Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz
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children from the neighboring Theresienstadt family camp. Wolken observed
Flagge when the inmates of that camp were being driven to the gas chambers;
he stood by the window with tears in his eyes.
One time Lingens asked him how a man with his attitude could remain
in Auschwitz. Flagge answered with a question: ‘‘Would you rather have an
unfeeling man in my place?’’
In the ss infirmary we encountered a type of man who was completely out
of step with the others. Eduard Jambor was an aged teacher from the Sudeten-
land and a convinced Nazi. He had been assigned to the physician of the ss
troops as a clerk, and the only prisoners he came in contact with were those
who worked in the ss infirmary. However, what was happening in Auschwitz
could not be concealed from him. Jambor, who realized that his ideals were
being sullied, buried himself in his files and refused to acknowledge anything
that was bound to shatter his conception of Nazism. He cautiously kept up
a human contact with us. It was touching when he shared his bread with us,
even though hewas one of thevery few who did not procure additional food in
crooked ways and thus did not have much himself. He avoided conversations
that might lead to the field of politics, but there was no overlooking his bad
conscience. His frantic attempts to keep his hands clean seemed grotesque in
that setting. As his wife wrote me at a later date, ‘‘He was always happy when
he could spend a few days with his family and did not have to think of his ex-
periences. He never gave us details.’’ This last statement indicates that Jambor
was disciplined even when he was with his family. His wife described him as
‘‘deeply religious,’’ which stands in contradiction to his Nazi convictions.
n Some ss men have remained nameless, but former prisoners do remember
theirconduct.An unknown ssmanrefusedto shoot at femaleinmates. Helena
Kopper testified before a British military court in Lüneburg that warden Irma
Grese reported him for this. All she knows is that he was an ethnic German
from Slovakia. Hermine Horvath met an ss man in the Gypsy camp who was
so moved by the sight of children suffering from noma and the holes in their
cheeks that he spontaneously brought them bread. Horvath concluded her
testimony by saying, ‘‘The next day this ss man was no longer in the camp.’’
Josef Farber is also unable to name thessman whom he met while engaged
in disinfection work in Birkenau.The man was always friendly and often con-
versed with Farber. One day—Farber believes it was probably in the summer
of 1943—the ss man told him, ‘‘I’m in trouble. I’ve been assigned to a gassing
detail, and I will refuse to participate.’’ Farber did not see this man for several
months. When he encountered him again, he noticed how pale the man was
and asked him if he was sick. The ss man told him that his refusal had caused
434 n the jailers
him to be locked up and that he had now been ordered to go to the front as
punishment. Farber remembers only that this man was from Romania, had a
German-sounding name, reddish hair, and the lowest ss rank.
Teddy Pietrzykowski met an ethnic German from Croatia when he was
cleaning a room in the staff building in which ss men with minor illnesses
were laid up.That man was a recent arrival in Auschwitz; Pietrzykowski thinks
that this probably happened in early 1943. At that time ethnic Germans from
Croatia were taken to Auschwitz in a sealed cattle car. Pietrzykowski assumed
that this was one of the usual transports to the gas chambers.To his surprise,
however, the men put on ss uniforms after getting off the train. The ss man
in the sickroom asked the Polish prisoner to get him some drug that would
really make him sick, since he wanted to leave the camp at any cost. In point
of fact, with Teddy’s assistance he was such a skillful malingerer that he was
released from the ss.
n There is documentation that some members of the ss were punished for
favoring inmates. For example, Artur Breitwieser, who was in charge of the
clothing depot, had to serve a prison term because he had given a female in-
mate threemetersof fabric. Ladislaw Gura, an ethnic German fromBratislava,
was incarcerated several times and finally sentenced to two years in jail by an
ss tribunal in Kattowitz because he had been caught drinking schnapps with
some inmates. The ss and police court in Breslau sentenced ss Private First
Class Kurt Hartmann to four months in prison and expulsion from the ss,
and Ludwig Karl Schmidt received a suspended sentence with a probationary
period at the front. Schmidt had facilitated a meeting between a male and a
female inmate, and Hartmann had given a prisoner some food. On Novem-
ber 30, 1944, Adolf Prem was sentenced for repeated military insubordina-
tion because he had bad-mouthed the ss leaders and talked politics with in-
mates. The indictment quoted this statement by Prem: ‘‘Life in Austria will
never be as beautiful as it used to be.’’ Prem belonged to the ss when it was
illegal in Austria and was thus considered an ‘‘Old Fighter.’’ At a later date
Bogan Wnetrzewski characterized him as ‘‘a very decent and friendly Aus-
trian and opponent of the nsdap.’’ On Prem’s radio and with his knowledge,
Wnetrzewski was able to listen to broadcasts of the bbc.
Anotherssman fromAustria is said to have treated the prisoners humanely.
Oskar Gravogel, an ss corporal from Türnitz (Lower Austria), was court-
martialed and shot in March 1945 for ‘‘insulting the Führer and doing crazy
things.’’ This information was supplied by Prem, who calls Gravogel ‘‘a good
man.’’
An unusual incident has been described by Andrej Milar. In the summer of
Reactions of Human Nature n 435
1944 Vogel, a Wehrmacht soldier about fifty years of age, was transferred to
Birkenau. Milar remembers that he was an artisan from Vienna. When those
selected for the gas chambers were once again ordered to undress before they
were forced to get on the trucks, Vogel, who was not yet familiar with ss prac-
tices in Auschwitz, asked a guard what was going to happen to the naked pris-
oners. He was given the official story that they were going to be taken to work
in a factory. Since there was bad weather, Vogel vigorously demanded that the
prisoners be clothed, and they were actually given blankets. After the trucks
had left, Milar, who had been watching, took Vogel to the attic of a barracks
from which it was possible to observe how the unfortunates were herded into
the gas chamber, and he enlightened him about the extermination. The out-
raged Vogel rushed to the room of the camp physician, where Dr. Mengele
happened to be. He is said to have told the physician that if such a thing was
possible he was ashamed of being a German.When Mengele tried to calm him
down by saying that death by poison gas was hardly painful, Vogel is said to
have replied that Jews were human beings, too, and must be treated as human
beings. He is supposed to have expressed his outrage to other members of the
ss as well. One day he disappeared.
Ludwik Lawin has reported the following episode. When he was working
in Porabka in the summer of 1942, he met an ss man, a pyrotechnist who had
been posted there as a convalescent. Lawin heard snatches of a spirited ar-
gument between this young man and ss roll call leader Palitzsch. The former
is said to have exclaimed, ‘‘What are you people doing to our thousand-year
culture? What are you doing to our honor?’’ Whereupon Palitzsch is said to
have replied, ‘‘Shit, this is the front,we’re cleaning up here, the eastern area is
beingcleared.’’ Accordingto Lawin,theyoung ssman was takenawaythe next
day, and there were rumors that he was assigned to an extermination detail
and shot himself.
It remains uncertain to what extent the dwindling hopes for a victory of
Hitler’s Germany prompted some of those described in this chapter to treat
the prisoners differently from the way they had been ordered to, but it cannot
be overlooked that in 1944 there were more humane acts than before Hitler’s
defeat in Stalingrad.
‘‘Demoralization’’ reached a new low when the end of Auschwitz was in
sight, the Russian troops were approaching, and the bombardments of Ger-
many had become a horrifying everydayaffair.Igor Bistric,who served as clerk
in Block 6 of the main camp at that time, reports that his block leader some-
times came to see him in the fall of 1944 in order to discuss the times before
thekz.‘‘He did not spurn accepting a piece of inmate’s bread withmarmalade
from a Jew,’’ writes Bistric, and he emphasizes that in those days no one was
436 n the jailers
beaten by a block leader any more. He explains this transformation by saying
that ‘‘the dream of a Thousand-Year Reich was simply over.’’
Soon after the liberation Heinrich Dürmeyer testified that at Christmas-
time 1944 ss roll call leader Heinz Hertwig approached him in a completely
drunken state, embraced him, and said: ‘‘Hey, if things ever change, you’re
gonna help me, aren’t you? I’m already doing whatever you want.’’
Reactions of Human Nature n 437
frank and pestek
nnn
Some members of the ss took the risk of helping inmates to escape. I have
made an effort to reconstruct as accurately as possible the small number of
cases that have become known.
German prisoners had the greatest chance of getting ss men to support
their efforts to escape. Otto Küsel told me that an ss man aided his three
Polish friends and him in their preparations foran escape and fulfilled Küsel’s
requests, one exception being the purchase of a revolver. They managed to es-
cape on December 28, 1942, and this was due in large measure to this helpful
ss man, whose name Küsel no longer remembers. All he knows is that he was
an ethnic German from Upper Silesia.
The camp elder in the indoctrination section of Monowitz, a communist
from the Cologne area named Rudi Kahn, was also helped by a guard in break-
ingout of thecamp. In early 1943 Kahn chose forhis undertaking a night from
Saturday to Sunday because many ss men were on leave over the weekend. He
escaped successfully from the camp in the vicinity of a watchtower that his
friend had arranged to man.
Some ss men went even further. The camp-wise Birkenau capo Franz Kej-
mar was not merely helped by an ss man when he prepared to flee together
with the Poles Zbigniew Pupalski and Edward Pasdor as well as the German
Theodor Retzlof; the ss man joined them on November 3, 1943. After only
three days of freedom the men were arrested. The lives of the inmates were
saved by the fact that Commandant Höß had just been relieved of his duties
and those caught while trying to escape were no longer executed under Höß’s
successor, Liebehenschel. However, Kejmar heard that the ss man, an ethnic
German from Banat, was executed.
n The ‘‘Combat Group Auschwitz’’ organized many successful escapes with-
out the help of members of the ss.When it decided to send some of its leaders
to partisans in the vicinity, it did not want to use the usual route because if
the camp administration learned of theescape of several inmate functionaries
known in the camp, including two who had been admitted as political oppo-
nents of Nazism,more intensive searches could be expected than theroutinely
ordered activation of the great cordon of guards for three nights.
First of all, we arranged with the partisans a place in the vicinity of the
camp where we were to meet and receive arms from them. In order to recon-
noiter the route to this meeting place, I prevailed on my boss to send me out
of the camp—escorted by guards, of course—along with Zbyszek, who was
also supposed to escape. This was prompted by the malaria that had spread
to the ss guard. In an effort to destroy the carriers of this disease, Wirths had
ordered the spraying of all bodies of water in the area, but this measure failed.
When he complained about this, I told him that it was the fault of the ss men
who were supposed to carry out this order; they preferred lying on the grass
and sleeping to walking around and spraying all the waters. Wirths knew his
men, and so he readily believed me.Then I found it easy to get him to send me
out in order to mark on a map all ponds, marshes, and swampy places, so that
these might be systematically sprayed, and to take along Zbyszek, who was
a graphic artist and could therefore make the most precise markings. Thus
we set out with two guards and a map that Zbyszek immediately copied so
that it might be used for future escapes. We carefully committed the meet-
ing place and the best route there to memory without our escorts suspecting
anything.
An ssman was to take us safelyout of the camp area and to the prearranged
meeting place as if he were escorting an inmate detail. I have described how
we tried to win him over:
Rudl’s friend Karl, the capo of the clothing depot, has made an appoint-
ment for me with the block leader, whom we want to persuade to flee. At
9:00 in the evening, we are to meet in the capo’s room on his block.
I am the first to arrive in his little attic room. I hear footsteps.The heavy
nailed shoes of the ss man can be clearly heard.
When an ss man enters a room, inmates have to rise and snap to atten-
tion. However, I don’t rise; after all, he is not an ss mannowandIamnot
an inmate. I extend my hand from my seat, and he takes it. For a few mo-
ments I have a peculiar feeling, and it appears that he does, too. The two
of us sit in the room opposite each other—he with a medal ribbon in his
buttonhole, I with my inmate number on my chest. I purposely did not put
on a different jacket. Anyone who wants to find me in the camp can easily
do so. Let him see that I am not afraid of him.
‘‘So,doyou know what this is about?’’ I use thefamiliaraddress du,which
is customary among comrades.
‘‘No, not really.’’
‘‘I am speaking with you in the name of our organization. You know that
there is an organization here in the camp, don’t you?’’
‘‘I could imagine it.’’
‘‘Fine. First of all, no matter how you will feel about our proposal, I shall
speak quite frankly and expect you to do the same. Your name and address
Frank and Pestek n 439
are on the outside, both with the resistance organization in Poland and in
London and Moscow. If something happens to me in the near future, you
won’t be alive much longer.’’
I look him firmly in the eye. His face doesn’t change. His hands do not
reveal anything either but rest calmly on his thighs.
‘‘Shall I go on?’’ ‘‘Yes, keep talking.’’ His voice sounds husky. He is im-
pressed.
‘‘Our organization is planning an escape. Do you want to flee with us?’’
‘‘I thought that something like this was going to happen.’’
‘‘Then you have probably thought of a response.’’ I give him a friendly
smile. He asks a number of questions. Finally we agree that he will think
the whole thing over and give me his answer in the clothing depot in two
days.
‘‘Don’t forget what I told you at the beginning. It would only be unpleas-
ant for both of us.’’ We smile and shake hands.
We knew that this block leader came from an area in East Prussia that had
becomeabattleground.Rudl had known himforalongtime,andthus the con-
versation could takeplace in that form. His responsewas evasive. On principle
he agreed to a joint escape because we had assured him of a good hiding place
out there until the arrival of the Russians, but he hesitated when a timetable
was to be established. I shall go on quoting from my Bericht:
We are again sitting together in the little room in the clothing depot. ‘‘Let’s
talk quite frankly. I am under the impression that you would like to post-
pone the escape, but we don’t want to do this. Are you ready to flee now?
It’s all right for you to tell us if you’re not ready; nothing will happen to
you. But don’t put us off any longer.’’
‘‘Quite frankly, I’m not ready right now.’’ He is visibly relieved.
‘‘All right. Then help us escape without you. We need a pass and a uni-
form. What can you get for us without being suspected? That wouldn’t be
in our interest, since we want to organize more escapes later.’’
He liked that. He does not want to burn the bridges to us. ‘‘A pass is
easy. I’ll bring you an old one, and all you have to do is to put a false date
on it. No guard will notice this if you do it skillfully. A uniform is harder
to obtain. I can bring you pants. I have an extra pair. It’s old, but you don’t
mind, do you?’’
‘‘No, we don’t mind. We can get a jacket elsewhere, and a cap, too. Try
to dig up a belt for us.’’ Heinz is now working in the ss clothing depot as
a capo. He has, relatively speaking, great freedom of movement and easy
access to ss uniforms. He is getting us a jacket and a cap.
440 n the jailers
The block leader brought us the promised clothes. Everything was ready
for the escape. The pass had been prepared, and a complete ss uniform was
hanging in a locked closet in our office at the ss infirmary; it belonged to a
medic who had been assigned to a satellite camp and came to the main camp
only infrequently. Zbyszek had made a key for that closet. However, on the eve
of the planned escape we were informed that the partisan group that we were
supposed to meet had been attacked, and so we had to cancel our enterprise.
Soon thereafter I was unexpectedly placed on a transport that had been under
preparation fora fewdays.Thus I left Auschwitz and never heard what became
of the young East Prussian block leader, whose name I have forgotten.
n That happened in August 1944. The leadership of the Combat Group re-
sumed its plans for escapes, and in October it was ready. This time Rudi Frie-
mel and Vickerl Vesely induced two ss men from the motor pool to smuggle
prisoners out of the camp in a chest on a truck that was taking dirty laundry to
Bielsko. Since there was room for several people in this chest, five men were
to participate in the escape. In addition to Ernst Burger and Zbyszek Raynoch,
who had been scheduled to flee in August, there were three Poles from the
resistance movement.
One of the previously mentioned ss men was named Frank. George Goiny-
Grabowski has described him as an ethnic German from Romania or Slovakia
who was about twenty years old. The other ss man, Corporal Johann Roth, an
ethnic German from Romania, played a double game. He informed the Politi-
cal Department about the plan. The men concealed in the chest, along with
Friemel, Vesely, and Frank, were arrested, and the partisans were attacked at
the agreed-upon meeting place. Roth was commended in a commandant’s
order of the day and received a photograph of Oswald Pohl, the chief of the
wvha, with a handwritten inscription.
Frank’s fate is not clear. The ss judge Gerhard Wiebeck recalls that he
once had to bring charges against an ss man who had been caught trying to
smuggle a Jewish woman out of Auschwitz in a chest. At that time Wiebeck
requested the death sentence. ss Captain Rohner was the presiding judge, but
Wiebeck claims he no longerremembersthe outcome.It is possible that Frank
was involved in this trial. While Wiebeck correctly remembers the means of
escape, the chest, he may be wrong about the person who was to be helped
in making an escape, for no other case is known in which an ss man tried
to smuggle one or more prisoners out of the camp with the aid of a chest. A
Polish inmate who worked in the motor pool and knew Frank well claims to
have seen him in Munich after the war.
Frank and Pestek n 441
n There is better documentation of the fantastic story of another escape in
which an ss man was a key figure.
ss Sergeant Viktor Pestek, a compatriot of Roth and Baretzki, stood out
among the Birkenau block leaders. Josef Neumann describes him as ‘‘a decent
person who never beat inmates,’’ and Jehuda Bacon says that he was ‘‘more
humane than the others.’’ In the Theresienstadt family camp he was called
Milácˇek, which is Czech for ‘‘darling.’’ Vitezslav Lederer has researched the
background of this remarkable man.
Pestek’s father was a German-speaking smith in Bukovina and owner of a
small farm. Viktor was also trained as a smith, but he joined the ss because
his mother urged him to do so and he wanted to see the world. Baretzki has
described how the ss recruited young lads after the resettlement of the Ger-
mans living in Bukovina. Pestek was sent to the Russian front. One day his
unit was ordered to attack a village near Minsk in which partisans were said
to be hidden, and to massacre the inhabitants.There was a fight in which two
ss men were wounded. Pestek was shot in the arm and lower leg. When dark-
ness fell, the ss retreated, but the two injured men had to spend the night
in the destroyed village waiting for a rescue crew. Pestek’s comrade died, and
he kept his vigil in a barn. When the completely exhausted man finally heard
footsteps in the morning, he cried out for help. A man with a rifle and woman
with two children appeared, and Pestek identified them as Russians. Pestek
indicated to them that he was thirsty; they dragged him to a fountain and then
left.
Later Pestek was rescued by a unit and taken to a field infirmary. He could
not forget that these people had let him live even though they had no rea-
son to spare a man in an ss uniform whose unit had just mowed down all the
villagers they could get their hands on. This experience reawakened religious
convictions in Pestek, who had had a strict Catholic upbringing.
Afterthis recovery Pestek was unfit forfurtherfrontline service, and thus he
was posted to Auschwitz. He was shaken by the daily mass extermination and
offended by the latent general contempt for an ethnic German Beutegermane.
While serving as a block leader in the Theresienstadt family camp, Pestek fell
in love with a tall, blonde Jewish prisoner named Renée Neumannova, for
whom he obtained the position of a block clerk.These considerations brought
about his decision not only to flee from the murderous atmosphere himself
but also to help inmates to escape.
This was anything but easy for Pestek because at that time there was an
incident that served as a warning to inmates with camp experience. An ss man
by the name of Schneider persuaded two inmates on the Canada Detail to es-
cape together. Since he was known as a ‘‘good’’ ss man, the two men accepted
his suggestion. It was not hard for them to ‘‘organize’’ valuables from Canada
442 n the jailers
that were intended to smooth their way once they were free. However, the two
men were captured, taken back to the camp, and executed. The inmates on
the Sonderkommando read the following words written in indelible ink on the
chests of the dead bodies: ‘‘Schneider betrayed us.’’ Evidently that ss man col-
lected both the ‘‘organized’’ valuables and the camp administration’s bonus
for preventing an escape.
When shortly after this incident Pestek approached Josef Neumann, the
capo of the Birkenau corpse carriers, regarding a joint escape, Neumann re-
fused in light of what Schneider had done. Rudolf Vrba, at that time a block
clerk in Birkenau, has provided the following report about subsequent efforts
made by Pestek:
WhenI went over to his(Vrba’sfriend Alfred Wetzler’s) roomin the d-camp
one evening in order to eat with him, I found him sharing a plate of pota-
toes with an ss man named Pestek, an uncommonly good-looking sergeant
around twenty-six years of age.When I entered, Fred said to his guest, ‘‘I’d
like to discuss this with Rudi. Would you excuse us for a moment?’’ The
German nodded. Fred took me to another room and gave me the following
explanation: ‘‘It’s like this, Rudi. This fellow has a most unusual plan that
might work. He is prepared to help me escape by dressing me as a higher-
ranking officer and marching through the gate with me. All we need to do
after that, he says, is to board a train to Prague.’’ (Both Wetzler and Vrba
were from Czechoslovakia.)
‘‘You’re crazy, Fred,’’ I replied sharply. ‘‘Think of Fero Langer. Think of
Unglick. (These two men had also been encouraged to flee by ss men a
short time previously and had been betrayed.) It’s a trap.’’
‘‘I don’t think so, Rudi,’’ answered Fred. ‘‘I know these fellows.We have
often eaten and gotten drunk together. Pestek is different from the others
—one of the few decent ss people.’’
While I respected Fred’s judgments about people, I still vividly remem-
bered the photographs of Fero with half his face shot off and of Charles
Unglick sitting on a stool and kept upright with spades.
‘‘No, Fred,’’ I replied, ‘‘it isn’t worth the risk. Fero Langer and Dobro-
volny (the ss man who had persuaded Langer to flee, an ethnic German
from Slovakia who had attended the same school as Langer and smug-
gled his mail out of Auschwitz) were like brothers, and think of what hap-
pened!’’
Fred thought about the matter for quite a while.Then he returned to his
room and told the ss man. ‘‘Many thanks, Pestek, but I don’t think that this
can work. And if it fails, we’re both goners.’’
The German shrugged his shoulders, glanced at me, and asked, ‘‘Did
Frank and Pestek n 443