Auschwitz Read online

  After his release from prison in 1928, Höss pursued another of the treasured right-wing nationalist beliefs which, like anti-Semitism, helped define the Nazi movement: love of the land. While the Jews were hated because, for the most part, they lived in cities (despised, as Josef Goebbels put it, for their “asphalt culture”), “true” Germans never lost their love of nature. It was no accident that Himmler himself had studied agriculture, nor that Auschwitz was eventually to have one incarnation as an agricultural research station.

  Höss joined the Artamans, one of the agricultural communities that flourished in Germany at the time, met the woman who became his wife, and settled down to become a farmer. Then came the moment that changed his life. In June 1934, Himmler, Hitler’s chief of police, invited Höss to give up farming and become a full-time member of the SS, the elite Shutzstaffel that had originally been founded as the Führer’s personal bodyguard and, along with other duties, was now running the concentration camps.6 Himmler had known Höss for some time and liked what he saw—Höss was an early member of the Nazi party, having joined in November 1922, and held party number 3240.

  Höss had a choice. He was not forced to volunteer—no one was conscripted into the SS. Yet he chose to join. In his autobiography he gives this reason for his decision: “Because of the likely prospect of swift promotion and the salary that accompanied it, I was convinced that I had to take this step.”7 This was only half the truth.

  Not surprisingly, writing after Nazism had been defeated, Höss omits what must have been for him the most important deciding factor—his emotional state at the time. In 1934, Höss would have felt he was witnessing the beginning of a new and wonderful world. Hitler had been in power for a year and already the Nazis’ internal enemies—the left-wing politicians, the “work-shy,” the anti-socials, the Jews—were being confronted. All over the country, Germans not in these specific risk-groups welcomed what they saw.

  The typical reaction was like that of Manfred von Schroeder, a banker’s son from Hamburg who joined the Nazi party in 1933: “Everything was in order again, and clean. There was a feeling of national liberation, a new start ... People said, ‘Well, this is a revolution; it is an astonishing, peaceful revolution, but it is a revolution.’”8

  Höss now had a chance to be a player in this revolution—a revolution that he had prayed for since the end of World War I. Joining the SS meant status, privilege, excitement, and a chance to influence the course of the new Germany. Remaining a farmer meant, well, staying a farmer. Is it surprising that Höss made the choice that he did? He accepted Himmler’s invitation and in November 1934 arrived at Dachau in Bavaria to start his service as a concentration camp guard.

  In the popular consciousness today—certainly in Britain and the United States—there exists confusion about the function of the various camps in the Nazi State. Concentration camps like Dachau (which was established in March 1933, less than two months after Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor) were conceptually different from death camps like Treblinka, which were not in existence until the middle of the war. Adding further to the confusion in many people’s minds is the complex history of Auschwitz, the most infamous camp of all, which was to evolve into both a concentration camp and a death camp. Grasping the importance of the distinction between the two is essential to understanding how Germans during the 1930s rationalized the existence of places like Dachau.

  None of the Germans this author has interviewed—even those who were formerly fanatical Nazis—professed themselves “enthusiastic” about the existence of the death camps, but many were more than content during the 1930s with the reality of the concentration camps. They had just lived through the nightmare of the Depression and had witnessed how, as they saw it, democracy had failed to prevent the country entering a spiral of decline. The specter of Communism still existed—in elections held in the early 1930s Germany seemed to be splitting towards the extremes, with large numbers voting for the Communist Party.

  Additionally, to a man like Manfred von Schroeder, who hailed the Nazis’ “peaceful revolution” in 1933, there were clear historical parallels that explained the necessity for the existence of the concentration camps: “To be a French nobleman in the Bastille was not so agreeable, was it? ... There were the concentration camps, but everyone said at that time, ‘Oh, the English invented them in South Africa with the Boers.’”

  The first prisoners who entered Dachau in March 1933 were mostly political opponents of the Nazis. Jews were taunted, humiliated, and beaten in those early days, but it was the left-wing politicians9 of the former regime who were seen as the more immediate threat. Höss, when he arrived at Dachau, believed absolutely that these “true opponents of the state must be securely locked up.”10

  The next three and a half years at Dachau were to play a defining role in shaping Höss’ character: For the carefully conceived regime at Dachau—inspired by Theodor Eicke, the first commandant of the camp—was not just brutal; it was designed to break the will of the inmate. Eicke channeled the violence and hatred that the Nazis felt towards their enemies into systems and order. Dachau is infamous for the physical sadism practiced there: Whippings and other beatings were commonplace. Prisoners could be murdered and their deaths be dismissed as “killed whilst attempting an escape”—and a significant minority of those sent to Dachau did die there. The real power of the regime at Dachau, however, lay less in physical abuse—terrible as it undoubtedly was—and more in mental torture.

  The first innovation at Dachau was that, unlike in a normal prison, the inmate had no clue as to how long his sentence was likely to last. During the 1930s, most prisoners in Dachau were released after a stay of about a year, but any individual sentence could be shorter or longer depending on the whim of the authorities. There was no end date for the prisoner to focus upon, only the permanent uncertainty of never knowing if freedom would come tomorrow, or next month, or next year. Höss, who had endured years of imprisonment himself, knew at once the terrible power of this policy: “The uncertainty of the duration of their imprisonment was something with which they could never come to terms,” he wrote. “It was this that wore them down and broke even the most steadfast will ... Because of this alone their life in camp was a torment.”11

  Added to this uncertainty was the way in which the guards could play with the minds of the prisoners. Josef Felder, an SPD (socialist) member of the Reichstag who was one of the earliest inmates of Dachau, remembers how—when he was at his lowest point emotionally—his jailer took a rope and demonstrated the best way to tie a noose so that he could hang himself.12 Only by exercising enormous self-control and remembering “I have a family” was he able to resist the suggestion. Inmates were required to keep their barracks and clothes absolutely meticulous. Regular inspections allowed the SS guards to find fault continually and—if they wished—punish the whole block for imaginary infractions. Everyone in a block could be “locked down” and ordered to lie silent and motionless in their bunks for days.

  At Dachau a system of “Kapos” was also introduced—something that would be adopted across the whole concentration camp network. The Kapo system subsequently also would play an important part in the running of Auschwitz. (The term “Kapo” appears to have derived from the Italian “capo,” meaning “head.”) The authorities at the camp would appoint one prisoner to be “Kapo” in each block or work “commando,” and this inmate would have enormous power over his fellow prisoners. Not surprisingly, that power was often abused. Almost more than the SS guards, the Kapos, in moment-to-moment contact with the other prisoners, could use arbitrary behavior to make life inside the camp intolerable. But the Kapos, too, were at risk if they failed to please their SS masters. As Himmler put it:His [the Kapo’s] job is to see that the work gets done ... thus he has to push his men. As soon as we are no longer satisfied with him, he is no longer a Kapo and returns to the other inmates. He knows that they will beat him to death his first night back.13

  From the Naz
is’ point of view camp life was a microcosm of the outside world. “The idea of struggle is as old as life itself,” Hitler said in a speech as early as 1928.

  In this struggle the stronger, the more able, win, while the less able, the weak, lose. Struggle is the father of all things.... It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle.14

  This quasi-Darwinian attitude, at the very core of Nazism, was evident throughout the administration of the concentration camps. The Kapos, for example, could “justly” mistreat those in their charge because they had proved themselves superior in life’s “struggle.”

  Above all else, Höss learned the essential philosophy of the SS while at Dachau. Theodor Eicke had preached one doctrine from the first—hardness: “Anyone who shows even the slightest vestige of sympathy towards them [prisoners] must immediately vanish from our ranks. I need only hard, totally committed SS men. There is no place amongst us for soft people.”15 Thus any form of sympathy, any form of compassion, was a demonstration of weakness. If an SS man felt these emotions come to him, it was a sign that the enemy had succeeded in deceiving him.

  Nazi propaganda preached that it was often in the most unlikely places that an enemy might lurk—one of the most widespread pieces of anti-Semitic propaganda aimed at children was a book called The Poisoned Mushroom , which warned of the insidious danger of the Jews by using the metaphor of a mushroom which seems attractive on the surface but is in reality poisonous. In just such away, the SS members were conditioned to despise their own feelings of concern when, for example, they witnessed the beating of an inmate. They were taught that any lingering feeling of compassion was caused by the trickery of the victim. As “enemies of the state” these cunning creatures were said to use any method—not least an appeal to the pity of those who held them captive—in an attempt to pursue their malicious goal. The memory of the “stab in the back”—the myth that Jews and Communists had plotted behind the lines to cause Germany to lose World War I—was never far away, and fitted perfectly into this vision of a dangerous but concealed enemy.

  The only certainty for members of the SS was the fundamental rightness of the orders they were given. If a superior ordered someone to be imprisoned, someone to be executed, then—even if, to the individual ordered to carry out the sentence, the judgement appeared incomprehensible—the order must be correct. The only protection against the cancer of self-doubt in the face of orders that were not immediately explicable was hardness, which therefore became a cult throughout the SS. “We must be hard as granite, otherwise the work of our Führer will perish,”16 said Reinhard Heydrich, the most powerful figure in the SS after Himmler.

  In the process of learning how to bury emotions like compassion and pity, Höss absorbed the sense of brotherhood that was also strong in the SS. Precisely because an SS man knew that he would be called upon to do things which “weaker” men could not, a powerful esprit de corps developed in which the loyalty of one’s SS comrades became a vital pillar of support. The crude values of the SS—unquestioning loyalty, hardness, protection of the Reich against the enemy within—became almost a substitute religious creed, a distinct and easily absorbed world-view. “I was full of gratitude to the SS for the intellectual guidance it gave me,” said Johannes Hassebroeck, commandant of another SS concentration camp. “We were all thankful. Many of us had been so bewildered before we joined the organization. We did not understand what was happening around us—everything was so mixed up. The SS offered us a series of simple ideas that we could understand, and we believed in them.”17

  Höss also learned at Dachau another significant lesson that would have consequences for Auschwitz. He observed how prisoners were better able to endure their imprisonment because the SS enabled them to work. He remembered his own imprisonment in Leipzig, and how it was only by being allowed to work (he had glued paper bags together) that he had been able to face each day in a more or less positive frame of mind. Now he saw how work played a similar role at Dachau, allowing the prisoners to “discipline themselves” and so enable them to withstand better the demoralizing effect of their imprisonment.18 So convinced was Höss of the palliative effect of work in the concentration camp that he even imported the slogan that had first been used at Dachau—“Arbeit macht frei” (“Work brings freedom”)—and emblazoned it across the iron gate at the entrance to Auschwitz.

  Höss was a model member of the SS and rose through the ranks at Dachau until, in April 1936, he was made Rapportführer, chief assistant to the commandant of the camp. Then, in September 1936, he was promoted to lieutenant and transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he remained until his elevation to commandant of the new concentration camp at Auschwitz. This, then, was the man who arrived in southwest Poland in the spring of 1940: a product of his genetic inheritance, of course, but also someone hugely molded by the history of the times, with six years’ service behind him as a camp guard. He now felt ready to take on his biggest challenge—creating a model concentration camp in the new Nazi empire. In his mind he knew what was expected of him, knew the purpose of the place he was about to construct. His experience at Dachau and Sachsenhausen offered a clear example for him to follow. But his superiors had other plans, and over the next months and years the camp Höss built at Auschwitz was to develop along a very different path.

  At the same time that Höss began work at Auschwitz, 400 kilometers to the northwest, his boss was doing something extremely unusual—composing a memorandum for the Führer. In Berlin, Heinrich Himmler sat and wrote the diffidently entitled “Some Thoughts on the Treatment of the Alien Population of the East.” Himmler, one of the most astute power brokers in the Nazi State, knew that it was often unwise to commit thoughts to paper. At the highest level, Nazi policy was frequently formulated verbally. Once his views were on paper Himmler realized that they could be dissected by his rivals—and, like any leading Nazi, he had many enemies who were always seeking to seize some of his power for themselves. The situation in Poland, which the Germans had occupied since the autumn of 1939, however, was such that he felt he had to make an exception and prepare a written document for Hitler. The document he wrote is one of the most significant in the history of Nazi racial policy, not least because the words Himmler committed to paper were to clarify the context within which the new camp at Auschwitz was to function.

  At that moment, in his capacity as Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, Himmler was involved in the largest and swiftest ethnic reorganization of a country ever contemplated, and the whole process was going badly wrong. Far from bringing order to Poland, a country whose supposed inefficiency the Nazis held in contempt, Himmler and his colleagues had brought only violence and chaos.

  There was no dispute among the Nazis about their basic attitude to the Poles: It was one of loathing. The question was what to do about it. One of the most important “problems” the Nazis thought they had to solve related to the Jews of Poland. Unlike in Germany, where Jews represented much less than 1 percent of the population (around 300,000 in 1940) and where most were assimilated into society, in Poland there were three million Jews, the majority of whom lived in their own communities and were often readily identifiable by their beards and other marks of their faith. After Poland was divided up between Germany and the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of war (under the terms of the secret part of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939), more than two million Polish Jews were left in the Nazi-occupied zone of the country. What should be their fate?

  Another (self-created) problem for the Nazis was finding homes for the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans who were currently being shipped to Poland. Under an agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union, ethnic Germans from the Baltic states, Bessarabia (northern Romania), and other regions now occupied by Stalin were permitted to emigrate to Germany—to “come home to the Reic
h” as the slogan went. Obsessed as they were by notions of the racial purity of “German blood,” it was an act of faith for men like Himmler to be able to accommodate all Germans who wanted to return to their native land. The difficulty was: Where should they actually go? Added to this was a third and final issue that the Nazis had to resolve. How should the eighteen million Poles now under German control who were not Jewish be treated? How should the country be organized so that they never posed a threat?

  Hitler had made a speech in October 1939 which offered some guidelines to those wrestling with these questions of policy. He made it clear that “the main task is to create a new ethnographic order; i.e. to resettle the nationalities so that in the end better lines of demarcation exist than today.”19 In practice, this meant that German-occupied Poland was to be divided—part of it would be a place where the majority of Poles would live, and part would be incorporated into Germany. The incoming ethnic Germans would then be settled not in the “Old Reich” but in this “New Reich”; they would indeed be “coming home to the Reich”—just not to the Reich they were expecting.

  This left the question of the Polish Jews. Until the start of the war, Nazi policy towards Jews living under their control had been one of growing official persecution through countless restrictive regulations, interspersed with moments of unofficial (though sanctioned) violent outrage. Hitler’s views about the Jews had changed little since the mid-1920s when, in his book Mein Kampf, he expressed the opinion that it would have been to Germany’s advantage during World War I to use “poison gas” on “10 to 12,000 of these Hebrew destroyers of the nation.” But while Hitler clearly hated the Jews—and had demonstrably done so since the end of World War I— and may, indeed, have privately expressed the desire to see them all die, no Nazi blueprint planning their extermination was yet in existence.