Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz
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medical student when he was sent to the camp. He was soon put on the staff
of the infirmaries and became camp elder in the hkb at Jawischowitz and
later in the one at Monowitz. After the war Budziaszek became a resident of
Hanover and Germanized his name to Buthner. Because serious charges were
brought against him by former fellow prisoners, the German courts had to
initiate legal proceedings. This is why there are numerous statements given
as evidence about Budziaszek’s activity in Monowitz.
Thus Norbert Wollheim declared that Budziaszek ‘‘personally made selec-
tions in the camp without the participation of ssmen.’’ Arthur Posnansky tes-
tified under oath that at smaller selections Budziaszek acted on his own and
his superior, the ss medic Gerhard Neubert, only nodded. In the courtroom
EphraimDiament characterized him as ‘‘a zealous helperof the ssphysicians’’
and Rudi Wachsmann portrayed him as ‘‘a fanatical, dangerous, and dreaded
anti-Semite.’’ Rudolph Robert confirmed Budziaszek’s anti-Semitic attitude
and its effects with these words: ‘‘He frequently turned away Jewish inmates
who came to him for treatment, and so they had to continue to run around
with gaping wounds. The Jewish inmates were afraid of this Polish inmate
physician.’’
Jan Trajster told me about his impression that at selections Budziaszek was
more unapproachable than Neubert. He also charges Budziaszek with having
learned how to perform operations at the expense of the patients. He remem-
bers that he once performed stomach surgery without having made a diagno-
sis simply to practice this procedure. Robert Waitz, a French professor, tes-
tified that Neubert and Budziaszek made preselections. ‘‘I clearly remember
this,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Sometimes these two presented such a large number of in-
matestothess physician that the latter could not accept all of them. I know
that Dr. Fischer once told Budziaszek that 600 inmates had been presented to
him for the gas chamber, but that he needed only 300. Budziaszek urged the
ss physician to take all 600, but he did not prevail.’’
Oszkár Betlen claims that, generally speaking, theinmate physiciansdid all
they could to inhibit the process of extermination and that Budziaszek was an
exception. He remembers that at a selection a craftsman was presented. ‘‘The
ss physician Fischer said that he was a tailor who could work in the camp.
Camp elder Dr. Budziaszek said to Dr. Fischer that the man could not be used
in the camp because there was no room for an additional tailor. Dr. Fischer
yielded, and the man was sent to Birkenau for gassing. To avoid a repetition
of this sort of thing, Dr. Fischer said about an inmate who was a chemist by
profession: ‘This man can definitely work for IG [Farben].’’’
Betlen has given this characterization of the camp elder: ‘‘He was a Polish
nationalist. It may be that he did something for Polish inmates, but he treated
Jewish inmates and members of other nations badly.’’
224 n the prisoners
GeorgesWellers did not go to Monowitz until July 1944, whereas the obser-
vations cited above refer to an earlier period. Wellers states that Budziaszek
helped him even though he had to wear a Star of David. Complaints about
Budziaszek’s anti-Semitic activities reached us in the main camp, and at that
time I talked with Polish leaders of the resistance movement. Stanislaw Klod-
zinski recalls that he and Cyrankiewicz issued a warning to Budziaszek, and
he believes that in general one could say both bad and good things about him.
He is said to have helped many patients before he became a camp elder; but as
soon as he become a ‘‘big man,’’ he participated in selections and performed
unnecessary operations. Dr. Vladimir Orlicky charges Budziaszek with having
raged in the infirmary at Jawischowitz. He is reputed to have capriciously in-
jected a patient named Mandelbaum, a Polish Jew born in 1902, with pus from
the wound of a patient he had just operated on.
It must be mentioned thatBudziaszekwas very good at ‘‘organizing’’ equip-
ment for his infirmary. Thus even electroshock treatments could eventually
be given there, which also brought benefits of another kind. According to
Georges Wellers, in October 1944 about a dozen mentally ill women were
regularly taken fromBirkenauto Monowitz,wherethey were given electrocon-
vulsive therapy.This opened up an avenue for Monowitz prisoners to establish
contact with their relatives in the Birkenau women’s camp. Budziaszek did
help Poles; Tadeusz Kosmider confirms that he was ‘‘the best comrade’’ for
Poles. He, too, emphasizes that Budziaszek obtained everything imaginable
for the infirmary.
Zenon Drohocki, who is personally indebted to Budziaszek, confirms that
the latter managed to ‘‘turn the Monowitz hkb into a model for the other in-
firmaries’’ and describes him as ‘‘very capable as a physician and ‘organizer,’ a
very good, helpful, and tireless comrade.’’ To be sure, Drohocki cannot over-
look the fact that his compatriot was not free of the anti-Semitism prevalent
in Poland and believes that he was ‘‘not sufficiently prepared’’ to resist the
current. Drohocki, an experienced inmate physician, also points to another
factor that probably caused inmates to have a bad opinion of this camp elder:
‘‘Without the collaboration of the ss nothing whatever could be done, and
certainly nothing good.’’
Years later Budziaszek told me, by way of defending himself, about the di-
lemma in which he found himself. Many inmates avoided going to the infir-
mary for as long as they could, even if they were sick, because they had heard
about the selections. The ss camp leader noticed one time that numerous in-
mates on the labor details could hardly stay on their feet and dragged along
the paper bandages that had opened as they marched out of the camp—in
short, their sight offended his military eye, and thus he ordered that those
unfit for work be identified in all blocks. No one had any doubt about the
The Inmate Infirmary n 225
fate that awaited these men. Budziaszek received this order as camp elder,
and he passed it on to the physicians who served under him. These physicians
named only three of the several thousand inmates. Budziaszek asserted that
‘‘the physicians could come to me with this low figure, but I could not take it
to the ss medic.’’ A subsequent selection claimed 150 to 200 physically weak
victims.
In retrospect Budziaszek criticizes those physicians for taking the easy way
out and putting the burden of responsibility on him. If instead of three they
had listed perhaps thirty or sixty, he could have desisted from the later selec-
tion, and the final result would not have been so unfavorable. Others have
shown that in such a difficult situation only a trusting cooperation of the en-
tire infirmarypersonnelcould prevent one oranotherinmate functionary from
becoming the tool of the ss. The power deriving from his armband probably
went to young Budziaszek’s head to such a great extent that he was incapable
of developing a relationship based on trust with those serving under him.
n Rudolf Diem, by contrast, was mature and experienced; he was forty-four
years old when he was deported to Auschwitz. Many Poles praise him as the
man who saved their lives. With the old Polish inmates in mind, Fejkiel calls
him the ‘‘camp trusty.’’ Servility was alien to Diem, and his imprisonment
could not break his pride. However, his anti-Semitism led this army physi-
cian to save his compatriots by sometimes steering ss men making selections
to Jews. His compatriot Holuj confirms that Diem harbored ‘‘an elementary
hatred of Jews’’ and ‘‘actively contributed to their destruction.’’
I once saw Diem stand in the outpatient clinic before a row of naked in-
mates whom he had to examine so that he might present them to the ssphysi-
cianthenextday.Noss man was in the room. With his face contorted with
rage, the otherwise very dignified-looking physician beat an utterly emaciated
Jew who was standing in front of him with his stethoscope, evidently because
he had not grasped an order. Vilo Jurkovic, who was able to observe Diem’s
conduct because he worked in the office of the hkb for an extended period,
reports that Diem took it upon himself to send Jews for lethal injections with-
out first presenting them to the ss physician, and he calls him a ‘‘helper of
mass extermination.’’ When Diem was transferred to the hkb in Birkenau, he
evidently revised his attitude. Tadeusz Joachimowski has testified that Diem
refused to execute Dr. Mengele’s order to select Jews with these words: ‘‘I am
an inmate, a physician, and a Pole, and that is why I can’t do this.’’ He knew
that this meant dismissal from his top position.
The case of the physician Enna Weiß may illustrate that condemnations
of leading functionaries in the infirmary must be considered with caution.
‘‘ManyJews hated her,’’ writes Cilia Goldglas, ‘‘because they did not know that
226 n the prisoners
she did her very best for all.’’ While everyone could see that the physician in
charge accompanied the ss physician when he was making selections, an at-
tempt by an inmate physician to help had to be done as secretly as possible.
Weiß, who had been deported from Slovakia before she had completed her
medical studies, was young as well as strikingly pretty and self-assured. That
mayhavebeenwhythess physicians placed her in this influential position,
perhaps prompting many older nurses and physicians to be envious of her.
I have asked many survivors their opinion of Weiß. Romualda Ciesielska, a
Pole who was in charge of the children’s block in the women’s camp, charac-
terizes her as ‘‘neither good nor bad’’ and adds that Weiß did anything to keep
her position. Regina Steinberg-Lebensfeld said spontaneously: ‘‘She was very
good; without her I wouldn’t have survived.’’ Jolan Groß-Deutsch also testi-
fied that Weiß saved her life when she was laid up in the infirmary with severe
cellulitis. Iris Langer, too, was helped by Enna Weiß: ‘‘She was very kind to all
Slovak women.’’ Unlike these women, Claire Beja was not a compatriot of the
physician, but was from Greece. She gratefully remembers that Weiß made it
possible for her and her sister to stay on in the infirmary for a while after their
recovery by having them knit baby clothes for an ss physician named König.
Vera Foltynova also confirms that Weiß helped many patients. Why, then, do
many survivors have negative memories of her? Foltynova explains this with
a statement that has general validity: ‘‘Everyone was a bit power-crazed.’’
Anna Palarczyk’s judgment seems to carry the greatest weight. As a block
elder she was not dependent on the help of the inmate camp physician, and as
a Pole she was able to observe the conduct of a Jewish inmate functionary ob-
jectively. Palarczyk confirms that Enna Weiß helped selflessly. She is reputed
to have secretly switched selectees with dead inmates, saving some lives that
way, and to have performed abortions at a time when every woman who was
giving birth was taken to the gas chamber. ‘‘In everything she did her heart
remained pure,’’ writes Jeanne Juda, who got to know Enna Weiß quite well
and esteems her.
n The story of Dr. Maximilian Samuel, a respected professor of gynecology
from Cologne, is bound up with the sterilization experiments that destroyed
Dering’s reputation. As a Jew Samuel had to emigrate to Belgium and later to
France, from where he was deported to Auschwitz with his wife and daughter
in late August 1942.
Dounia Ourisson-Wasserstrom, who worked in the Political Department,
remembers that his arrival was announced with a note requesting the best
possible living conditions for him. In point of fact, Dr. Samuel survived the
initial selection, though on that occasion only thirty-nine out of 957 depor-
tees were spared the gas chamber and Dr. Samuel was sixty-two years old at
The Inmate Infirmary n 227
the time. His preferential treatment probably derived from the Iron Cross that
he had received inWorld War I and his reported participation in themovement
against the French occupation in Cologne. After imprisonment in Golleschau
and Monowitz, Dr. Samuel was transferred to the experimental Block 10 of
the main camp, probably in May 1943.
Judgments about his activity there are harsh. Dr. Dora Lorska, who was on
the staff of that block, has criticized his overzealousness. Sara Spanjaard van
Esso, who was locked up there as a test subject, characterized him as ‘‘a thor-
oughly loathsome person’’ who was ‘‘very zealous.’’ In the Dering-Uris trial
in London, many witnesses also mentioned Dr. Samuel, and on the basis of
these testimonies Mavis M. Hill and I. Norman Williams have described him
in their documentation as a sinister pest.
Everything connected with the strictly isolated experimental block was ob-
served particularly closely by the resistance movement. We were quite aware
that a Jewish physician could hardly evade an order to participate in experi-
ments without endangering his life. Samuel’s position was fundamentally dif-
ferent from Dering’s, but the zeal he displayed was not forced on him. One
time I cautiously indicated to him that an inmate participating in human ex-
periments of the ss should not do more than what was absolutely necessary.
Samuel brusquely rejected this by telling me that he knew what he had to
do, and I immediately changed the subject. His reaction made it appear risky
to speak of it again, and more plainly. The ‘‘Aryan’’ physician Dr. Adelaide
Hautval refused to assist Samuel in experiments that he conducted on Schu-
mann’s orders. Samuel reported this to the ss, and eventually we learned that
he also had contact with the Political Department.
One day the ss garrison physician asked me my opinion of Samuel. Dr.
Wirths had occasionally asked me what I thought of functionaries in the in-
firmaries without giving a reason for his questions. Each time it turned out
that he had asked my opinion because he had been considering a person for
a leading position. After all I had learned about Samuel, I had reservations
about helping him to an influential position, and so my answer was guarded.
Wirths responded by saying that he did not think too highly of Samuel, and
then he dictated something else to me. Soon thereafter Friedrich Ontl, the ss
garrison physician’s top sergeant, took Dr. Samuel to Birkenau, and the office
was instructed to prepare his death certificate.
Should I have givenWirths a different answer? Upon sober reflection I con-
clude that I could not have reacted differently.Yet my thoughts keep returning
to this question, and I wonder whether I unintentionally share the responsi-
bility for that man’s death.
Why did the ss kill Samuel before the conclusion of the experiments? Ta-
deusz Paczula believes that the ss ‘‘were evidently dissatisfied with him be-
228 n the prisoners
cause of his talkativeness and unsavory appearance,’’ for ‘‘Samuel’s face was
covered with a suppurating eczema and was repulsive to look at.’’ Dering also
stated that Samuel was eliminated because he was ‘‘old, useless, and full of
eczemas,’’ though he formulated the reasons differently in a London court-
room, saying that Samuel was arrogant, knew too much, and started quarrel-
ing with other physicians. De Wind learned from his wife, a ‘‘guinea pig’’ in
Block 10, that prior to his disappearance Samuel had clashed with Clauberg.
According to Dr. Alina Brewda, Samuel was convinced that her transfer to the
experimental block as physician in charge meant his death. At that time he
told her that he was an old man who was now superfluous, and he already
regarded himself as a dead man because he was the bearer of secrets.
This, however, would not explain the zeal with which Samuel continued to
carry out the ss’s orders. Brewda supposes that the ss blackmailed him with
regard tohis daughterin Birkenau and describes him as a ‘‘confused old man.’’
Tadeusz Holuj, a clerk in the block that housed Samuel, has probably come
up with the best reason for Samuel’s killing: ‘‘Dr. Samuel once wrote a letter
to Himmler. I read it because all inmates who wanted to send letters had to
submit them unsealed to the office. Dr. Samuel begged Himmler to spare his
daughter Liselotte, who had been deported to Birkenau along with him at the
age of nineteen, and referred to his meritorious service in World War I. As
a frontline soldier he had been wounded, and later he was decorated for his
opposition to the occupying forces in Cologne. He asked that his daughter be
released because of these services. A few days later Dr. Samuel disappeared
from the camp, and then his death was reported.’’ Paczula also remembers
that Samuel wrote similar letters to Himmler.
The type represented by Dr. Samuel in such extreme form was often en-
countered in Auschwitz, especially among older inmates—prisoners who de-
spite their great intelligence and life experience, despite knowledge of the
Auschwitz machinery of destruction, refused to face reality and harbored the
insane hope that they could secure an exception for themselves. Years later I
spoke with Dr. Hautval, who had been informed on by Samuel. She felt sorry
for the old man and said: ‘‘I can still see him before me, sweating with fear.’’
n That extraordinary woman represents an entirely different type in great
purity. Hautval was born in 1906 in Lorraine as the daughter of a Protestant
pastor and given a strict religious upbringing. She received a medical degree
from the University of Strassburg. After the Nazi occupation of France, she
was arrested and while in prison protested against the bad treatment of her
Jewish fellow prisoners. This was the answer she received: ‘‘If you defend the
Jews, you will share their fate.’’ Thus she was sent to Auschwitz on Janu-
ary 27, 1943, and assigned to the infirmary there. Soon she was asked by the
The Inmate Infirmary n 229
ss garrison physician whether she could work as a gynecologist. At that time
Hautval had already heard about the sterilization experiments and suspected
that this question could be connected with them. Nevertheless, she gave a
positive answer. When a London court questioned her about her motivation,
she stated: ‘‘I wanted to know what kind of experiments they were, because
it was possible that we could leave the camp some day.’’
In this way Dr. Hautval became acquainted with Block 10 and the experi-
ments made there. When the ss garrison physician instructed her to assist
Professor Clauberg in these operations, she told him that she was absolutely
opposed to sterilizations. When the London court asked her how Wirths re-
acted to this refusal, she answered: ‘‘Dr.Wirths was surprised that a physician
workingas apsychiatrist regardeda method as bad whenitconstituted a selec-
tion aimed at preserving the purity of the race.’’ She persevered in her point
of view and justified it by saying that no one had the right to make decisions
about the life and fate of others.
Dr. Samuel, who at the behest of the Luftwaffe physician Schumann re-
moved ovaries of ‘‘guinea pigs’’ that had been destroyed by X-ray treatment,
oncebrusquelyorderedhertoanesthetize a victim,aseventeen-year-oldGreek
girl, before the surgery. After Hautval had done this, she informed Samuel
that she would henceforth not assist at operations of this kind, whereupon
Samuel reported her to the ss.
Since Dr. Hautval occupied a key position in the London trial and Dering’s
defense was that any refusal would have posed an absolute risk to one’s life,
she was questioned at length. This was her response to the question why she
had not refused to participate in the very first operation: ‘‘The reason was that
I did not react quickly enough, and at that moment I was afraid of the con-
sequences.’’ This response explains why there were so few similar reactions.
In Auschwitz people were repeatedly confronted with surprising situations.
More than a quarter century after this incident, Dr. Hautval told me, by way
of deflecting undue attention to her refusal, ‘‘Believe me, I am still bothered
by the fact that I assisted Samuel at this first operation.’’
In the course of her testimony Hautval told the London court that after
Samuel had informed him of her refusal, the ss garrison physician asked her
whether she had not noticed that the Jewish women on whom these experi-
ments were made were different from her. ‘‘I replied that there are differ-
ent people who are different from me, beginning with the physician himself.
Wirths made no response.’’
Dr. Hautval was transferred back tothe Birkenau women’s camp,whereshe
again refused to participate in experiments, this time the ones conducted by
Dr. Mengele. On August 16, 1943, a day Dr. Hautval has not forgotten, shewas
ordered to come to the Political Department the next morning. She needed no
230 n the prisoners
explanation of what that meant, and friends in the infirmary gave her sleeping
pills. To this day she does not know how she escaped that danger. She never
found out under what pretext her appearance before the camp Gestapo was
canceled, but she surmises that Dr. Wirths and Dr. Weber from the Institute
of Hygiene helped squash this affair.
Hautval, who resists any emphasis on herself, rejects all comparisons and
judgments. She explains her conduct by saying, ‘‘I was fortunate enough to
have higher values than life itself. I have other sides as well.’’ Hautval’s warn-
ing against rash judgments and self-righteous condemnations ought to be
taken seriously.
Dr. Alina Brewda also stood up for the victims in the experimental block.
The women on whom experiments were made and who as witnesses in a
London courtroom accused Dering of misanthropic brutality testified that in
those days Brewda was a kind of mother to them.
n Before one dares to judge this person or that who had a function in an in-
firmary, one should always keep in mind the pressure under which every staff
member worked. This pressure had the strongest effect on those who were at
the very bottom of the inmate hierarchy. Jan Weiß testified about this at the
Frankfurt trial. In Block 20 of the main camp, Jews were forced to help ss
medic Klehrand his colleagues when hewas killing the sick and the weak with
injections of poison. ‘‘I had to remove the murdered men,’’ said Weiß. ‘‘I had
to take the dead from the injection room in Block 20 past the hallway to the
washroom. Often I was only a half meter or a meter from Klehr when he was
injecting. On September 29, 1942, Klehr murdered my father right in front of
my eyes.’’ When the presiding judge asked Weiß to describe this incident in
detail, no matter how hard it might be for the witness, he continued: ‘‘At that
time Klehr gave injections every day. My father was laid up in Block 21 with
cellulitis in his left hand, and I frequently visited him. On that day my father
was suddenly taken to Block 20. Two men were always taken to Klehr’s room
together, and one of these was my father. Klehr spoke to both of them. ‘Have
a seat. You’ll now be inoculated against typhus.’ I began to cry. He injected
my father, and I carried him to the washroom.’’ Weiß also explained why he
remained mute: ‘‘I didn’t tell Klehr at the time that this was my father because
I was afraid he would tell me to take a seat next to him.’’
Despite the pressure that was on all of them, though to varying degrees,
nurses and physicians did many positive things in the infirmaries of Ausch-
witz.
It is no accident that the resistance movement in Auschwitz gained a firm
foothold among the personnel of the infirmaries, as it did in every other Nazi
concentration camp. The infirmaries that the camp administrations had in-
The Inmate Infirmary n 231
stalled as ‘‘waiting rooms for death’’ were frequently transformed into cells
of rescue and aid, though never completely and certainly not easily. Because
this was possible, one may say with a detachment born of experience that it
was proper to take positions in the infirmary. The moral burden that a per-
son thereby shouldered for the rest of his life and the criticism from people
who make judgments without knowledge of all connections and backgrounds
were the price that had to be paid. What weighs more heavily on the scale is
the awareness of a physician that he remained a healer even in Auschwitz and
that of a nurse that he did not lose his human face even in death’s waiting
room.
232 n the prisoners
those born in auschwitz
nnn
After the establishment of a women’s camp in Auschwitz, the camp admin-
istration had to find an answer to the question of what would happen with
children who were born in Auschwitz. The answer was in keeping with the
general methods of the ss.
‘‘When an expectant woman came to the camp in 1942,’’ writes Anna Palar-
czyk, ‘‘neither she nor the child remained alive. I frequently saw newborn
babies in the outpatient clinic. They continued to lie there until they died.’’
Here is a report by Julian Kiwala, who was assigned to the hkb of the
women’s camp as block elder from November 1942 to January 1943:
One day a women’s transport arrived from Zamosc, and it included five or
six pregnant women. They gave birth in the infirmary. At first the mothers
and the children received milk and white bread as additional rations. The
children were added to the inmate population, and as a block elder I had
to give a daily accounting of the numbers. One evening, when the children
were about two weeks old, the ss medic Klehr remained in the block when
we marched off (the male nurses slept in the men’s camp). When I came to
the block the next morning, those five or six children were no longer there.
I found their corpses in the morgue and was able to determine that they
had been given injections in the cardiac area.
‘‘In 1943 an imprisoned woman was permitted to give birth, but her child
did not have a right to live.’’ That is how the Polish physician Janina Kosciusz-
kowa describes a change in orders by the ss. ‘‘The female nurse put the new
baby in a water bucket and then burned it in the oven.’’ The physician found
out that it was much worse if the mother tried to save her child. One woman
managed to hide her baby for five months, but then it was discovered and she
was ordered to turn it over for destruction. Kosciuszkowa reports that this
mother ‘‘pressed her son to her heart and went to the crematorium together
with him.’’
Stanislawa Leszczynska adds that a prisoner who had been incarcerated for
murdering her child was ordered to drown the newborn babies, and a Ger-
man prostitute had to help her. ‘‘In May 1943 the situation of many children
changed,’’ she writes. ‘‘Blond and blue-eyed children were taken away from
the mothers and sent to Naklo for Germanization.’’ As far as she remembers,
this involved a few hundred children, while 1,500 were drowned.