Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz

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seventy-seven former inmates of Auschwitz in the spring of 1959 reports that

most of them claimed to have had no feelings of alienation in the camp; on

the contrary, the help of comrades had uplifted them. Most of them did not

develop feelings of alienation until after the liberation. The physicians em-

phasize that the men they examined were not Muselmänner in the camp; only

four of them had been deported for reasons of ‘‘race.’’ They have summed up

their ﬁndings as follows:

It should be noted that the majority of those examined believe that their

time in the camp had a decisive eﬀect on the further development and for-

mation of their individuality.These are some of the eﬀects they mentioned:

diﬃculty in trusting people; diﬃculties in establishing contacts and at the

sametime a strong emotional attachment to formerfellowinmates; height-

ened tolerance; placing a lesser value on unimportant matters. Many stated

that since their liberation their emotional reactions have become blunted,

that theycan neither rejoice nor grieve as theydid before. For many of them

their stay in the camp has become an obsessive idea....Themost fre-

quently mentioned pathopsychological manifestations include depression,

a feeling of angst and constant danger, and an almost complete absence of

the sex drive.

A premature weakening of the vital functions, early physical and psycho-

logical aging, and manifestations of typical geriatric disorders have been ob-

served. More than one-third of the Frenchmen who returned from the camps

in 1945 died within ten years. It may be assumed that the majority of the re-

turnees were rather young, since few of the older inmates survived imprison-

ment in a camp. ‘‘Our clinical and statistical examinations of 500 former in-

mates,’’ writes theGermanpsychiatrist Waltervon Baeyer, ‘‘turned up in about

three-fourths of these cases not organically explainable, character-neurotic,

psychopathic or experience-reactive abnormal attitudes, most of which must

be regarded as having been caused completely or partially by persecution and

the majority of which must be considered permanent.’’

Independently of one another, several experts have come to the conclusion

that the results of their examinations, particularly of those former camp in-

mates who were interned in extermination camps under the special condi-

tions of ‘‘racial’’ persecution, have deprived the psychiatrists’ classic concept

of causality of its general validity—the concept that says that every experience

leaves a personality basically unaﬀected and only abnormal people react by

becoming ill.

n The Dutch psychoanalyst Tas wrote in June 1947: ‘‘I know people who came

back from concentration camps where they had the most horrible experiences

494 n Afterward

and, after a period in which they would not or could not say anything about

those experiences, returned to a normal life with their family and their work.

And yet it is impossible to speak of mental health in such cases. There is no

doubt that large amounts of aﬀect and aggression have been suppressed, but

it is certain that these have not been assimilated. It is very probable that in

the course of time this will lead to serious psychological disorders.’’ In 1967

Tas’s colleague Eduard de Wind referred to this statement and wrote: ‘‘After

twenty years these words have been conﬁrmed numerous times. Many former

inmates who lived for years in an outwardly assimilated fashion in reality had

an extremely regressive relationship to the world outside and harbored social,

political, and other illusions that could never be gratiﬁed. A breakdown was

unavoidable.’’

Dr. Wolfgang Jacob reports about a case that seems characteristic to him.

Twenty years after his liberation from a concentration camp, a ﬁfty-year-old

patient suﬀered from high blood pressure as well as other complaints that

were hard to diagnose. After his imprisonment he had quickly recovered,

adapted well socially, and done successful work. At the examination this pa-

tient appeared quite composed and reserved. The physician ﬁnally referred to

the years his patient had spent in a kz. At ﬁrst the patient blocked any talk

about it, but then it burst out of him and over him. The memory was such a

shock to him that it took six weeks of clinical treatment to restore him. ‘‘The

tormentors have disappeared, but the torment remains.’’

French physicians also observed that in many survivors the consequences

of their imprisonment in a kz did not appear until later. After examining

former deportees with lung diseases, they wrote: ‘‘We know many comrades

who maintained an admirable composure during their entire detention but

after their return suddenly seemed to have lost this balance—as if they had ex-

hausted theirentire reserves of energy! Perhaps there is a connection between

this demoralization and their subsequent lung disease.’’

Delayed psychological eﬀects are particularly noticeable in persons who

were in a kz as children. In her examination of ‘‘Auschwitz kids,’’ Dr. Wanda

Poltawska included those whose names and nationalities cannot be deter-

mined because they were small children in the camp. Even those who have no

memory of Auschwitz suﬀer from anxiety attacks. ‘‘Suddenly, without know-

ing why, they greatly fear something. Only reluctantly and in moments of the

utmost intimacy do they admit that they are afraid without any reason. They

are afraid of dogs, uniforms, all people wearing any uniform, screams, white

coats, and the German language.’’ The closer the youths were to puberty at the

time of their imprisonment, the more frequently did Dr. Poltawska encounter

anxiety states and a morbidly enhanced memory of everything relating to the

camp.

Inmates after Liberation n 495

During a psychoanalytic treatment, Dr. H. Strauß observed that a patient

who was in Auschwitz at the age of ten retained the idea of inferiority that

had been forced on her so insistently in those days and believed that it was

justiﬁed.

Hearing German speech again also caused anguish to persons who had

been persecuted as adults. I repeatedly observed this when Auschwitzers vis-

ited me in Vienna. Jadwiga Landowska, a Polish woman, begged to be excused

for this: ‘‘I know that people here are nice, but I can’t help it.’’ As soon as she

heard German spoken in Vienna, she became afraid.This anxiety disappeared

in conversations with me, even though they were conducted in German; evi-

dently she regarded me as a companion in misfortune.

Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich speak of indelible memory traces

that sound an alarm at the slightest touch, and they document this phenome-

non with the following case: ‘‘One of our patients,who had to live in a concen-

tration camp for four years, is frightened by the sight of every German police-

man. He knows that this is absurd, but the signal that once emanated from

such a uniform is too powerful to be extinguished by relatively insigniﬁcant

subsequent experiences.’’

Consequences of internment in extermination camps can be discerned

even in the next generation. In Canada Dr.Vivian Rakoﬀ observed depressions

in children of Jewish immigrants who had been interned, but also aggres-

sionsand infractions of thelaw—evidently ‘‘because theyare unable toabreact

their generationally determined spirit of dissent, for the parents either idol-

ized their children or were tired of reacting to the oppositional forces in any

way. Thus the children’s aggressions are vented outside the family.’’ Added to

such parental failings is theirreluctance to speak with theirchildren about the

years of their persecution. This inhibition is particularly noticeable in Israel,

where parents dread questions about their behavior as well as reproaches for

having allowed themselves to be led to the places of extermination like sheep.

Constantly evading this subject is bound to disturb a normal relationship be-

tween parents and children.

David Rousset is right: the fate of the survivors diﬀers from that of all

others through an experience that is impossible to communicate.

n Strange though this may sound, the guards of Auschwitz apparently had

a certain idea about this experience and this diﬀerence. There have been a

number of reports that a member of the ss showed something like a kind of

sympathy for an inmate he knew when he met him again in another camp.

In Groß-Rosen, Mieczyslaw Kieta reencountered the medic Josef Klehr,

whom he had gotten to know all too well in Auschwitz. In accordance with

regulations he greeted him by standing at attention and saying nothing. Klehr

496 n Afterward

called out to him, ‘‘Hey, big fellow, wait a bit,’’ asked him whether he had

been in Auschwitz, and gave him a cigarette after Kieta had answered in the

aﬃrmative. Kieta had the impression that Klehr was pleased about this re-

newed encounter. In Auschwitz Teddy Pietrzykowski worked on a detail that

was commanded by Franz Hössler, later the ss camp leader. When Hössler

saw him again in Bergen-Belsen, he appointed him as senior capo and made

him his Kalfaktor (handyman).

WhenTadeusz Snieszkowas transferred to a satellite camp at Ravensbrück,

hewas personallyescorted by ss roll call leader Oswald Kaduk. During the trip

Kaduk, an Upper Silesian, conversed with the inmate in Polish, asked whether

hehad been givenfood for thejourney, and, afterhe had answered in the nega-

tive, gave Snieszko a can of sardines. At length he asked if Snieszko wanted

something to drink. When the inmate answered that he had not drunk beer in

a long time, Kaduk bought him beer. Snieszko mentioned this in his Frankfurt

court testimony, but Kaduk denied everything. Even though Snieszko’s story

was virtually the only testimony from which the court learned about a humane

action by Kaduk, Kaduk even claimed that he had not accompanied Snieszko

on that trip. It seems that he was embarrassed in front of his comrades, now

his codefendants, about his lack of discipline in dealing with this inmate.

In the courtroom the tormented reencountered their tormentors under

completely diﬀerent circumstances. When time had not yet been able to per-

form a healing or at least calming function, these renewed encounters were

dramatic. I remember the atmospherein the room when Höß was called to ac-

count in Warsaw in March 1947. The presiding judge tried hard to conduct the

trial in an objective and sober manner, but the excitement of the audience in

the large, overcrowded courtroom could be felt at all times.There I reencoun-

tered many acquaintances from Auschwitz who followed the trial every day.

The atmosphere at the Frankfurt trial was quite diﬀerent from that at the

Warsaw hearings, and not only because in the seventeen years between these

two trials lifehad gone on; this timethetrialwasbeingconductedinGermany,

the homeland of the victimizers (though, with some exceptions, not of the

victims). Shivering and shuddering, and sometimes probably with some skep-

ticism as well, the people attending thetrial—primarily Germans,of course—

experienced the necessarily inadequate reconstruction of the mechanism of

destruction. The fact that school classes were taken to the courtroom indi-

cated that Auschwitz had already become a factor in history.

For a year and a half I attended the trial in Frankfurt and observed the re-

actions of the witnesses as they encountered the defendants again. I empa-

thized with the despair caused by their obligation to conjure up life in Ausch-

witz again in the atmosphere of a courtroom. All too often this despair was

exacerbated by the fact that the questions of many members of the court dem-

Inmates after Liberation n 497

onstrated the inability of many German jurists to understand and make allow-

ance for the situation of a former prisoner in a courtroom. In many instances

it took a lot of urging on my part to make such a person decide to go to Frank-

furt. I was not able to convince all of them of a survivor’s duty to bear witness

to the death of their comrades. More than once the fear of overstraining the

nerves was stronger than all arguments.

For many their trip to Frankfurt marked their ﬁrst renewed encounter with

Germans since the liberation, a contact that they had avoided up to that time.

Raya Kagan told me that on the plane taking her to Frankfurt shewas impelled

to scrutinize all German-speaking passengers of her generation and ask her-

self what one person or another could have been and could have done in those

years.

All those who were called as witnesses were able to prepare themselves in-

wardly for testifying and encountering the defendants again, but what good

was that when Auschwitz became such an uncanny presence in the court-

room?

Alex Rosenstock, a dentist who traveled to Frankfurt from Haifa, is an ur-

bane and cultivated man. His testimony was passionate but self-controlled.

When he had ﬁnished and was leaving the room he suddenly had to stop. He

leaned against the wall and started to cry uncontrollably.

A Russian witness was supposed to identify the defendants about whom he

was testifying. The ss men of yesteryear were instructed to stand in a semi-

circle behind the witness stand. When the Russian turned around and saw

those twenty men in front of him, he instinctively covered his eyes with his

hands. I was certainly able to empathize with this gesture.

Józef Gabis reported to the court that he saw the body of Lilly Toﬄer, who

had been shot in the yard of Block 11 because a love letter from her to Gabis

had been found. Gabis found out that Boger had killed his girlfriend. After the

cross-examination Gabis was asked to identify Boger but said, ‘‘I would rather

not look at the defendant.’’ He left the courtroom without having looked at

the dock.

When Filip Müller was giving his testimony, particular excitement could be

felt in the courtroom, for the witness, who had been assigned to the Sonder-

kommando, was reporting about Hans Stark, whose cruel deeds were excep-

tional even in that trial. Stark’s attorney tried to create doubt as to whether

the evildoer described by Müller was identical with his client. At that point the

witness, a Czech who spoke only broken German, gave such a precise imita-

tion of the blustering, dialect-tinged tone of Stark’scommands (thedefendant

had not yet spoken in the courtroom) that it became clear how vivid the past

had remained to him.

Müller’s testimony so stirred many witnesses that they were afterward im-

498 n Afterward

pelled to speak with me, the only person they could expect to understand

them.

Dr. Friedrich Skrein, a respected Viennese jurist, is familiar with the atmo-

sphere in a courtroom. After his testimony he told me that he was neverthe-

less so disconcerted by the presence of the defendants, whom he knew from

Auschwitz, that he forgot to give a substantial part of his prepared testimony.

As a block elder, the Pole Anna Palarczyk was able to observe many things

with a greater inner detachment than an anonymous inmate possessed. Her

testimony was matter-of-fact and devoid of emotion. On the next day she told

me about an oppressive dream. She was alone in a big, empty room. The ss

men on trial came in and approached her slowly but inexorably. She could not

ﬁnd an exit from that room.

Sometimes a reencounter after twenty years triggered diﬀerent reactions.

The Pole Erwin Bartel was eighteen when he worked under Hans Stark in the

Admissions Department. After Bartel, who had gotten a degree in engineer-

ing, had ﬁnished his rather incriminating testimony, the defendant availed

himself of his right to question the witness, something that he did not ha-

bitually do. ‘‘Does the witness still remember our confrontation in October

1959?’’ he asked Bartel. Stark had been arrested then, and Bartel had been in-

vited to Frankfurt during the preliminary investigations. Bartel replied, ‘‘Yes, I

remember. You said to me, ‘Why didn’t you say this ten years ago? Now I have

a wife and a child.’’’ Stark continued: ‘‘At that time you said, ‘We had a lot of

good things when we worked for you, but so many bad things happened in

Auschwitz that I have to tell everything.’’’ ‘‘Yes, that’s correct,’’ said Bartel.

Stark’s questions hardly diminished the witness’s credibility; if anything, they

enhanced it. I had the impression that Stark had not broken his usual silence

toward incriminating witnesses in order to cast doubt on the testimony, but

for another reason. It was as though he had felt a need to refer once more to

the personal relationship developed in Auschwitz.

I have also heard about personal encounters between the guards and the

guarded under radically changed circumstances after the end of the war. An

inmate who was an expert on Persian lamb coats had to examine and work

on such coats while on the Canada Detail. He helped the leader of this detail,

ss Sergeant Otto Graf, to sell them on the black market, and in return the ss

man made life more pleasant for the inmate. Graf had a bad reputation but

was known to spare inmates who could be useful to him. Many years after the

end of the war, the fur expert met Graf, a Viennese, at the race track in that

city, and they discussed trading in Persian lamb coats.

Since 1955 I have increasingly concerned myself with the history of Ausch-

witz. I have spoken and corresponded with Auschwitzers, studied the perti-

nent literature, written and lectured about subjects connected with the camp,

Inmates after Liberation n 499

instituted legal proceedings,and conferredwith judicial authorities. I thought

that this activity had in the course of time given me an objective view of this

part of contemporary history when to my surprise I was confronted with per-

sons in Frankfurt whom I had known as ss men in Auschwitz. Dr. Viktor

Capesius, the pharmacist in charge, was arrested in December 1959; and since

he had denied any guilt and I happened to be in Frankfurt, hewas brought face

to face with me. When he entered the room, all of a sudden I vividly remem-

bered details that I had not been able to recall during my conversation with

the prosecutor a short time previously. Suddenly the past was in the room. I

noticed that this surprising encounter had thrown Capesius oﬀ balance, too.

Though he continued his denials even in my presence, his excessive sweating

was visible evidence that he was lying. A short time later I was confronted with

the medic Josef Klehr, whose murderous practices I tried to combat by noti-

fying the ss garrison physician and who was ﬁnally transferred from Ausch-

witz. At the time I was well aware of the risk I was taking, particularly after

I had noticed that he suspected I was working against him. I always had to

be prepared for his revenge. Now a bailiﬀ led him into the room by a chain

attached to his wrist. His only response to my accusations was, ‘‘I know that

Herr Langbein was not well disposed toward me even in Auschwitz.’’ This re-

newed encounter was so ghastly that I was not able to laugh at his remark. At

night I dreamed of him—not of the old, seedy Klehr whom I had confronted

that day but of the medic at the zenith of his power.

Ispenta sleepless night beforetestifyingat the big Auschwitztrial in Frank-

furt. Even when I had been called as a witness at the second Auschwitz trial,

where my testimony was bound to have no particular signiﬁcance, I was un-

able to sleep the night before. Kazimierz Smolen, the director of the State

Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, occupies himself with events from the camp

period more regularly than I do.While testifying against Dr. Horst Schumann

in December 1970, he suﬀered a weak spell, which, as he told me later, he

found diﬃcult to conceal. Smolen had previously testiﬁed at all Auschwitz

trials and associated no oppressive personal memories with Schumann.

In thecourse of myendeavors to reconstruct detailsof the history of Ausch-

witz, it frequently seemed appropriate to question former guards as well. For

a longer period than was reasonable, I had compunctions about approaching

such persons, even when I knew that they had tried to help the inmates in

the camp. Even after I had overcome this reluctance, every encounter with a

former member of the ss caused in me an emotional tension that is hard to

describe.

In June 1967, when I was studying documents at the Institut für Zeit-

geschichte in Munich in preparation of this study, I found a letter signed by

Friedrich Entress, the camp physician of Auschwitz.When I suddenly saw the

500 n Afterward

familiar signature again twenty-four years after encountering Entress for the

last time, the elapsed time seemed unreal for a moment. To contain my trepi-

dation I ﬁrst had to remind myself that I was sitting in a reading room where

I was treated courteously by cultivated people. I knew that Entress had been

executed many years previously. Nevertheless, at that moment he was more

present to me than those sitting beside me.

Inmates after Liberation n 501

ss members after the war

nnn

After the capitulation of the Third Reich, those bearing the greatest respon-

sibility abandoned their subordinates to whom they had delegated the orga-

nization and execution of the mass murders. Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler

pointed the way with their suicides. Afterward, none of those who had given

the commands to murder provided cover for those who had incurred guilt by

executing their orders.

‘‘I shall never forget my last report and farewell to the rfss,’’ wrote Höß.

Alongwithotherss leaders from concentration camps, he had been sum-

moned by Himmler,who had already withdrawn to Flensburg. ‘‘Hewas beam-

ing and in the best of spirits, and yet the world, our world, had gone under. If

he had said, ‘All right, gentlemen, now it’s over; you know what you have to

do,’ I would have understood, since it would have been in keeping with what

he had preached to the ss for years: self-surrender to an idea. But this was

his last order to us: Disappear into the Wehrmacht! This was our farewell to

the man I had looked up to, in whom I had had such unshakable conﬁdence,

whose commands and utterances had been gospel to me.’’

The chief of the wvha, ss General Oswald Pohl, did not take his life. In a

Nuremberg prison he declared that he had never ordered or even encouraged

anyone to beat inmates to death. On the contrary, he had opposed inhumane

acts when he had heard of them. At the peak of his power, this same Pohl

ordered all commandants of concentration camps to make the work assign-

ments of the inmates ‘‘exhausting in the truest sense of the word.’’ This can

be read in black and white.

Others were cleverer than Pohl. They prepared their escape at a time when

the idea of a German defeat was regarded as a capital crime, and not infre-

quently by those who were already mapping their own escape routes.

Adolf Eichmann escaped to Argentina. After he had had years of leisure to

reﬂecton his actions, he thought thatwhat heconsideredto be hisdefensewas

so important that he had it recorded on tape. ‘‘My subjective attitude to what

happened was my belief in the national emergency preached by the leadership

of the German Reich at that time. In addition there was my increasing belief

in the necessity of a total war because to an increasing extent I always had to

believe in the constant proclamations of the German Reich’s leaders: ‘Victory

in this total war—or downfall of the German people.’ Based on this mind-set

I did my duty with a clear conscience and a trusting heart.’’ Eichmann char-

acterizes himself in these words: ‘‘I was nothing but a loyal, proper, correct,

industrious member of the ss and the rsha, who was ﬁlled only with idealis-

tic feelings for my fatherland, to which I was honored to belong. I never was

a Schweinehund or a traitor.’’

n Equally typical as the substance and form of Eichmann’s statement is the

answer that Höß, in the Nuremburg prison, gave to the question of when he

had ﬁrst thought that he might be taken to court and sentenced: ‘‘At the time

of the collapse—when the Führer died.’’

Ten months later Höß described his reaction more verbosely in his Cracow

cell:

On the way (while ﬂeeing with his family) we heard on a farm that the

Führer was dead. When we heard that, my wife and I simultaneously had

this thought: Now we have to go, too! The end of the Führer was also the

end of our world. Did it make any sense for us to go on living? We would be

pursued and sought everywhere. We were going to take poison; I had pro-

cured some for my wife so that she and our children would not be captured

alive by the Russians if there was an unexpected advance. For the sake of

our children, we did not do it and were willing to endure whatever might

come. We ought to have done it, and later I always regretted that we did

not do it, because we, and especially my wife and the children, would have

been spared a great deal. And what will they still have to go through? We

were tied and chained to that world, and it would have been our duty to go

down with it.

Höß was content with pathos-ﬁlled words and until his arrest on March 11,

1946, lived on a farm near Flensburg with false papers provided by Himmler.

People such as Dr. Eduard Wirths and Dr. Hans Delmotte who had already

attempted to distance themselves from the crimes while still in Auschwitz did

end their lives.

Most members of the ss went underground, which was not too diﬃcult

after the capitulation and division of Germany into various occupation zones.

They destroyed their pay books and in prisoner-of-war camps pretended to

be members of the Wehrmacht, usually under false names.They soon noticed

that it was practically impossible to check their false statements, and thus

many of them became quite careless and audacious. Cases in point are Robert

Mulka, the adjutant to Höß, who demanded (and received) compensation for

his ﬁctitious army service, or the block leader of the Auschwitz bunker, Bruno

Schlage, who also passed himself oﬀ as a member of the Wehrmacht and,

while he was at it, gave himself a higher rank than he had held in the ss be-

cause he expected that this would beneﬁt him ﬁnancially some day. The camp

ssMembers after the War n 503