Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz
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were transferred to other camps. It cannot be ascertained exactly how many
had died before the liquidation of that section of Birkenau.
In another section of the camp, which was run as theTheresienstadt family
camp, 15,711 Jews from Czechoslovakia had to spend six months waiting for
their deaths. Before the second gassing campaign on July 11 and 12, 1944,
around 3,000 people were sent to labor camps.
Kazimierz Smolen, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum,
has estimated that approximately 120,000 persons were housed in the various
sections of Birkenau. This estimate includes those prisoners in Mexico who
waited without a number to be sent to a labor camp.
The population of the labor camps grew steadily. On January 20, 1944,
13,288 prisoners were registered in Auschwitz III, and by April there were
15,000. By July 1, 1944, the figure had risen to 26,705 and was probably 10,000
higheratthetimeof the evacuation.Monowitz, thelargestlaborcamp, housed
6,571 inmates on January 20, 1944; that figure rose to 10,000 in June and to
approximately 10,500 in December.
n In March 1944 I managed to smuggle out of thecamp statistics that showed
foreach month the percentage of deceased inmates in proportion to the popu-
lation. For 1942 I took these figures from the quarterly reports that I was able
to examine in the files, and the figures for 1943 and for the first three months
of 1944 were based on the monthly reports that Wirths had dictated to me. I
took the death figures from the weekly reports that listed those who died each
day.
These figures clearly indicate the conditions under which theinmates lived.
While in the third quarter of 1942 an average of 20.5 percent of the prisoners
were registered each month as dead, an average of 3.6 percent per month died
in July, August, and September 1943. The document that covers the period
up to March 1944 gives the lowest mortality rate for October: 2.3 percent. In
the first quarter of 1943 an average of 4.8 percent of all prisoners died each
month; the figure had been 20.4 percent in the same quarter of the preceding
year.
It is possible to compare the figures for the first quarter of 1944 month by
month. In January 1943, 19.1 percent died; in January 1944, 13.2 percent. In
February the corresponding percentage of the dead amounted to 25.5 in 1943
and 6.1 in 1944. The February 1943 number is the largest known. For March
the figures are 15.4 percent in 1943 and 10 percent in 1944. The latter figure
is given as an estimate in the document, for I completed it before I had all of
the March statistics.
As compared to the maximum reached in the worst period of Auschwitz,
thesecond half of 1942 and thefirst two months of 1943,thenumberof deaths
54 n Introduction
had already declined considerably under Höß as commandant.The reforms of
Liebehenschel were clearly evident, and they would have become even more
so had a typhus epidemic in the women’s camp not caused a drastic rise in
the number of deaths. In July 1943 there were 1,133 deaths in the women’s
camp, 1,433 in August, 1,861 in September, and 2,269 in October. In Novem-
ber, when there was a change of commandants, the numberdeclined to 1,603,
but in December it climbed to 8,931,a number reminiscent of theworst times.
The number of deaths has been preserved only for the first half of January
1944; it was 2,661.
The high figure for March 1944 is due to the killing of the members of the
first transport, who had been housed in the Theresienstadt family camp and
were murdered six months after the transfer on orders from the central ad-
ministration. The resistance movement sent a chart to Cracow that contains
the monthly death figures for the women’s camp for February 1943 to mid-
January 1944 and also indicates the numberof thosewho died in thecamp and
those who were killed in the gas chambers. These figures are broken down;
under four different rubrics are listed ‘‘Poles,’’ ‘‘Other Aryans,’’ ‘‘Jews,’’ and
(in German) ‘‘Gas.’’ In the following account of this document, two obvious
mathematical errors have been corrected, though these add up to no more
than forty.
In those eleven and a half months 19,761 inmates of the women’s camp
died and 11,940 were gassed. The influence of the season and of the typhus
epidemic in late 1943 had a striking effect on the number of deaths. Septem-
ber and October brought the lowest numbers, 690 and 724, but in March 1943
there were 2,189, in December 4,684, and in the first half of January 1944
1,961. The largest number under the rubric ‘‘Gas’’ is given for December as
well: 4,247. This rubric has a line for the months of June, July, and November;
evidently there were no selections in the camp then.
Polish women made up 21.7 percent of all the deceased registered in the
camp.Thisrubric, too, indicates great fluctuation. BetweenFebruaryandApril
more than 39 percent of those who died were Poles, but the percentage de-
clined to 4.3 for September to November. Of all who died in the camp, 37.8
percent were ‘‘other Aryans.’’ Their percentage was highest in the relatively
favorable months September and October: 72. During that period, transports
of ‘‘Aryan’’ women, which included no Poles but a large number of Russians,
were directed to Auschwitz.
The percentage of Jewish women who died in the camp was 40.5. Their
mortality rate was highest at the end of the period covered by the report; be-
tween November 1943 and mid-January 1944 it amounted to 54.2 percent. To
this number must be added those listed under the rubric ‘‘Gas,’’ for Jewish
women were the first victims of the selections in the camp. This means that
Numbers n 55
60 percent of those who died or were murdered were Jews. While there are
no documents to show how many Jewish women, Polish women, and ‘‘other
Aryans’’ were interned in the women’s camp at that time, these figures speak
for themselves.
Somestatistics that happen tohave been preservedgive us a chance to learn
about the differences in the treatment of Jews and ‘‘Aryans’’ as well as the
different conditions in 1942 and 1943.
Between April 17 and 29, 1942, when rshatransports were not yet subject
to selections at the ramp and all prisoners were admitted to the camp, 2,845
Jews arrived in Auschwitz on four transports from Slovakia. By August 15 of
that year only 182 of them were still alive. Even though there are no exact fig-
ures, there can be no doubt that the fate of the other people on the rsha
transports, all of whom were admitted to the camp in its early phase,was simi-
lar. In those days many transports from Slovakia were directed to Auschwitz,
and those who survived had to go through periods in the camp that left an
indelible mark on many of them. These data should be borne in mind when
reading later in this book the account of the behavior of Slovakian women on
the first transports.
On January 17, 1943, 230 ‘‘Aryan women’’ arrived in Auschwitz; on April 10
of that year 73 of them were still alive and on August 3, 57. Charlotte Delbo,
the chronicler of that transport, emphasizes that such a low death rate in the
women’s camp was ‘‘unique in its history.’’ She attributes this exceptional
situation to the fact that these women were political prisoners who knew one
another and practiced solidarity.
The difference is clear: 93.6 percent of the Jews deported in April 1942 died
within the first four months, while 24.8 percent of the ‘‘Aryan’’ Frenchwomen
deported in January 1943 were still alive after more than six months.
That the fate of privileged Germans in Auschwitz differed from what
awaited this group of prisoners in other camps is proved by our transport.
Our group of seventeen men was transferred from Dachau in August 1942.
Within the first few months six of us died of epidemics that spared no group
of prisoners.
n These figures also prove that for all those deported the first weeks and
months were the worst. After that, no member of our transport died. Of the
group of Frenchwomen, 68.3 percent lost their lives in the first two and a half
months in Auschwitz. During the next four months, almost 22 percent of the
survivors from the early period died. We may assume that the mortality fig-
ures of the Slovaks who survived the terrible early period dropped markedly
as well.
Statistics prepared by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum shed light on
56 n Introduction
the relationship between mortality and the length of time spent in the camp.
They give the weekly death rate of Jews who were deported in fifteen trans-
ports between April 15 and July 17, 1942. Of these, 3.06 percent died in their
first week in Auschwitz, and the percentage increased quickly in the following
weeks, amountingto 5.32 in the second week, 6.2 in thethird, and 11.32 in the
fourth. After that, the mortality rate stabilized; it was 11.04 in the fifth week,
10.75 percent in the sixth, and 10.45 in the seventh.These statistics prove that
those who survived the most horrendous early period had better chances. In
the eighth week the mortality rate was 7 percent and in the ninth 8.7 percent,
but then it declined rapidly. It was 6.1 percent in the tenth week, 4.78 percent
in the eleventh, 3.3 percent in the twelfth, and less than 2 percent thereafter.
Wojciech Barcz, a Pole who was interned in Auschwitz from the first day
to the last and to whom we owe valuable observations, wrote: ‘‘It is a fact that
most of the prisoners in the camp perished within the first three months after
their arrival. The reason was that the devitalizing nature of the system hit an
unprepared human being with enormous force and, as it were, crushed him
intellectually, so that he was ready for impending death. After three months
something like a resistance after an inoculation developed, at least in mental
terms.’’
n Finally, there are statistics about those who were left behind at the evacua-
tion of Auschwitz because they were sick, unable to walk, or hidden. In the
women’s camp, 4,428 women and girls and 169 boys remained. The Russian
troops found approximately 4,000 persons there on January 7; the others had
been shot or had died or had escaped from the camp in the ten days between
the evacuation and the liberation. On the day of the liberation, around 1,880
peoplewere in the infirmaryof theBirkenaumen’s campand 1,200 in the main
camp. Eight hundred and fifty prisoners who were unable to walk remained
in Monowitz, and 200 of these died in the aforementioned ten days, a period
vividly described by Primo Levi. In Fürstengrube 250 patients stayed behind,
and all but approximately two dozen of these were massacred by an ss squad
after January 27. Six hundred stayed behind in Jaworzno; some inmates were
killed when the campwas fired at, but most of them were liberated by Russian
troops as early as January 19. The number of those left behind and liberated
in Blechhammer cannot be determined.
This means that the arrival of Russian troops restored the freedom of at
least 7,650 people in Auschwitz, but many of those could no longer enjoy it.
On February 6, 1945, functionaries of thePolish Red Cross counted only 4,880
survivors in thevarious Auschwitz hospitals,which amounts to a difference of
2,770 people. It cannot be determined how many died in the first ten days of
freedom (in many cases the change of diet had a devastating effect), and how
Numbers n 57
many people, most logically Poles, had the strength to head for theirhomes. A
committee of Russian medical examiners found 536 corpses and determined
that in the case of 474 of them death had resulted from total exhaustion. Such
mass deaths continued for a time. On February 28 two former inmates were
buried in a mass grave. According to a report by Leo Vos, eighty-two of those
liberated in Blechhammer died.
This is what the available figures tell us about the fate of the 405,000 per-
sons who were imprisoned in Auschwitz.
n The number of those who were selected immediately after their arrival in
Auschwitz and were murdered in one of the big gas chambers is far greater.
Because those deportees were not registered, their numbers can only be esti-
mated, though we do have partial figures. Georges Wellers has calculated that
of the 61,098 Jews who were sent to Auschwitz from France between July 29,
1942, and August 11, 1944, 47,976 or 78.5 percent were victims of the selec-
tions at the ramp. Danuta Czech came to a similar conclusion—that 76.6 per-
cent of the Jews deported from Greece were killed in the gas chambers im-
mediately upon arrival; of a total of 54,533 deportees, only 8,025 men and
4,732 women were admitted to the camp. Between July 17, 1942, and Septem-
ber 5, 1944, fifty-seven trains from Holland brought 51,130 persons to Ausch-
witz; 18,408 received an inmate number, but 64 percent were immediately
killed with poison gas.
Since these statistics cover only a small part of the rsha transports, any-
onewhowants to get an idea of the magnitude of the extermination campaign
must resort to estimates.
The admission division of the Political Department was the only office that
preserved carbon copies of the reports that were sent to Berlin and revealed
the numberof those destined fordeath during the selection at theramp.Those
copies were destroyed by the sswhen an evacuation of thecamp becamelikely,
but Kasimierz Smolen and Erwin Bartel, prisoners who had been employed
in that office, made calculations before the destruction of the documents. At
that time they arrived at figures between three and four million. Before his
escape in April 1944, Rudolf Vrba attempted to gain an idea of the scope of
the extermination campaign because he wanted to tell the world about it. His
estimate is noteworthy for several reasons. He first worked at the ramp and
then became a clerk in Birkenau, where he had an exceptional insight into the
situation, and he has an unusually good memory for figures. Vrba arrived at a
figure of 3.25 million. To be sure, the most extensive campaigns of extermi-
nation, in which the Hungarian Jews and the inhabitants of the Lodz ghetto
were among the victims, did not begin until after Vrba’s escape.
58 n Introduction
Members of the ss have dealt with this subject as well. At his hearing in
Nuremberg, Höß gave the figure of 2.5 million, but later he reduced it. It is
not clear whether his estimate refers to his tenure as the camp’s commandant
or to the entire period. On July 30, 1945, the ss physician Friedrich Entress
testified at Gmunden that two to 2.5 million people were killed in Auschwitz.
When he was challenged, he conceded that it might have been five million.
Entress had no contact with the camp after his transfer, and so his vague esti-
mate probably refers only to his period of employment in Auschwitz.
Maximilian Grabner, who headed both the Political Department and its ad-
missions division, the only office permitted to record the number of those
gassed immediately after their arrival, testified in Vienna on September 16,
1945. ‘‘There were so many deaths that I completely lost count and today can-
not state how many prisoners were murdered. But during my term as head
of the Political Department it was at least three million.’’ Grabner was trans-
ferred from Auschwitz in October 1943, around the same time as Entress.
When ss Technical Sergeant Wilhelm Boger, who was also attached to the Po-
litical Department, was questioned in 1945 about the number of deaths, he
responded that there were more than four million, but two decades later he
reduced that estimate substantially. Unlike Entress and Grabner, Pery Broad,
also a member of the Political Department, testified in March 1946 not as a
defendant but as a witness, and he stated that a total of 2.5 or three million
prisoners were gassed. All these statements were made shortly after the end
of the war, when each informant’s memory was still fresh and none of those
interrogated had been influenced by other estimates or calculations. Because
these testimonies were given independently of one another, they permit us to
draw some conclusions regarding the actual number of victims in Auschwitz.
An objectionthat is occasionally raised, namely that killingsof such ascope
would have been impossible from a purely technical point of view, has al-
ready been refuted by Höß. ‘‘It would not have been difficult to destroy even
more people,’’ he told the American psychologist G. M. Gilbert in a Nurem-
berg prison. ‘‘Killing was easy. We didn’t even need guards to push them into
the gas chambers; they simply went in because they assumed they would take
a shower there, and instead of the water we turned on the poison gas. The
whole procedure went very quickly.’’ The burning of corpses was harder and
took more time. When the gas chambers were in maximal use, corpses were
burned on wood piles in the open air next to the crematoriums. The ss did
not want to have this action limited by the capacity of the ovens.
The incredible scope of the killings and the uncertain and largely unknown
estimates of persons able to give first-hand information later led to calcula-
tions and speculations that deviated much more from one another than the
Numbers n 59
estimates of those who had been in Auschwitz.This only increased the uncer-
tainty about the total number of those murdered in the extermination camp
Auschwitz, and often this uncertainty was fomented intentionally.
Finally, I would like to point to a grotesque consequenceofthe bureaucracy.
It afforded Jews whom the Nazis persecuted not only because of their origin
but also because of political activities against them better chances of survival
than it gave to Jews who were persecuted only for ‘‘racial’’ reasons. A Jew who
was sent to Auschwitz because of a political offense did not arrive on an rsha
transport but on one of the many transports that were directed to Auschwitz
from German prisons. Hence he did not have to undergo a selection, for he
was accompanied by a Gestapo file, whereas those deported to Auschwitz on
an rsha transport had no such file. If at a later date he fell victim to a selec-
tion because of physical weakness, the Political Department pulled him out
of the ranks of those earmarked for death. Before those selected were taken
to the gas chamber, their numbers were sent to that department, and anyone
who had a file there was removed from the list.
An acquaintance of mine owes his life to this practice. The Viennese Pepi
Meisel, a member of the Communist Party, was sent by that party from Bel-
gium, where he had immigrated, to Austria in order to engage in political
activity there with false papers that identified him as a foreign worker. He
was soon captured by informers. The file that accompanied him when he was
sent toAuschwitz contained references to his political activity. Meisel was safe
from camp selection, but there was no doubt that sooner or later the Vienna
Gestapo would notify the camp administration that he had been sentenced to
death. We helped Meisel to escape successfully.
Eduard de Wind tells about a Dutch jazz trumpeter, Lex van Weren, who
also owed his life to the fact that he had been sent to Auschwitz as a Jew with
a file. De Wind’s report does not say whether that man was able to survive the
entire concentration-camp period. Anton van Velsen reports about Wilhelm
Schwed fromVienna, whom the same practice saved from gassing, though he
was later shot at the Black Wall.
The respect for files could for a while keep German Nazism from extermi-
nating human beings like vermin.
60 n Introduction
The Prisoners
under the power
of the camp
nnn
In a sociological study of the concentration camps, H. G. Adler, who had first-
hand experience of them,writes: ‘‘The problems of Nazism represent nothing
but an extreme—admittedly insanely extreme—special case of conditions or
possibilities that are encountered in modern society all over the world, at least
latently and often manifestly....Crueltyanddeindividualization are what
make a concentration camp possible; both have to be systematically fostered
for it to exist and become what it is: a place of absolute and ultimate subju-
gation beyond the bounds of a life worth living.’’
Adler also refers to the Nazi leadership principle (Führerprinzip), which ‘‘ex-
tended to the concentration camps and, because of their closed society, as-
sumed its purest form there. The ‘positive’ hierarchy of the free ss was con-
tinued among the enslaved prisoners as a ‘negative’ hierarchy.’’ Olga Lengyel,
who recorded her experience in Birkenau, picks up on this idea: ‘‘The greatest
crime committed by the Nazis against the prisoners may not have been their
extermination in the gas chambers but the frequently successful endeavor to
form the prisoners after their own image, to turn them into bad persons.’’
Because the ss had every conceivable resource at its disposal, it was even
able to blur the boundary line with which it separated people in Auschwitz
from one another: the electrically charged barbed wire. Willi Brachmann, a
Green capo and certainly not one of the worst, may serve as proof of the
blurred line between inmates and guards. A quarter century later,whenhetold
the court about his fellow prisoners under his command, he casually used the
expression ‘‘my inmates.’’
Thefact thatfluid bordersbetweenthetwo sharplydividedgroups of people
inAuschwitz were createdbytheother sideaswell is an indicationofthelimits
that human nature imposes on a totalitarian system even where it has estab-
lished its most unrestricted dominance. For the time being, Viktor Pestek, an
ss man who escaped from Auschwitz together with an inmate and returned
to the camp in order to help others escape, may suffice as evidence for the
crossing of the boundary set by the ss leadership.
One result of contact between two such antithetical groups of people was
that prisoners were even integrated into a special ss unit; according to ss
theory, Germans had ‘‘Führer qualities’’ even as prisoners. In practical terms,