Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz

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that time, led to the establishment of a separate labor camp right next to the

plant.

The following statements by Murr are even more revealing. ‘‘I knew that

there were complaints when there were no longerenough workers. After such

a complaint things usually improved.The ss sent us stronger people because a

feebleinmate could not do much.’’ When thepresidingjudge at the Auschwitz

trial in Frankfurt asked Murr what concrete actions the camp administration

took in response to such a complaint, all he said was, ‘‘I have no knowledge

of that.’’ The chimneys in the gas chambers that he could see were not within

his authority, and so he was not interested in them.

Dr. Friedrich Entress, the camp physician of Monowitz for several months

in 1943,was more speciﬁc in his testimony. ‘‘The turnover among the inmates

in Monowitz was great. The inmates were weak and malnourished. It should

be emphasized that the performance demanded of the inmates was not in ac-

cord with their living conditions and nutrition. Working with inmates of the

concentration camp was beneﬁcial to IG Farben in that this company would

otherwise have had to employ civilian workers under far better conditions.’’

Entress reported that at a conference in spring 1943 IG urged that the inﬁr-

mary in Monowitz be kept small because it was particularly important to the

plant to have as manyable-bodied inmates in Monowitz as possible.The prac-

tical eﬀect of this discussion was that while all sick patients were admitted

to the Monowitz inﬁrmary, they could only stay there for a limited time; and

if their illness lasted too long (three or four weeks), they were taken back to

the main camp, and most of them were sent to Birkenau for gassing. If more

than 5 percent of the camp population were sick, the camp physician had to

make selections.

Dürrfeld was evidently guided by commercial considerations. The IG had

to pay the commandant’s oﬃce a certain amount for each inmate of Mono-

witz. A prisoner not ﬁt for work who was removed from Monowitz could be

deducted from the IG’s account.

The prisoners were made to feel this attitude of the top oﬃcials. Once

Samuel Graumann was put in charge of a labor detail of a hundred youths be-

tween fourteen and seventeen years of age. A German engineerdemandedthat

he spur the lads on by beating them because ‘‘we have to make every eﬀort to

be victorious.’’ A German supervisor managed to get Graumann dismissed as

a foreman because he had allowed his subordinates to wash during working

hours. He said that he could not use any compassionate foremen. A civilian

contractor who was commissioned by the IG leadership to do earth-moving

work on the factory grounds was characterized by Graumann as an exploiter

of the worst sort. ‘‘That man instructed the inmates to carry more bricks than

before and sicced the guards on them.’’

454 n the jailers

Metzger Silber remembers that ‘‘the gentlemen stood there when beatings

were being administered and were all smiles.’’

n Primo Levi has provided a very vivid description of a certain Dr. Pannwitz

of the Polymerization Department of the Buna Works. On one occasion the

management requested more chemists, and, because Levi had studied chem-

istry, he was given a test along with others. The examiner was Dr. Pannwitz,

‘‘tall, skinny, and blond; his eyes, hair, and nose were of the type all Germans

must have.’’ Levi is standing in front of Pannwitz’s desk.

When he is ﬁnished with his writing, he raises his eyes and looks at me.

There has never been such a look from one human being to another. If I

could fully explain to myself the special nature of that gaze, which was ex-

changed as through the glass wall of an aquarium by two human beings in-

habiting diﬀerent elements, this would also explain the nature of the great

madness in the Third Reich. What all of us thought and said about the Ger-

mans could be felt directly at that moment. This is what the intellect that

ruled those blue eyes and well-manicured hands said: ‘‘This dingus in front

of me belongs to a species whose eradication is of course appropriate. In

this particularcaseit is a matterof determiningwhetherit containsa usable

aspect.’’

Primo Levi’s imagination enabled him to describe how inmates must have

appeared to German employees:

To civilians we are untouchables. They believe, more or less undisguisedly

and with all nuances of contempt and compassion, that, if we were con-

demned to such a life and had sunk to such a level, we must have incurred

some mysterious, enormous guilt.They hear us converse in all kinds of lan-

guages that they do not understand and that appear to them grotesque and

like the sounds of animals. They see that we are totally debased and en-

slaved—without hair and devoid of honor and names, the victims of daily

beatings who become more depraved every day. Never do they ﬁnd in our

eyes even a ﬂicker of rebellion, peace, or faith. They know us as predatory,

unreliable, ﬁlthy, ragged, and starved. Confusing the eﬀect with the cause,

they think that we have deserved this depravity. Who could tell our faces

apart? To them we are das Kazet (the kz),which in German is a neuter noun

in the singular.

To be sure, this does not keep many of them from occasionally tossing

us a piece of bread or a potato and letting us scrape their bowls after the

distribution of soup at the construction site; afterward we have to clean the

Civilians in Auschwitz n 455

bowls and return them. They deign to do this in order to get rid of an in-

sistent, greedy gaze or in a momentary surge of humaneness. Maybe they

simply want to watch us come running from all directions to compete for a

morsel, unrestrained and like animals, until the strongest inmate swallows

it and the others limp oﬀ with their tails between their legs.

n However, there also were Germans in the Buna Works who helped. Years

later Heinz Galinski still talked about a foreman who gave him some food.

Arthur Nedbal writes: ‘‘A ﬁtter at IG Farben (like Nedbal, a Viennese) helped

me. He smuggled mail out for me, and I received parcels through him.’’ Arnos

Tauber draws attention to a works manager named Thieme who expressed to

him his disgust at the extermination of the prisoners. Thieme was a druggist

from Breslau, and Tauber was a Jew.

‘‘I have not forgotten anything,’’ writes Jean Améry, ‘‘not even the few cou-

rageous people whom I encountered. They are with me: Herbert Karp, a dis-

abled soldier from Danzig who shared his last cigarettewith me in Auschwitz-

Monowitz; Willy Schneider, a Catholic worker from Essen who addressed me

by my ﬁrst name, which I had already forgotten, and gave me bread; and the

senior chemist Matthäus, who said to me with a pained sigh on June 6, 1944:

‘Now they’ve ﬁnally landed! But will the two of us hold out until their ﬁnal

victory?’’’

However, Améry had to get to know others, too. ‘‘Once a senior ﬁtter by

the name of Pfeiﬀer proudly appeared in a winter coat—he called it a ‘Jewish

coat’—which he had been eﬃcient enough to procure.’’ Améry sums up by

pointing out that the positive exceptions ‘‘drowned in the mass of the indiﬀer-

ent, the malicious and the despicable, the shrews (whether they were old and

fat or young and pretty), and those intoxicated with power who thought that

communicating anything but rude commands to the likes of us was a crime

not only against the state but also against their own selves. There were far

too many of those, and they were not ss men but workers, ﬁle clerks, techni-

cians, and female typists—and only a minority of them wore the badge of the

nsdap....Avictimwasbound to believe, willy-nilly, that Hitler really was the

German people. My Willy Schneider and Herbert Karp and Master Matthäus

had no chance to prevail against the mass of the people.’’

At least two employees of IG Farben got into trouble because of their hu-

maneness. Only after protracted negotiations did chief engineer Max Faust

manage to free two masters who had been charged with favoring inmates.The

same Faust wrote in his weekly report dated October 18, 1943: ‘‘Regarding the

treatment of inmates, I was always against shooting inmates or beating them

half to death on the construction site. However, it is my view that a moder-

456 n the jailers

ate form of chastisement is absolutely essential for preserving the necessary

discipline among the inmates.’’

WhenIwas gatheringmaterial forthis study, Imettwohighlyqualiﬁedspe-

cialists of IG Farben who, as I learned, had already rejected Nazism inwardly

whenHitler was stillrushingfromone triumph toanother. Both became high-

level employees of the Buna Works.

When the chemist Dr. Ferdinand Meyer was transferred to Auschwitz, his

superiors instructed him to use theJews at thedisposal of theBunaWorks only

for the most menial tasks and warned him that compassion for them would

not be tolerated. Levi has testiﬁed that Meyer helped them anyway. Dr. Meyer

describes how instruction of this kind fell on fertile soil even in the ﬁnal phase

of the war.

On my daily rounds (of the Buna Works) I observed a group of inmates who

had to unload several carriages in the bitter cold (in the last phase of the

war). I asked the German foreman to distribute the sheepskin jackets in

our storeroom among the Jews. The German master immediately obliged,

and all Jews worked in fur jackets. Half an hour later I tried to check on

whether my instructions were still being followed, and to my consterna-

tion I noticed that this group of Jews was wearing their thin striped sum-

mer jackets. When I asked the foreman why the fur jackets had been col-

lected again, he explained that a higher-ranking master had told him that a

high-level directive prohibited the distribution of fur jackets among Jewish

workers.

In the face of this ‘‘high-level directive,’’ Dr. Meyer saw no alternative but to

capitulate.

Reinhard Heidebroek, a graduate engineer, was the other IG Farben expert

who had inwardly distanced himself from Nazism. He was gratiﬁed to note

that in the department he headed in the Buna Works there were only two em-

ployees who were card-carrying members of the nsdap. He described the

shattering eﬀect that the sight of inmates, particularly of columns of females,

had on him and asserted that he had helped wherever he could by requesting

warmer clothes for the prisoners and leaving some food for them. However,

he shrank from establishing contact with inmates. ‘‘I had reason to fear that

therewere V-men (ss Vertrauensmänner) among them.’’ To my question whether

hehad resisted a transfer to Auschwitz after learning what was going on there,

he replied that he had not. He sent for his wife because the Auschwitz area

seemed to be safe from bombardments at the time.

I asked both of the specialists who inwardly rejected Nazism whether in

view of the permanent destruction of human beings they did not consider it

Civilians in Auschwitz n 457

appropriate and necessary to sabotage work in this plant, which was so im-

portant to the war eﬀort; as senior engineers they could surely have found

eﬀective and undetectable ways of doing so. Heidebroek responded that the

idea of sabotage never crossed his mind in Auschwitz. Meyer admitted that

my question had made him think of this for the ﬁrst time. When I expressed

my surprise, he gave me this explanation: ‘‘It is probably a German character-

istic not to reﬂect about instructions and to do one’s duty.’’ Evidently he still

did not realize how perverted this conception of duty had become in the face

of the Auschwitz reality.

n No court has collected as many reports about the conduct of German em-

ployees in other plants that also used inmates of Auschwitz. However, what

little has become known enables one to conclude that their behavior did not

basically diﬀer from that of the employees of the IG Works.

After the end of the war, masters of the Krupp Works testiﬁed that they

were under instructions to treat inmates very strictly, and this surely does not

applyonly to them. Director Heine, the head of the coal mine in Jawischowitz,

was at least as persistent as Dürrfeld in urging that prisoners who were no

longer fully ﬁt for work be replaced with newly arrived inmates even though

he, like his colleague at the IG Works, knew the fate that awaited those who

could not work. Rafal Dominik, who was from Poland, has testiﬁed that dur-

ing inspections Heine beat inmates and instructed ss mentodriveintothe

mine to check on inmates. ‘‘The Polish civilian workers behaved in diﬀerent

ways in the mine. Only a small number of them helped us.’’ He also remem-

bers the names of civilians who gave beatings: Apryjas, the Czuwa brothers,

and Oberheuer Wojcik.

As an inmate physician in the satellite camp Janinagrube, Dr. Erich Orlik

found out that Kröger, a man who spoke German with a Polish accent and was

the director of the mine, tortured prisoners to death. There are other conﬁr-

mations of Kröger’s murderous rampages.

Henry Bulawko observed that most of the German masters in Jaworzno

wore swastika pins, greeted each other with ‘‘Heil Hitler!,’’ and beat people and

yelled a lot. One of them, however, did not urge the prisoners on but fed them

and permitted them to light a ﬁre at their workplace in winter. Bulawko gives

only the initial, L., of this master’s name. He also entered into private con-

versations with prisoners, which indicated that he, like the inmates, yearned

for the arrival of the Russian armies. Ethnic German civilian workers in that

plant behaved in diﬀerent ways; Karl Dubsky recalls that some gave beatings

and others helped.

Franciszek Piper has collected all of the documents and statements about

458 n the jailers

the satellite camp Jaworzno that were available at the State Museum of

Auschwitz-Birkenau.

During working hours the inmates were under the control of the pit fore-

men, masters, civilian workers, and capos. The guards were usually Ger-

mans who were very prejudiced toward the inmates. Under one kind of

pretext or another, they beat them unmercifully to the point of uncon-

sciousness and murdered many of them. On one occasion pit foremen

found inmates who had fallen asleep at work. Kazimierz Borowiec, who

witnessed this incident, remembers that foremen rushed at these inmates

and began to massacre them in beastly fashion. When the inmates no

longer showed any signs of life, they kicked them to make sure that they

were no longeralive. Most of thoseforemen belongedto the sa.Attheparty

rallies they received pertinent instructions from their chief, Rempe.

Piper emphasizes that this mistreatment continued even after the ss camp

administration had notiﬁed the plant managers in a letter dated January 29,

1944, that the beating of inmates by mine employees was forbidden. To be

sure, there were also many mine workers who gave inmates food and medi-

cines, transmitted messages, and even helped with preparations for escapes.

Arthur Schönberg, who was deported from Austria for ‘‘racial’’ reasons,

points out that he owes his life to an engineer of the Union Works who con-

ﬁded in Schönberg that he would never have become a Nazi if he had known

what was going on in the concentration camps. He smuggled mail from pris-

oners out of the camp.

If inmates were brought in as skilled workers, then the management had

an interest in maintainingtheirability to function, since they could not simply

be replaced the way that unqualiﬁed workers were. At the Siemens Works in

Auschwitz, specialists were employed for the most part. Chief engineer Kurt

Bundzus, who built the works after the Berlin facility of this company was de-

stroyed by air raids, described for the Frankfurt court his search for skilled

workers: ‘‘When I arrived in Auschwitz, I gave 100 preselected inmates a com-

petency exam. Fifty met the technical demands. I asked the commandant’s

oﬃce that these inmates be given additional food and preferential treatment

until they were installed in our facility. These inmates were to be nurtured

(aufgeforstet) with the greatest care.

However, neither Bundzus, whose use of the verb auﬀorsten (to cultivate a

forest) gives one suﬃcient insight into his character, nor the uninterested

camp administration checked on thewaythis preferentialtreatmentworked in

practice. In fact, the inmates picked out by Siemens received especially rough

treatment while they had to wait in Birkenau for their transfer to the new fac-

Civilians in Auschwitz n 459

tory. The reason may have been that the inmate functionaries who still ruled

them envied the skilled workers their better future.

Erich Altmann, who also took a qualifying test at that time, conﬁrms that

chiefengineerGeorg Hanke requested himas a specialist even thoughhemust

have noticed that Altmann had falsiﬁed his profession at the test. Hanke ad-

dressed him as ‘‘Herr Altmann,’’ which was so unusual that Altmann still em-

phasizes it years later. Hanke’s help could only be eﬀective because Altmann

spoke German. Someone whose mother tongue Hanke did not understand

would not have been able to win his favor so easily.

When a camp had been built near theSiemensWorks in Bobrek, the chosen

inmates were transferred there—that is, those who were still alive. Altmann

has written the following about the conditions there:

(I am to be) assigned to a detail of the Luftwaﬀe that has to operate a bar-

rage balloon on the factory grounds. An ss private ﬁrst class (Obergefreiter)

gives us assignments. Inmates are in general very cautious in associating

with soldiers. ‘‘Herr Obergefreiter’’ here, ‘‘Herr Obergefreiter’’ there. With

every question one takes oﬀ one’s cap.Then the private ﬁrst class takes me

aside and says: ‘‘You needn’t call me Herr Obergefreiter; you can say du to

me. We are comrades. If I didn’t wear a military jacket, I would certainly

have your garb on.’’ He gave me his soup every day; and when he returned

from leave, he even brought me an ointment for my scabies, which cured

this unpleasant condition in a few days.

Altmann observed that the soldiers were afraid of one another. ‘‘Thus it

happened that each of the four soldiers independently gave us food. None of

them could be told about the others,sincewe could not trust our best friends.’’

Altmann has also described how the demoralization emanating from Ausch-

witz took hold of the civilian employees of the Siemens Works: ‘‘All sorts

of things were manufactured—rings, cigarette holders, etuis, combs, metal

boxes, clock cases, tobacco pipes, lighters, bracelets, necklaces, and many

other items. If a guard was looking fora present, he could ﬁnd what hewanted

inside the factory and obtain it for a little bread or margarine. More safety

locks were secretly manufactured in Bobrek than were on sale in all of Upper

Silesia. In the two weeks before Christmas 1944, not a single workpiece was

shipped from the plant because everybody was busy manufacturing gifts.The

foremen, the ss camp leaders, the guards—they had all placed their orders.’’

The most extensive construction project, the four big crematoriums, also

employed Polish civilian workers. Adolf Weiß, an inmate who worked there,

rememberstwo metal workers named Sonowiczand Boltys, fromKönigshütte

and Rybnik respectively, who regularly brought the prisoners something to

eat.

460 n the jailers

Others tried to get close to the gas chambers. According to Pery Broad,

‘‘Railroad workers liked to linger at the unloading ramp and pretended to be

working on mechanical problems in order to steal things from the luggage

left behind by the inmates.’’ They were not the only civilians who misappro-

priated the property of deportees. At the Auschwitz railroad station, postal

employees regularly stole thingsfromparcels addressedto inmates.This prac-

tice did not stop until ss Sergeant Wladimir Bilan threatened them with dire

consequences if packages continued to be brought into the camp half empty.

Not all postal employees had such an attitude. This is what the Pole Witold

Dowgint-Nieciunski reported to the Frankfurt court: ‘‘I worked at the camp

post oﬃce for some time. Almost every day we went to the post oﬃce in the

town of Auschwitz, and so wewere able to make contacts there—forexample,

with a German from Silesia who had been discharged from the Wehrmacht

because he had lost an arm.’’ I have already described the permanent, well-

organized contact between prisoners and Polish civilians who were working

in the camp area.

On the extensive grounds of the Buna Works, inmates encountered foreign

laborers of various nationalities. Primo Levi writes:

An Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the leftovers

from his meal every day for six months. He also gave me an undershirt full

of patches, wrote a postcard to Italy for me, and saw to it that I got a reply.

He did not ask for any reward for this and would not have accepted any, for

he was good and simple and did not believe that a person should do good

things for the sake of a reward. I believe that I owe it to Lorenzo that I am

still amongthe living—not so much because of his materialaid but because

his presence, his quiet and simple way of being kind, constantly reminded

me that there is a just world outside of ours. It is very hard to deﬁne this

remote possibility of goodness that makes it worthwhile to preserve one’s

life.

However, Levi also met civilians who were not Germans, either, but be-

haved quite diﬀerently. When he was working in a laboratory, he came in con-

tact with the Polish stockroom manager Liczba and other girls, whom he de-

scribed as follows: ‘‘They don’t talk with us and turn up their noses when

they see us shuﬄe through the laboratory in our wooden shoes, miserable and

dirty, sicklyand shaky. Once I askedMiss Liczba forsome information; she did

not answer me but with a face that expressed disgust turned to Stawinoga (the

Polish German head of the laboratory) and jabbered away at him. I could not

understand what she was saying, but clearly heard the word Stinkjude (stinking

Jew), and this made my blood boil.’’

Englishprisoners of war who had been assigned to labor in theBunaWorks

Civilians in Auschwitz n 461

gave inmates a great deal of help even though any contact with them was

strictly forbidden. Many grateful survivors have reported about this.The same

applies to the coal mine at Jaworzno, where English prisoners of war estab-

lished contact with inmates as well.

n Women who were not employed by arms factories or personally involved

with the kz also came in contact with inmates. The wife of the IG engineer

Heidebroek, who had moved to Auschwitz to be with her husband, still re-

members that one day the wife of chief engineer Faust told her about a Jewish

inmate who had accosted her on the factory grounds and stammered ‘‘Frau—

Brot’’ (Woman—bread).When Frau Heidebroekasked her how shehad reacted

to that, Frau Faust replied, ‘‘I screamed and called the police.’’ Frau Faust was

the director of the Red Cross in Auschwitz.

Thewife of ss roll call leader Gerhard Palitzsch complained to her husband

that an inmate detail assigned to make repairs in her house had done shoddy

work. The inmates were punished with Baum (tree)—that is, they were hung

by their hands, which were tied behind their backs.

The wife of Wiegleb, the head of the property depot, behaved quite diﬀer-

ently. According to Maurice Schellekes, when her husband, like Palitzsch and

others, ordered inmates to work in his house or garden, Frau Wiegleb served

them cake.

ss camp leader Hössler had Artur Rablin perform personal services for

him, and so Rablin frequently came to Hössler’s house. Frau Hössler not

only gave him food and an occasional glass of liqueur but repeatedly asked

him with a worried expression about her husband’s reputation among the

inmates. On one occasion, when Rablin was taking Hössler’s children (two

girls aged twelve and ten and a boy of six) for a walk, they passed an inmate

detail. Evidently the children had talked at home about the way the inmates

were treated at that workplace because Frau Hössler reproached Rablin for

not having shielded the children from that impression and asked him to avoid

making them eyewitnesses of such mistreatment in future. Here is Rablin’s

comment on his episode: ‘‘I could read a certain shame in her eyes.’’

In the Höß villa inmates came in contact with the commandant’s wife.

She was feared because she reported to her husband inmates who in her es-

timation were working too lackadaisically so that they would be punished.

Marta Minarikova-Fuchs, who worked in the villa as a seamstress, conﬁrms

that Klaus, the oldestson, also made such reports. However, Frau Höß did not

behave badly toward prisoners who worked for herdirectly, though she always

kept her distance. Shewas visibly impressed with the nimble and skillful work

of Frau Fuchs. This evidently did not jibe with her notion that Jews were not

462 n the jailers

capable of working. When Teddy Pietrzykowski received an assignment from

Frau Höß, he was regularly given bread, milk, and coﬀee.

Stanislaw Dubiel, the factotum in the Höß villa, once heard Frau Höß ex-

claim, ‘‘This is where I want to live and die!’’ When the inmate who was work-

ing as a gardener told her that a woman had given birth in the women’s camp

and that he was the father, she sent the young mother a pink baby jacket.

The wife of camp physician Werner Rohde occasionally came to the ss in-

ﬁrmary, and thus I met her. In my Bericht there is the following account of a

conversation I overheard:

Thewife of ssSecond Lieutenant Dr.Rohdeis speakingwith Richter,the ss

sergeant from the oﬃce. I happen to be in the adjoining room that houses

the ﬁle cabinets and pull something out. They have not noticed me.

‘‘Have you heard that there will ﬁnally be a Canada again?’’ That is the

voiceofFrauRohde.

‘‘Oh yes, it’s about time.’’

‘‘This time it will be Hungarian Jews, so far as I know.’’

‘‘I hope they’ll bring enough.’’

‘‘Oh, my husband told me that there’s loads of Jews down there.’’

‘‘What I meant was that I hope the Jews will bring along enough things.’’

‘‘Rest easy. These Jews still have whole mountains of treasures.’’

Frau Rohde looks like a well-groomed, cultivated woman, and yet she

can hardly wait for the ﬂames in the crematoriums to be rekindled.

Dr. André Lettich also met that woman. When he was working at the Insti-

tute of Hygiene, he once had to check smears from her for bacteria because

she had recently recovered from diphtheria. His ﬁrst examination was posi-

tive, and Frau Rohde threatened him. ‘‘If the smear is again positive, I shall

string you up with my own hands.’’ She was eager to end the burdensome

quarantine. Lettich thereupon certiﬁed that no bacteria could be detected.

n In the ss inﬁrmary nurses tended to ss men with minor illnesses. A nurse

with an outstandingpersonality was transferredthere.Maria Stromberger was

born in 1898 in a small town in Carinthia; her early years were hard. Not until

she was more than thirty years of age could she train for the profession that

she had dreamed about since her childhood. Then she became a nurse ‘‘body

and soul,’’ as her sister put it. At the Höß trial, Nurse Maria was a witness

and testiﬁed as follows about her career, which ﬁnally took her to Auschwitz:

‘‘On July 1, 1942, I was transferred from Carinthia in Austria to an inﬁrmary

for infectious diseases in Königshütte. This was done at my request. In my

homeland I had occasion to hear diﬀerent things about what was going on in

Civilians in Auschwitz n 463