Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz

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the Nazi leadership to eradicate ‘inferior’ races and peoples the feeling that

they were behaving antisocially or placing themselves outside the basic norms

of society.’’

The jurist Ernst-Walter Harnack has pointed out that the crimes committed

in the name of Nazism were supported by an enormous cluster of governmen-

tal and government-related organizations

in which there was a hierarchy of thousands of people ruled in accordance

with superiority and subordination, orders, instructions, and obedience,

inﬂuenced and guided by a fascinating ideology of far-reaching power, by

feelings and pledges of loyalty, by belief in authorityand some formof trust

in the better judgment of the government—a government, moreover, that

was waging a war, and was at least tolerated by theworld until its outbreak,

that the people with their universities and churches had on the whole ap-

proved of for years and that was headed by a Führer who was often almost

religiously transﬁgured, particularly by more simple-minded and younger

people.

Harnack is clearly attempting to exculpate the ss. For example, it could not

have escaped his attention that those crimes had been committed in embry-

onic form before the outbreak of the war. However, one cannot make light

of his reference to the connivance of ‘‘universities and churches.’’ Viktor von

Weizsäcker has aptly referred to collective crimes that were committed ‘‘with

moral anesthesia.’’

Alexander Mitscherlich refutes the frequently voiced view that the murders

were committed by some dregs of society who sullied the German name. He

counters it by writing:

But we know that the Hößes and Bormanns, the higher-ups and the lowly,

were in agreement with virtually everyone. Everyone enjoyed seeing the

Jews being herded away like cattle, just as everyone enjoyed it when the

black slaves were crowded to death on vessels of the East India Company.

The rear guard of history should note that it is a matter of unconscious

enjoyment that paradoxically could fail to enter the consciousness even of

those who choked others with their own hands, trampled on them with

army boots, and shot them with guns belonging to our state. People were

executed with a steely fulﬁllment of someone’s duty. No pleasure, says

Biedermann [in Max Frisch’s play The Firebugs]. The grandeur of the genu-

ine Marquis de Sade is not often encountered; Himmlers are more likely to

be legion.

Helmut Gollwitzer goes even further when he says that the unimaginable

atrocities were ‘‘largely committed by entirely normal persons whose sadistic

284 n the jailers

opportunities were created by a historical constellation for which the entire

people is to blame, which makes both the murderers and the murdered the

victims of society.’’ Even though it would be calamitous to intermingle guilt

in the criminal sense with shared moral responsibility, this does not invali-

date Gollwitzer’s reference to shared moral guilt. Where parts of society be-

came aware of their responsibility, they were able to inhibit the commission

of crimes. The mass murder of mentally ill German nationals was stopped

by Hitler in view of the negative reaction of wide circles of opinion, whose

spokesmen were clerical dignitaries.

The murders of Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs somewhere ‘‘in the East’’ did not

elicit comparable reactions. Thus it was possible to assure ss men that they

were doing things one could not discuss but could be proud of, things that

ordinary people could not be expected to do, whose value would be properly

assessed only by futuregenerations.Thus they were eventuallycapableof mur-

dering Jews and Gypsies with the mentality of exterminators who kill vermin.

This should be taken literally because the ss men who were trained in the use

of poison gas were called ‘‘disinfectors.’’

n Neither the Nazi propaganda nor the general attitude of the German people

could exert as enduring an eﬀect on ethnic Germans as they did on people

who had grown up in the Third Reich.The ethnic Germans were inﬂuenced by

simpler methods. Stefan Baretzki, who had been posted to Auschwitz at age

twenty-two, gave the Frankfurt court a rather graphic picture of how these

young, primitive fellows were molded in Auschwitz. During one of his spon-

taneous outbursts in the courtroom, Baretzki exclaimed: ‘‘In those days we

wereshownrabble-rousing ﬁlmslike Jud Süß and Ohm Krüger.I rememberthese

two titles. And what consequences they had for the inmates! The ﬁlms were

screened for the ss staﬀ—and how the inmates looked the next day!’’ Erich

Kohlhagen remembers that he and other Jews in the penal colony at Sachsen-

hausen were beaten up after the ss had watched the ﬁlm Jud Süß the evening

before.

Baretzki also described to the Frankfurt court how the young ethnic Ger-

mans were induced to carry out all orders. Once he blurted out:

I was in Auschwitz.Thousands were killed there.We were told that this was

a law and had to be done that way; that’s what ss camp leader Schwarz-

huber said at an instructional session. They said that there must be gas-

sings. We were instructed by oﬃcers and civilians.We were told that it was

necessary to exterminate the Jews. I’m not a good speaker, so you’ll have

to help me, Your Honor. Some of us did ask: ‘‘What did these people do?,’’

and they answered that they poisoned the wells and committed sabotage.

The Guards n 285

When we asked, ‘‘The women and children, too?,’’ the answer was, ‘‘When

you are in the ﬁrst grade, you use the book for that grade and not the one

for the ﬁfth grade.’’

In response to the presiding judge, who asked whether that meant he and the

others did not understand the situation at that time, Baretzki replied: ‘‘Yes sir.

They told us we would ﬁnd out later. They also told us that everything Hitler

did was law.’’

Baretzki’s defense was anything but sophisticated, and thus he can be be-

lieved when he testiﬁed as follows at the preliminary hearing: ‘‘We were often

told by ss oﬃcers and civilians that what happened in Auschwitz was legal

because the inmates had acted as saboteurs. I personally held the view that all

these things were an injustice. For example, what acts of sabotage could chil-

dren have committed? When I was on leave in Romania in 1943, my mother

told me it would be best if I did not return to Auschwitz and lived illegally

in the mountains. On that occasion my brother also advised me to go to the

mountains. But I thought that if I didn’t go back, there might be reprisals

against my mother.’’

n The commandant of the ethnic German Baretzki never toyed with such

thoughts. When Höß was asked in his prison cell at Nuremberg whether he

could have refused to execute an order, this was his reply: ‘‘No. On the basis of

our entire military training, the idea of disobeying an order, no matter what it

was, simply did not cross our minds.’’ Höß added: ‘‘I assume you are unable

to understand our world. I had to obey orders, of course.’’

Höß returned to this subject when he was working on his memoirs in the

Cracow prison: ‘‘Since my arrest, I have been told repeatedly that I could have

refused that order (to expand Auschwitz into a place of mass exterminations)

or that I could have gunned down Himmler. I don’t think that even one of the

thousands of ss leaders could ever have entertained such a thought. That sort

of thing was simply impossible. Sure, many ss leaders grumbled and groused

about many a hard order from the rfss, but they did carry out every order.

The ss indoctrination was deep seated, and the rfss knew quite well what he

could ask of the ss.’’ Even in prison the awareness of being subject to higher

command had not disappeared. Höß continued: ‘‘But outsiders can’t under-

stand that there was not one ss leader who refused to obey an order from the

rfss or did away with him because of a cruel or harsh order. What the Führer

ordered, or what we were ordered to do by his second in command, the rfss,

was always right.’’ Höß emphasized the word ‘‘always.’’

Josef Kramer, the commandant of Birkenau, gave this testimony before the

British military tribunal in Lüneburg: ‘‘Himmler was my commander in chief,

286 n the jailers

and his every order had to be executed, of course. There simply was no other

view, and not to carry out a military order was utterly out of the question.’’

Adolf Eichmann asserted in Israeli captivity that only one thing could have

given him a bad conscience: not carrying out the orders given him. In the

courtroom he said that his guilt was obedience, but he immediately added that

obedience is to be praised as a virtue. Like Höß he doubted that his judges

would be able to understand him.

When the engineer Klaus Dylewski was asked by an examining magistrate

why he did not refuse tocarryout criminal commands in Auschwitz, he replied

that this would have been ‘‘a reaction alien to the German national character.’’

In Nuremberg Höß admitted that he sometimes had doubts about carry-

ing out mass murder. ‘‘The only decisive factor in dispelling these doubts

was always the unconditional order and the accompanying rationale of rfss

Himmler.’’ In Cracow Höß gave this pithy summary: ‘‘Having been raised in

the strict discipline of the ss organization, I believed that everything that its

head and Hitler ordered was right, and it was my view that it would be a dis-

grace and a sign of weakness if I tried to evade the execution of these orders

in any way.’’

n In these ex post facto attempts to explain their conduct, it is signiﬁcant

that neither Höß nor the others defended themselves by saying that they had

executed the orders to commit murder out of a fear of punishment. Evidently

such an excuse seemed too shameful and incredible to them. For example,

when asked by an examining magistrate about what happened to ss members

who declared that their nerves and emotions did not permit them to carry out

certain assignments, Emanuel Schäfer, an ss lieutenant colonel and the ﬁrst

head of the Kattowitz Gestapo, responded: ‘‘Such people were transferred for

their own best interests and were assigned duties that were not such a strain

on their nerves and emotions. I can’t name a speciﬁc case oﬀhand, but I know

that such transfers were made. I think it is absurd if people claim today that

such people were under threat of being shot. Of course, those involved ran

the risk of being regarded as ‘Schleimscheißer’ [pantywaists]. There also was

the possibility that such persons had to wait longer for their promotion, but

this too cannot be stated with certainty.’’ Schäfer ought to know because he

was the superior of the ss men who served in the Political Department at

Auschwitz.

Richard Böck remembers a comrade named Lange, an ‘‘old ﬁghter’’ who

had been honored with the Blood Order and the Golden Party Badge. In the

early period, when shootings of prisoners were still handled by execution

squads, Lange managed to have only volunteers used for the purpose. He ar-

gued for his initiative by saying that as an old Nazi he had not fought for this

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sort of thing. This prompted the head of his company, ss First Lieutenant

Josef Kollmer, to snap at him in front of his lined-up unit and tell him that

he ought to be ashamed of himself.Thereupon Lange submitted a request for

a transfer to Dachau, which was immediately approved. When I asked Böck

whether Lange’s initiative had not embarrassed the companychief, he replied:

‘‘More men volunteered for those executions than could be used.’’ This has

been conﬁrmed by Wilhelm Brock, who was in Auschwitz from the beginning

to the end and testiﬁed as follows: ‘‘On a number of occasions an ss man who

had been assigned to an execution squad did not want to participate. Then

therewas a discussion among the men,and someone always came forward as a

replacement. All the oﬃcers cared about was that the numbers were correct.’’

As is well known, despite thorough research and the expertise of their cli-

ents, not a single defense attorney in the numerous trials of Nazis was able to

present even one case of an ss man having been punished as an example to

others for refusing to obey an order to murder someone.

n It is not the aim of this study to fathom the boundless authority that the

pedantic-bureaucratic Himmler enjoyed among his ss; he was in no way akin

to the ideal image in whose spirit his men were educated. But a few revealing

episodes will be mentioned here. Himmler inspected Auschwitz on two occa-

sions,on March 1, 1941, and on July 17 and 18, 1942. On the latter occasion the

mechanism of mass destruction had recently been installed, and he inspected

it closely, becoming ‘‘weak in the knees,’’ as Höß put it to Eichmann. Despite

this sign of weakness registered by Höß, Himmler ordered an expansion of

the capacity for killing at that time. To Höß he served as an example of how

a man must overcome his weaknesses and remain hard.

In Auschwitz Himmler observed with interest how corporal punishment

was administered to a woman. Another episode is also characteristic of this

man. Since Himmler had a special interest in anything connected with agri-

culture, he asked to see a cowshed. Teddy Pietrzykowski, a Polish prisoner,

was working there at the time, and after he had reported in accordance with

regulations, he was asked by Himmler whether there was anything to drink.

Teddyanswered: ‘‘Yes sir, regular milk, skim milk, and cream.’’ Himmler took

a glass of skim milk and gave Teddy a pack of cigarettes for it.

Himmler’s eﬀect on the Auschwitz ss is indicated by the following mar-

ginal statements at theFrankfurttrial.Twenty-twoyears later ssroll callleader

Oswald Kaduk astonished the court with this minute description: ‘‘The visit

(Himmler’s) took place on July 17, 1942. At 2:20 p.m. the rfss arrivedatthe

main camp and stayed there until 3:00 p.m. The rfss was not present at the

roll call and was driven to Birkenau at 3:05.’’ During his visit Himmler spoke

288 n the jailers

to an ordinary ss man; when Baretzki asked him afterward what Himmler had

told him, all he answered was: ‘‘Do you think I know? I was so afraid that I

peed in my pants.’’

Höß’s adjutant, the Hamburg export merchant Robert Mulka, who was in

noway a primitive person, gave the Frankfurtcourt this recollection of Himm-

ler’s visit: ‘‘I had a discussion with the rfss about the strange behavior of ss

leaders. At the dinner table in the ss leadership home, an ss second lieuten-

ant leaned on the table with both arms. I sent an orderly to him and asked

whether he would not like a chaise longue. Himmler overheard this and said:

‘Great! That’s how I want my leaders to be! They shouldn’t just be brave at

the front but should be able to walk in patent-leather shoes in any salon.’’’

Two decades later Mulka remained proud that the rfss, as he still respectfully

called Himmler, honored him with two sentences. It was also characteristic

of Himmler that even toward the end of the war he concerned himself with

trivial matters while frequently leaving decisive problems unsolved. This re-

inforced the feeling in members of the ss that they were constantly under the

direct control of therfss.This is illustrated by the following unusual episode.

Rudolf Friemel, a Viennese, fought in the ranks of the international bri-

gades in Spain and married a Spanish woman. There was a civil wedding in

accordance with the laws of the Republic. After the defeat of the Republic,

Friemel, like most of his comrades, was interned in southern France and

ﬁnally landed in Auschwitz. His wife, who had given birth to a son and also

emigrated, moved in with his father in Vienna. Since the Franco regime did

not recognize civil marriages contracted at the time of the Republic, the Ger-

man authorities also regarded Friemel’s marriage as invalid. For this reason

Friemel’s father and his wife tried very hard to enable Rudi Friemel to marry

his wife again in accordance with German law, and theirpetition wound up on

Himmler’s desk. Himmler made a positive judgment; the father, the wife, and

the little son received permission to travel to Auschwitz, and Rudi was per-

mitted to let his hair grow. On March 18, 1944, he put on civilian clothes and

went to the Auschwitz registry, which normally issued only death certiﬁcates,

and the marriage was contracted in accordance with German law. Because

Himmler had personally given permission for this, the camp administration

granted Friemel unusual rights. The Identiﬁcation Service, which took only

photos that ﬁlled rogues’ galleries, made a real wedding picture, and a room

in the camp bordello was placed at the disposal of the couple for one night.

n It is easy to demonstrate that it cannot have been just blind obedience that

caused the ss men of Auschwitz to carry out all murderous commands in-

stantly, for other orders were generally ignored. For example, sexual inter-

The Guards n 289

course between members of the ss and Fremdvölkische (members of other na-

tionalities) was forbidden. It was necessary to keep reminding the ss of this

order, which was regularly circumvented. Orders from the commandant’s of-

ﬁce frequently began with thesewords: ‘‘For the last timeI draw yourattention

totheprohibition...’’

Any personal relationship with an inmate was forbidden with particular

strictness. Nevertheless, many ss men took up intimate relations with female

prisoners. Höß, who said that every order was sacred to him, was one of the

ﬁrst to transgress this prohibition.

Himmler put particular emphasis on prohibiting his men from appropri-

ating the property of those murdered in extermination campaigns. The rfss

threatened that ‘‘anyone who takes even one mark is a dead man.’’ Only a tiny

numberof ss members did not enrich themselves in the places of destruction.

Konrad Morgen, who headed an ss commission charged with investigating

cases of corruption, remembers that in several dozen cases ss members in

Auschwitz were sentenced to prison terms (and, despite Himmler’s threat,

certainly not to death) for appropriating the property of murdered persons.

This did not have a deterrent eﬀect.

ss men misappropriated not only the gold of the murdered but also the

food of the living. Baretzki, a block leader in Birkenau, has given a graphic de-

scription of this. ‘‘At nine o’clock the head of the Labor Service and the ss roll

call leader went to breakfast in the inmate kitchen, followed by the ss camp

leader at ten.’’ From Höß on down, the prominent leaders went to Harmense

to get ﬁsh, which were raised in ponds there. Pery Broad writes that every day

vehicles with sausages and meat destined for the inmate kitchen were driven

to the sskitchen. ‘‘The sscuisine worsened perceptiblyafter Egersdörfer,who

administered the storeroom of the inmate kitchen, had a ﬁght with ss Tech-

nical Sergeant Scheﬄer, the head of the ss kitchen, which meant that there

no longer were any special allotments.’’ Egersdörfer testiﬁed that ss mem-

bers transferred large quantities of food from the inmate kitchen. He claims

to have noticed that about 200 hundredweights of margarine that were part

of the inmates’ rations had been concealed in the cellar of the commandant’s

building.

Goods that were scarce in wartimewere openly appropriated from Canada.

The higher the rank of an ss man, the more uninhibited the method of ap-

propriation. If an ss man had a bath prepared for himself in the ss inﬁrmary,

the inmate charged with that chore also had to provide soap and cologne. No

one asked where he got those things, and it goes without saying that they

disappeared after the bath.

In the ss Tailoring Detail, twenty-three female prisoners were occupied ex-

290 n the jailers

clusively with sewing for the wives of ss leaders and female ss wardens. At a

timewhen Himmler had repeatedlyand very vigorously ordered that the great-

est possible number of inmates be made available to the arms industry and

that inmates could be used only for absolutely necessary work in the camp,

this detail was enlarged. I need hardly mention that the material was obtained

in Canada. In those days ‘‘Aryanizing’’ was not considered an insult to one’s

honor, and that is why despite all the threats of punishment most ssmembers

had no compunctions about ignoring the prohibition.

If German society had actively opposed or tacitly rejected the aims pursued

by the ss, the orders to kill would probably have been treated like the prohi-

bitions of enrichment through the appropriation of Jewish property. Orders

to murder confer an intoxicating power; they require a hardness one can be

proud of and promote elitism because they cannot be given to everyone. This

distinguishes them from other orders that were not carried out so zealously

because those concerned counted themselves among an elite from which ex-

traordinary things can be demanded. The following episode is characteristic.

When Auschwitz was built, the Poles living in the vicinity were resettled.

Anyone who knows the ss can imagine the scenes that took place there. Rich-

ard Böck reports that some ss men in his company refused to participate. ss

camp leader Schwarz did not call their attention to the consequences of re-

fusing to obey orders but just lit into them: ‘‘What kind of men are you?’’ This

suﬃced to make the recalcitrant men cease their resistance.

However, as the following example shows, the pressure exerted on mem-

bers of the ss should not be overestimated.The nsdapexpected its adherents

to leave their religious denominations and designate themselves as gottgläubig

[believers in God]. As an elite Naziorganization, the ssdesired this even more

strongly. The religious creed of thirty-nine of the forty defendants in the big

Auschwitz trial at Cracow has become known. Eleven described themselves

as believers in God and four as religiously unaﬃliated. Seventeen stated that

they were members of the Protestant denomination and seven of the Catholic.

That trial primarily featured prominent members of the ss.

n Himmler imitated the tactics of his master Hitler that had been so success-

ful. He often left even decisive questions to the initiative of his subordinates,

from whom he demanded independent actions. Eugen Kogon writes in this

connection: ‘‘The ss expected subordinates to be at once obedient and inde-

pendent, and both of these qualities had to be sensed by them, so to speak.

Consequently, those who were considered the best members of the ss ‘knew

what was involved,’ who did not wait long for explicit orders but acted in the

spiritoftherfss.’’ Kogon aptly compares the typical ss member of the guard

The Guards n 291

unit to ‘‘a bloodhound trained to attack people; he follows his instinct in a

free chase but immediately heeds any remote whistle of his master, whether

it means ‘Down, boy’ or ‘Sic ’em.’’’

Most ss leaders evidently regarded it as a distinction that they were en-

trusted with an assignment that was as important as it was secret: the exter-

mination of human beings for thebeneﬁt of the ‘‘German race.’’ They thought

they understood their Führer well if they displayed initiatives beyond the ex-

plicit orders.This attitude is expressed in the description given by Adolf Eich-

mann in Israel of the conduct of the Auschwitz ss leaders when they escorted

high-level visitors to the extermination facilities:‘‘When someone came there,

these people turned the whole thing into a spiteful spectacle, describing the

matter as gruesomely as possible to a person who had a desk job, and present-

ing it as abruptly as possible; of course, they rejoiced every time if the visitor’s

nerves did not permit him to maintain the same Haltung [composure], as they

called it, as they did.’’

This has been quoted verbatim from the tape that Eichmann made during

the preliminary investigation. Eichmann also described how a person should

behave ‘‘ss-like’’ if his nerves threatened to give out in the face of the mass

gassings: ‘‘It would not have looked good if I had fainted (at the sight of piles

of corpses on the grating where they were burned) because, after all, there

was a little group of subordinates behind us, who would have interpreted it

as a lapse, and word of it would immediately have spread like wildﬁre, and

people would have personally revised their entire attitude—something that

could not be allowed to happen.’’ These sentences were taken from a tape that

Eichmann made as a free man in Argentina.

Wanda von Baeyer-Katte has investigated the consequences of the feeling

of belonging to a special elite within the elite of the ss. ‘‘The crimes that were

committed,’’ she writes, ‘‘constituted a kind of blood bond for the executors

as well as the secondary participants in the line of duty. It bound them close

together in that each person prompted in the other the consoling thought that

it was possible to participate here without despairing.’’

A camaraderie comes into being, a variant of comradeship. People cover

each other’s transgressions, jointly circumvent unpleasant orders, and think

they are above the norm. The camaraderie is preserved throughout the shared

period in the camp; and if one has to testify in court, it resembles the soli-

darity of gangsters, each of whom knows that the other fellow could also tell

tales.

At the same time the ssmen of Auschwitz got to know and fear the unscru-

pulousness of their masters.When the ss judges Konrad Morgen and Gerhard

Wiebeck visited the gas chambers in the course of their investigations, an ss

noncommissioned oﬃcer asked them what would happen to them when the

292 n the jailers

war came to an end. Broad has written about this subject more clearly: ‘‘Again

and again, simple soldiers on guard duty said that theycould not imagine ever

beingdischargedand becoming free human beings again. Some surmised that

to keep the secret they would probably be the last ones to march into the gas

chambers. It is revealing that everyone regarded it as self-evident that Himm-

ler would muster the necessary lack of characterand the brutality required for

such a step.’’

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