought they were
all criminals and murderers, which is what he had heard at the indoctrination
sessions. After he had become acquainted with them and their fate he regu-
larly brought them cigarettes, honey, and other foods. At Christmastime he
used some pretext to have some women with whom he had a good contact
detailed for dutyat his apartment, where he had a Christmas tree and presents
laid out for each one. Even when Quästl was already at the front, his mother
sent these women parcels by way of ss Corporal Lettmann, who had served
under Quästl in Auschwitz. Gabanyi knows that Quästl, who was born in 1915,
came from Litomerice and had joined the ss to finance his studies.
n The establishment of contact with the outside world—above all, with rela-
tives—was a particularly valuable help.True, ‘‘Aryan’’ inmates were permitted
to write and receive mail regularly (every two weeks), but owing to the cen-
sorship these letters had to remain vague and constituted little more than a
confirmation that the writer was still alive. As a rule, Jews had no legal op-
portunity to write. Decades later Gisl Holzer is for this reason still grateful to
Sappe, an ss sergeant from Gablonz whom she met in the Labor Assignment
Office, for smuggling her mail out of and into the camp. Others in the ss—for
example, warden Gertrude Liehr—also accepted letters for mailing, and they
were frequently paid for this.
In a very unusual way Eva Gabanyi was given a chance to establish con-
tact with her family. In Rajsko, where she worked, a guard once addressed her
in Slovakian, telling her that he was also from Slovakia and was very worried
about his sick child. Gabanyi advised him, the next time he was on leave, to
call on her brother, a physician who had not yet been arrested, and give him
regards from his sister, for then he would surely help the child. The ss man
did this and Gabanyi’s brother was able to cure the child. From that day on,
the grateful guard kept up the contact between Eva and her family for as long
Reactions of Human Nature n 427
as he was in Rajsko. Gabanyi does not remember his name; her guess is that
he was twenty-six years old. What struck her was that he spoke a primitive
kind of German.
Some ss men helped with the procurement of what were often critically
needed medicines. The corporal in the ss pharmacy, Tadeusz Dobrzanski—
who, like many others whose humane conduct has been documented, was an
ethnic German—insisted on good payment for supporting the smuggling of
medications.The inmates working in the ss pharmacy gave him gold and dol-
lars that they had found in the tubes and pastes brought from Canada. Martin
Stocker, an ss man from Mannheim, regularly brought Felix Amann medica-
tions, and he did this without a quid pro quo. The two men met in the dis-
infection section of Birkenau.This is what Amann has said about Stocker: ‘‘He
was so kind that later he was sent to Buchenwald as an inmate.’’
While serving as a guard in Harmense, a fish-farming pond, Helmut Pom-
reinke, an ethnic German from Romania, met the inmate Rudolf Rybka. The
two men developed such a relationship of trust that Pomreinke visited Rybka’s
parents, who were living in Czechoslovakia, not far from Auschwitz, and
brought Rybka food from them.
Artur Rablin remembers Kurt Fiebig, an ss technical sergeant from Zittau,
who once called on the parents of an inmate at the inmate’s request. Fiebig is
said to have hanged himself in the building of the old crematorium after his
connection with this inmate had been betrayed by other men.
All exceptions from the rule were carefully registered and not forgotten by
the prisoners. Felix Amann recalls, in addition to Stocker, an ethnic German
from Lithuania by the name of Viktor Cheimnis whowas assigned to disinfec-
tions as well as gassings. Cheimnis openly displayed to Amann his disgust at
what he had to do. Whenever he had an opportunity to do so, he aided in-
mateswhomheknew.ss Master Sergeant Franz Xaver Dornacher of the ss
canteen is described by Heinrich Dronia as ‘‘a person of rare kindness’’ who
helped wherever he could and warned inmates against ill-disposed ss men.To
be sure, in his position Dornachercame in contact with only a very small num-
ber of inmates. He openly cold-shouldered ss roll call leader Oswald Kaduk,
a man feared because of his brutality, whom Dornacher outranked.
More than twenty-five years later, a former inmate recalled in court that
membersoftheLuftwaffeslipped somethingintohisand his comrades’hands
when they were sorting fragments of destroyed planes in Birkenau. ss Tech-
nical Sergeant Friedrich Münkel, who was in charge of the shoemakers’ and
tailors’ workshops in Birkenau, never gave beatings himself and did not per-
mit others to do so in his presence. He sometimes gave inmates cigarettes.
In the winter of 1942–43, Erich Kohlhagen met Kuhn, an ss corporal in
Monowitz who was, according to Kohlhagen, ‘‘anything but a Nazi’’ and
428 n the jailers
neither gave beatings nor reported inmates.Kuhn once told him that hewould
never shoot at an inmate becausehecould not square that withhis conscience.
Miriam Blits remembers a guard named Erika who secretly gave food to her
and her comrades. Jehuda Bacon was fifteen when a female warden sent for
him one day and served him a plate of noodles; he mentioned this episode in
an interview fifteen years later. A long time afterward Alexander Princz also
praised a young ss man in the canine corps who gave him something to eat.
That ss man, whose dialect indicated a Bavarian background, intimated that
he did not like serving in Auschwitz. When Princz met him again at the time
of the evacuation, the ss man offered to help him escape, but Princz did not
accept his offer.
n There were some ss men who did not want to incur the risk of being sent
to the front but shirked tasks directly connected with the mass murders.
When Hubert Christoph, an ss sergeant, was about to be transferred to the
department that had to regulate the work assignments of the inmates, he re-
sisted the move. When he was later asked why, Christoph, who had joined the
ss in 1934, said: ‘‘When I joined the ss, I imagined something different. I did
not want to work inside the camp.’’ Christoph was harassed because of his
attitude, but he was spared a transfer.
When a judge asked Horst Huley, an ethnic German from Romania who
had served in Auschwitz as an ss private, why a person of his intelligence had
not achieved a higher rank, he responded as follows: ‘‘I could have become a
block leader if I had had the disposition for it. It was possible to behave in
such a way that one did not become a block leader.’’
ss Sergeant Johann Piringer testified that on watchtowers there were graf-
fiti like ‘‘Auschwitz, the murderer of my youth,’’ which prompted a major in-
vestigation.
Richard Böck, who had been assigned to the motor pool, was once ordered
to drive the selectees who were no longer ambulatory from the ramp to the
gas chamber in his truck and to dump them there. After the first run he de-
clared that he was incapable of taking this route again. He was excused and
from then on had to transport only food. On such occasions he tried to help
inmates, and once he was even locked up for aiding and abetting prisoners.
Since this could not be proved, he escaped punishment.
Böck was the most consistent in shirking all transports to the gas cham-
ber, but others also tried to do so. Knut Siebenlist, a German inmate with a
position in the motor pool, states that ss drivers who had been assigned to
transport victims from the ramp to the gas chamber repeatedly gave him food
and said, ‘‘Tomorrow I’ll fall apart. I can’t go on.’’ Siebenlist adds: ‘‘I was not
surprised, given that our trucks always had to be cleaned after drives to the
Reactions of Human Nature n 429
gas chamber.The condition of the trucks after such transports indicates what
happened on these drives. The trucks were soiled with feces and draped with
torn-out hair; I even saw chopped-off fingers.’’
Ruth Kersting drew my attention toWladimir Bilan, an ethnic German who
had to admit the new arrivals to the camp. He probably noticed her because
of her then still well-groomed appearance and asked her the reason for her
imprisonment. Kersting answered truthfully that she had been arrested be-
cause she had attempted to get in touch with her mother, a Jew who had
been deported to Theresienstadt after the death of her ‘‘Aryan’’ husband. Bilan
said that he was sorry for her and instructed the admissions clerk to register
Kersting as a ‘‘German political prisoner from the Reich’’ even though as a
Mischling (half-Jew) she should have been obliged to wear a Star of David.This
probably saved Kersting’s life.
Bilan touched her life on another occasion as well. Worn out and desperate
after the first and hardest weeks, she happened to catch sight of Bilan in the
camp. Sheventured to accost him and asked him whether he had any work for
her, a speaker of many languages, because she was anxious to get away from
a detail that involved heavy physical labor. Bilan just took down her number.
She was called that very evening, and Bilan took her to see his superior. At
that time transports from Italy were expected, and since Italian was one of
Kersting’s languages, she was added to the Admissions Department, where
she found much more favorable conditions.
When Kersting was quarantined prior to leaving the camp, she asked Bilan,
with whom she had become better acquainted at work, how he could stand
being in the camp. Bilan answered that as an ethnic German his only choice
had been to join the Russians or the Germans, and that is how he had joined
the ss. He would have liked to get out of Auschwitz, but he had been threat-
ened and therefore had stayed.
I questioned other women who worked in the Admissions Department un-
der Bilan and received answers that were unusually consistent. ‘‘During that
entire period we never saw him beat an inmate, as others did,’’ said Zofia
Bratro. ‘‘He only helped us, and without prompting he suggested that we sur-
reptitiously send letters to our families.’’ Trude Guttmannova’s answer was
this: ‘‘He never beat us and only yelled when it was absolutely necessary—
that is, when one of the high-level gentlemen was in sight. But he apologized
immediately afterward, and we knew very well that he did not want to harm
us. He brought us medications, books, and newspapers, all of which were
forbidden.’’
In Monowitz, where Bilan was transferred, he behaved equally well. ‘‘He
was always very, very decent and polite, almost comradely. We never heard an
unfriendly tone from him. He never touched an inmate and believed every-
430 n the jailers
thing that an inmate said during an interrogation.’’ There, too, he brought the
inmates books and newspapers.Unikower thinks that Bilan was not suited to
the ss and the camp, and he presumes that he had been assigned to the Politi-
cal Department on account of his knowledge of languages. (He was a native
of Poland.)
I questioned this man, who constituted such a striking exception. He told
me that at the beginning it had been impressed on them in Auschwitz that
they had the honorable task of guarding the scum of the earth. Such phrases,
he said, had lodged in the flesh and blood of many. ‘‘Most of them were of the
opinion that this was theway it had to be. Many believed in theThousand-Year
Reich and thought they would not be called to account.’’ This is how Bilan
described the atmosphere in the garrison. And why did he not adopt this atti-
tude? ‘‘When I saw a vehicle with corpses at the old crematorium, I thought to
myself: this is being done by Germans whom we ethnic Germans admired so
much.Thatwasa signalforme, and I changed,because otherwise I might have
done the same thing.’’ This answer, to be sure, does not explain how he re-
mained an exception, since probably everyone in Auschwitz saw mountains of
dead bodies. The most convincing demonstration of Bilan’s good conscience
was his request for the addresses of surviving former prisoners with whom he
had had contact in the camp. No other ss man whom I talked with afterward
went to the trouble that Bilan did to establish contact with former inmates.
n Fairly often one encountered members of the ss in Auschwitz who obedi-
ently executed the orders given them, even if murder was involved, yet who
occasionally were incapable of following through because their inner nature
rebelled. Many survivors remember an episode of this kind. In February 1943
Polish lads from Zamosc and environs were taken to the infirmary of the main
camp. At that time the inhabitants of that region were evacuated and for sim-
plicity’s sake sent directly to the kz. The youths were to be injected because
they did not seem strong enough to be assigned to labor. At a later date the
medic Scherpe stated that these children were between ten and fourteen years
of age, but inmates thought they were eight to twelve years old. Tadeusz Pac-
zula says cautiously that none was older than fifteen. Stanislaw Klodzinski, a
nurse in the block where the injections were given, still remembers the day on
which those lads were taken there. ‘‘The children entered Block 20 through a
side door. They had to undress and then line up in the corridor. Scherpe ar-
rived. There was deathly silence in the block. The only thing one could hear
was the sound of bodies falling on the floor of the washroom. After a few
such dull thuds Scherpe emerged from the room. He said, ‘I can’t do it any
more,’ and left.’’ On that day I saw a pale and upset Scherpe go to see the ss
garrisonphysician.Fromlater statements I gatheredthat he had declaredhim-
Reactions of Human Nature n 431
self incapable of killing children. He was excused, transferred to the satellite
camp Golleschau, and promoted to the rank of ss technical sergeant shortly
thereafter. The document recommending this promotion had probably been
prepared earlier, but it was not canceled after Scherpe’s refusal.
Emil Hantl killed the otherchildren in Scherpe’s stead.This is howTadeusz
Holuj described Hantl’s behavior after these killings: ‘‘Hewas completely bro-
ken down, cursed thewar, and talkedabout his earlier life.’’ In other ways,too,
Hantl stood out from the accustomed pattern. ‘‘He did not beat us and did not
seem like a typical ss man to us,’’ wrote Ota Fabian. ‘‘When Hantl came down
to our cellar (Fabian was a corpse carrier), we did not even have to rise, nor did
he say anything if he saw us eat potatoes.’’ Tadeusz Paczula confirms that ‘‘he
was quiet and polite, and sometimes he gave us a cigarette,’’ and to a question
from the Frankfurt judge he replied that the other inmates who knew Hantl
welltrustedhim.Wladyslaw Deringtestified that ‘‘Hantlgave uscigarettes and
bread and never reported anyone.’’ Hermann Reineck declared: ‘‘He made a
good impression on me, and I was pleased that there were human beings even
among the ss men.’’ On one occasion Hantl evidently came out of his shell
during the night shift and complained to Reineck, who was the block elder
at the time, that he could barely stand service in Auschwitz. Ludwig Wörl, a
camp elder, also testified that Hantl repeatedlycomplained to him that he had
to give lethal injections and kept saying, ‘‘If only this stopped!’’ Wörl believes
that Hantl was not brave enough to refuse the execution of orders to murder.
From the office of the hkb, where he was employed, Igor Bistric was able to
observe that even though Hantl killed people by injecting them with phenol,
‘‘he had retained a bit of humaneness.’’ This ss man from the Sudetenland,
who was forty-one at the time, sometimes conversed with Bistric in Czech.
The clerk of Block 20 particularlyemphasizes one point: ‘‘The most impor-
tant thing was that Scherpe and Hantl always said ‘Good Morning’ when they
came into the block and ‘Goodbye’ when they left. For us, who had been so
degraded, these were small signs of humaneness.’’ Such favorable judgments
about these two medics are due, among other things, to the fact that former
inmates instinctively compared them with medic Klehr, who was active in the
main camp at the same time. ‘‘By comparison with Klehr, Scherpe and Hantl
seemed like angels.’’ This remark by Glowa indicates the relativity of such
judgments.
Twenty-five years later Max Kasner told me that he still felt respect for
Ludwig,a medicwho alwaysacted humanely in thesatellitecampJaninagrube.
It has been reported that another medic, Neubert, on one occasion slapped
a capo in the face because he had so mistreated an inmate that he broke his
arm. Tadeusz Kosmider illuminates the relationship that developed between
Neubert and inmate functionaries in the Monowitz infirmary when he tells of
432 n the jailers
how they once gave Neubert a hundred marks and said, ‘‘Buy cigarettes—half
for you, the other half for us.’’
Harmless-sounding episodes of this kind should not make people forget
that these ss medics selected prisoners who were to be killed and then killed
them with their own hands.
Even Klehr had his ‘‘weak’’ hours. The Pole Jerzy Tabeau owes his life to
such a moment. In the summer of 1942 he was selected by Dr. Entress. Alfred
Stössel, the Polish block elder, knew Tabeau and begged Klehr to take his
name off the selection list. ‘‘Klehr ordered that I be brought before him,’’ re-
ports Tabeau. ‘‘Hewas sitting at a table in the small operating room, looked at
me, and ordered me to get out. I was not sent to the gas.’’ Stössel presumably
was able to achieve this because he often did the injecting when Klehr was
tired.
When Klehr was transferred as a medic to the satellite camps in Gleiwitz in
the fall of 1944, he visibly changed. As Josef Farber testifies, ‘‘He committed
no more brutal acts there and was in general decent. Moll, the ss camp leader
(and former director of the crematoriums), was the only man who wanted
to establish an Auschwitz-type regime in Gleiwitz. Klehr resisted this idea. I
heard him yell at inmates who were beating other inmates.’’ In those days Far-
ber was even able to save the lives of two prisoners whom Klehr had selected
by guaranteeing that they would be fit to work again in a short time. Farber
attributes this transformation to the development at the fronts and also to the
influence of Klehr’s wife, who was able to visit him frequently in Gleiwitz.
An ss man named Flagge had the best reputation of all medics. He was
probably around fifty when Ella Lingens met him in the satellite camp Babitz.
She writes: ‘‘I encountered one island of peace in the concentration camp
Auschwitz: the labor camp Babitz. It was to the credit of one man, ss Tech-
nical Sergeant Flagge. I don’t know how he did it. It was clean there, and the
food was correspondingly so.Thewomen called him ‘Daddy,’ and he even pro-
cured eggs from the outside.’’ In her book Lingens reports that Flagge shared
his food with her and other inmates and made sure that the accommodations
were heated when it rained so that the women could dry their clothes after
returning from work. On one occasion, when he came into the camp unex-
pectedly, he surprised Lingens and the Polish nurse sleeping during working
hours. He left without waking them. Lingens reproduced for the Frankfurt
court a conversation she once had with this medic. ‘‘You know, Herr sdg,
everything we do (in tending the sick) is so terrible and so senseless, because
when this war comes to an end we shall all be killed anyway. They won’t let
any eyewitnesses survive.’’ Flagge’s response was this: ‘‘I hope there will be
enough people among us who will prevent that.’’ Dr. Otto Wolken met Flagge
in the quarantine section of Birkenau where the latter liked to play with the
Reactions of Human Nature n 433