Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz
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‘‘Of course.’’
‘‘But we stopped the Russians conclusively at the Vistula.’’
‘‘How often have you stopped the Russians conclusively in the past two
years? With their next offensive theyare going to be here in Auschwitz, and
that means in Upper Silesia as well.There is no firm front in the East or the
West. Herr Doktor, the war is definitely lost.’’
‘‘But that’s terrible.’’
‘‘It is good, Herr Doktor.’’
‘‘How can you say such a thing? After all, you are a German, too.’’
‘‘I am thinking of the drawing you once showed me. The projected ex-
pansion of Auschwitz. The enlargement of the camp after the victory. Both
of us know Auschwitz. Isn’t it good that it can no longer be expanded?’’
Wirths once showed me this blueprint, and when I asked him when this
expansion of the camp was to be accomplished, he replied: ‘‘After the war,
when we shall need even biggercamps.’’ Now he doesn’t answer fora time,
and his head is lowered.
‘‘Then all my work for the military hospital would come to naught.’’
‘‘Of course.’’ In recent months Wirths has concerned himself particu-
larly with establishing an ss military hospital. It is a source of pride to him
and is to be opened in a few weeks; Pohl and Lolling are coming for the fes-
tive inauguration, and Wirths is counting on being promoted to the rank
of ss major on that day. He stops talking, and his hand lies feebly on the
table.
‘‘Only one thing has not come to naught: our work here in the camp and
our help for the people here.’’ Wirths does not respond. No, he has not
reached the point where I can include him in plans to escape.
On the next morning I was, at the behest of the commandant and to my
surprise, assigned to a transport that left the camp. Karl Lill took over my
duties as Wirths’s clerk.
This, too, is part of Wirths’s picture: he feared a defeat of Nazism even
though he had become acquainted with its true face more distinctly than any-
one else. As I gathered from another conversation, he clung to the very end
to the insane notion that the Führer did not know about all the things that
were happening in the places of extermination. He probably needed this idea
to justify his membership in the Nazi movement to himself.
n When the Russian front was approaching Auschwitz, the resistance organi-
zation learned about a plan to kill the sick inmates and those unable to march
at the evacuation. Lill spoke about this with Wirths, who confirmed the exis-
tence of such a plan but also said that he had managed to have the inmates
384 n the jailers
who could not be transported left behind alive. This actually happened. True,
after the evacuation therewere several instances in which inmates were killed
by returning ss units, but most of those who had been left behind in the camp
were liberated by Russian troops on January 27, 1945.
In his apologia Wirths wrote: ‘‘I succeeded in saving numerous sick pris-
oners from the intended killing to be done at the eventual clearance of the
concentration camp Auschwitz.’’
Wirths was transferred to other camps and at the end of the war was able
to make his way to Hamburg, where his brother lived. From there he wrote to
his wife on May 24, 1945: ‘‘If due to human inadequacy and a lack of mental
clarity I was unable to recognize in time the true face of this period, this may
also have been God’s will, because later, when I was given superhumanly dif-
ficult tasks, I applied my strength to helping and saving whatever I could in
order to snatch it from destruction.’’
In another letter Wirths wrote: ‘‘In the meantime we have arranged for me
to speak with the English, but I shall have to wait for a decision until Monday.
And then there is no telling how everything will develop. Oh, what wouldn’t
I give if I had one of my familiar prisoners from A. here who could bear wit-
ness for me in this terribly difficult undertaking! With the best conscience it
is a difficult step because it is hardly possible to foresee to what extent the
other side will understand the difficulty of my task, whether it will be able to
appreciate how heavily the hard pressure weighed on me, and all the things
that caused, and still cause, so many headaches.’’
Wirths was arrested by the British.Years later Colonel Draper, who interro-
gated him, described to mewhat followed.Hehad Wirthsbrought beforehim,
extended his hand, and said: ‘‘Now I have shaken hands with the person who
as the physician in charge at Auschwitz is responsible for the deaths of four
million human beings. Tomorrow I shall interrogate you about this. Reflect
during the night about your responsibility and look at your hands.’’
During that night Wirths hanged himself. He was cut down before he was
dead and did not die until a few days later, on September 20, 1945.
When I told Colonel Draper almost twenty years later what role Wirths had
played in Auschwitz, he asked me whether he had acted incorrectly then. I
said that he had not. Draper was familiar with Auschwitz and Wirths’s func-
tion there, but did not know any details. Around the same time I spoke with
Wirths’s widow, and she said that it was probably best for her husband that
he had ended his life. I agreed.
Dr. Wirths n 385
subordinates of
the ss leaders
nnn
The vast majority of the thousands of ss members who served under the lead-
ers of Auschwitz have remained unknown. Only those who stood out from
the mass by virtue of their special functions or striking behavior were remem-
bered by the inmates. In the case of persons who had to answer to a court,
the testimonies of witnesses have been collected. I shall present portraits of
some of these ss men here.
The members of the ss who served in the dreaded Political Department
were different from those who served as sentries.
The most feared man was ss Technical Sergeant Wilhelm Boger. He was
born in Württemberg in 1906 and at the age of sixteen joined the Nazi youth
movement, which was largely unknown at that time. When Hitler came to
power, this loyal vassal was made a member of the auxiliary police.
‘‘Boger loved his profession—hewas a criminologist. He had to work. If he
had no interrogation scheduled, he rode his bicycle to the camp and looked
for something. He always found something.’’ This statement was made by
Dounia Ourisson-Wasserstrom, who served Boger as an interpreter. He en-
joyed spreading fear and terror. The most dreaded instrument of torture was
called the Boger swing. Grabner later testified that Boger had learned this tor-
ture from a Gestapo official who had come to Auschwitz for interrogations
and introduced right then and there the swing, which involved having the un-
protected genitals of thevictim bared fordirected blows.When Liebehenschel
prohibited its use, Boger said: ‘‘How can these pigs be made to talk if they
can’t be hit?’’
One could observe in Boger a general phenomenon: if an ss man had be-
come personally acquainted with an inmate, thereby detaching him from the
gray, anonymous mass, human feelings came to the fore that were otherwise
totally lacking.
Witold Dowgint-Nieciunski saw Boger daily because hewas a cleaner in the
commandant’s building, where Boger had an office. There he had good op-
portunities to observe what went on, and later he testified in detail in court
about Boger’s crimes. ‘‘I have to remark,’’ he said, ‘‘that Bogeracted very prop-
erly toward me. He interrogated me once and did not beat me. He also cared
a great deal about flowers and saw to it that they were watered.’’ Nieciunski
was a Pole, and Boger, who hated that nation with a passion, primarily hunted
Polish inmates.
Boger also took care of the Jewish women who had to work for him. ‘‘He
made sure that we received an additional kettle of food,’’ said Regina Stein-
berg-Lebensfeld. And Maryla Rosenthal testified as follows: ‘‘I was Boger’s
clerk, and Boger treated me very decently. He would leave some food in his
mess kit and say, ‘Maryla, this is to be cleaned.’ He really was not allowed to
do this. In winter he got me warm clothes and shoes.’’
In his own way he occasionally ‘‘consoled’’ girls who worked for him. This
is what Lilly Majerczyk remembered. ‘‘As bearers of secrets we had to expect to
be gassed. On one occasion, after Boger had made a remark about the threat-
ening defeat of Germany, I asked him, ‘Herr Oberscharführer, what will hap-
pen to us then?’ He answered, ‘That’s not so bad; three minutes and you’re
gone.’’’
Boger spread terror even among the guards. ss Sergeant Karl Hykes testi-
fied that Boger was almost as dangerous to the ss people as to the inmates. ‘‘If
he found that an ss man had some contact with an inmate, he also proceeded
against the ss man.’’
Boger frequently had to conduct investigations of ss men because they had
appropriated the property of inmates, but this did not keep him from taking
whatever he needed, just like his boss Grabner. In this pursuit he fully ex-
ploited his position. One day Jiri Beranovsky was locked up in the bunker.
His friend, the capo on the Installations Center Detail, intervened with Boger,
who happened to be looking for an enamel bathtub for an apartment he was
furnishing in Auschwitz. An official request would have brought him only a
stone tub, but the capo supplied the desired kind and Beranovsky was released
from the bunker.
On another occasion Boger needed a five-liter kettle for boiling his laun-
dry, and he asked for one from Tadeusz Jakubowski, who was working in the
storeroom; but that inmate saw no way of fulfilling Boger’s wish. As a conse-
quence he was arrested for smuggling and so severely tortured in the Political
Department that he died. Then Boger expressed the same wish to Stanislaw
Pawliczek, the clerk in the storeroom. Since the latter was prohibited from
supplying anything without an order form, he requested one. Boger said that
he did not have one, but he could invite Pawliczek for a brief conversation, as
he had recently done with Jakubowski. Thereupon the clerk asked only when
and where he should take the desired kettle. Boger’s wife accepted it, and
Boger left Pawliczek in peace.
It is typical of Boger and many of his colleagues that they defended them-
selves against this kind of testimony much more vigorously than against accu-
sations of murder, even though they could no longer be charged with appro-
Subordinates of the ssLeaders n 387
priations, blackmail, and similar crimes. According to the ss code of ethics,
these were regarded as dishonorable, but tortures and killings were not.
Boger’s depredations did not remain hidden fromhis superiors. In an effort
to undermine his position, the resistance movement in the camp once ar-
ranged to have an anonymous letter to the commandant sent from the outside
that listed the valuables unlawfully appropriated by Boger and stated where
they could be found. We watched for the consequences of this report, but
neither Boger’s zeal nor his position were affected.
Boger, who enjoyed making everyone tremble, was himself beset by fears
and was repeatedly laid up as a patient in the ss infirmary. Edward Pys, who
had to clean the sickrooms and serve the patients, thinks that Boger suffered
from a nervous disorder. ‘‘Once I had to bring him a bottle of apple juice,’’
Pys said. ‘‘When I entered his room, I saw that the bottle had already been
opened. Boger screamed at me, and I had to bring him another bottle, which
I had to open in his presence.’’
n The most distinctive personality among the members of the Political De-
partment was Pery Broad.The course of his life is itself out of the ordinary. He
was born in 1921 in Rio de Janeiro, and his father,whose family had come from
England, was a Brazilian citizen. At age four Broad and his German mother
moved to Berlin, where he joined the Hitler Youth and began his studies at the
Technical Institute.
Anton vanVelsen states that ‘‘Broad was much more intelligent than Boger;
hedid not fit into the generalpicture of the ss.’’ Jenny Spritzer remembersthat
‘‘we never knew what to expect from Broad. He was friendly and intelligent,
but he often asked us catch questions.’’ Dounia Ourisson-Wasserstrom de-
scribes Broad as follows: ‘‘He was young, smart, and crafty. I never knew what
he was thinking, whether he felt compassion for us or hated us. It seemed as
if he did not take the occurrences in Auschwitz seriously.’’ This is indirectly
confirmed by van Velsen, who as a block elder in the Gypsy camp had close
contact with Broad. ‘‘Hewas always in my room; I had a map on thewall there,
and we checked the progress of the front on it.That was our hope. Broad took
no action against it. Once it was rumored that I had money, and Broad found
Polish zlotys. He confiscated the money but took no further action.’’
This idiosyncratic ss man, who only achieved the rank of corporal, had
books by Molière and Racine on his desk, took Russian lessons from female
inmates in his department, and was exceptionally musical—something that
has been confirmed by the French musicians Simon Laks and René Coudy. He
regularly visited the orchestra of which these two were members and occa-
sionally played with it. Laks and Coudy believe that he could have played his
accordion in a first-rate orchestra, and they describe him in these words: ‘‘He
388 n the jailers
is very cultivated and speaks several languages fluently.’’ Van Velsen reports
that Broad formed an orchestra in the Gypsy camp. The Dutchman remem-
bers that ‘‘he loved jazz, which the ss decried as decadent.’’ ‘‘Once,when I was
standing behind the door in the barracks of the Political Department,’’ writes
Raya Kagan, ‘‘I heard him play a Bach concerto on his accordion.’’
Broad regularly participated in executions in the bunker. On one occasion
Fritz Hirsch was locked up in a bunker cell, the vent of which faced the yard
next to the Black Wall. ‘‘During the executions in the yard, this shaft, which
went to the window in our cell, was covered up. Then the cover was removed,
and Broad was standing before us. With a friendly smile he gave us a ciga-
rette butt.’’ Hirsch concludes his report as follows: ‘‘At that time I counted
thirty-four shots.’’
Regina Steinberg-Lebensfeld, who was assigned to Broad as a clerk, re-
members a conversation he once had on his return from the Black Wall: ‘‘He
was with Lachmann,whose door to our room was open. Standing in the door-
way Broad said to him: ‘You know, Gerhard, it spurted out again today as from
a beast.’ He said this with a laugh. Then he gave me his coat for cleaning.
It was spattered with fresh blood.’’ When the defendant Broad was asked in
court to respond to this testimony, all he said was this: ‘‘I always stood so far
from the Black Wall that I could not be spattered.’’ Steinberg also remembers
that once Broad and Wilhelm Hoyer beat a prisoner on the swing until he fell
off, all bloody and groaning. The prisoner was doused and taken out of the
room, whereupon Steinberg had to remove the trail of blood from the floor.
Broad was transferred to the Gypsy camp and took Steinberg along as his
secretary. She testified that once a boy of ten or twelve was brought to Broad’s
office. The child had arrived in Auschwitz on a transport of Hungarians and
apparently had been able to escape selection by hiding. Amid tears the boy
assured Broad, displaying his childlike hands, that he was strong and able to
work. Broad just laughed, told the guard who had escorted the boy to take
him to the others, and pointed in the direction of the gas chamber. Steinberg-
Lebensfeld sums up her opinion in these words: ‘‘I have the impression that
doing his duty gave him great satisfaction.’’
Other statements by witnesses conflict with that view. Edward Burakowski,
a Pole, served in the Political Department as a cleaner. One day the Kattowitz
Gestapo conducted interrogations in Auschwitz. ‘‘The inmates were flogged
unmercifully,’’ wrote Burakowski, ‘‘and Broad told me this: ‘When the ss men
of the Gestapo leave, bring some water for the people here.’’’ Broad called
the Gestapo officials butchers and murderers. The same witness has also re-
ported another incident: ‘‘Family members from the Jewish communities of
the area were to be gassed. The people were escorted by German policemen,
and an ss man from the commandant’s office was at the head of the proces-
Subordinates of the ssLeaders n 389
sion to show them the way. A high-ranking ss man walked up to Broad and
said to him: ‘Come along, quickly!’ Broad pointed to his leg and acted like a
sick man, whereupon the ss man laid off and took someone else. I had the
impression that Broad only feigned his foot trouble. On that occasion Broad
said to me: ‘My hands are clean, and I don’t want to have anything to do with
this.’’’ At length he told Burakowski that he was going to absent himself as
soon as he looked out the window and saw transports arriving. Burakowski
was instructed to say that his boss was not there. To the best of the Polish
witness’s recollection, this transpired in the middle of 1943, when others did
not yet impose restraints on themselves.
In British captivity this shady, intelligent man tried to curry favor with the
victors and wrote a report about Auschwitz that is repeatedly quoted. Could
someone who did not actually feel revulsion at the mass murders have com-
posedit in this form?To besure, at theAuschwitz trial in FrankfurtBroad’sbe-
havior was no different from that of the others. He denied whenever he could,
was careful not to say anything bad about a codefendant, and took refuge in
memory gaps where an outright denial would have been too implausible. At
best he did all this somewhat more intelligently than his colleagues.
n Two female inmates who worked in the Political Department have painted
a vivid picture of one of these colleagues, ss Sergeant Bernhard Kristan, the
director of the registry that was part of that department. Raya Kagan testified
as follows: ‘‘He was from Königsberg and twenty-two years old at that time.
I remember him as an especially convinced Nazi. We knew that he had been
a high-ranking leader in the hj (Hitler Youth) in East Prussia. He despised all
Jews and strove almost frantically not to come into contact with us or with
objects that we touched. For example, I still remember that he pressed the
doorknobs of our rooms with his elbow rather than his hand.’’ Julia Skodova
writes this about Kristan: ‘‘He is a typical product of the hj—cruel, blood-
thirsty, and firmly convinced of Hitler’s divinity. He does not have theslightest
doubt that theThird Reich will rule all of Europe (thisis still so in thespring of
1944), and he is equally convinced of his own importance and the important
role that he will play in the historic events. He does not care that his actions
make him hated. On the contrary, this hatred of the hounded is proof that the
superiority of the ‘masters’ is recognized.’’ The fact that Kristan, like so many
other ‘‘high masters’’ of Auschwitz, had trouble with his writing completes
this portrait.
Wilhelm Claussen also worked in the Political Department before he be-
came an ss roll call leader. It sounded implausible when he asserted in Ameri-
can captivity that he was expelled from the ss ‘‘because of desertion and other
things’’ and became an inmate of Buchenwald. He claimed that he had been
390 n the jailers
transferred to Auschwitz from there, but as an ss man rather than as a pris-
oner. He said that his brother died as an inmate of the concentration camp
Natzweiler in March 1943, when he already was a junior officer in Auschwitz.
However, documents have been preserved that verify these statements.
It has been established that Wilhelm Claussen was interned in the Buchen-
wald camp as a political prisoner from November 21, 1940, to February 19,
1941. His brother Egon was taken to the kz on April 1, 1941, and died there.
The documents do not give the reasons for this internment. Grabner has de-
scribed Claussen as a confidant of Höß who also had to report to the comman-
dant about Grabner. Höß probably used Claussen’s past to gain an informer.
n Particulars about other defendants at the Frankfurt trial permit us to draw
conclusions about the character of individuals who personify the inhumanity
of the ss.
One of these figures is ss roll call leader Oswald Kaduk. He grew up in
the part of Upper Silesia that was given to Poland after World War I and was
twelve when Germany lost that war. ‘‘About my political developmentI can say
that I have had a nationalistic orientation since my youth.This thinking along
nationalistic lines was determined by the milieu at home and by the fact that
I lived in an area where there were conflicts between Germans and Poles.’’ In
these words, which he spoke not nearly as fluently as they read here, Kaduk
described his youth to the court with his harsh accent. The last camp elder of
the main camp, Heinrich Dürmeyer, believes that Kaduk became a particularly
‘‘hard’’ ss roll call leader because as an ethnic German he wanted to prove that
‘‘he was an especially good German and a 150 percent ss man. The ss people
called him a Wasserpolak [disrespectful term for a Polish-speaking Upper Sile-
sian].’’ Jerzy Pozimski of the Labor Service, who was able to observe Kaduk
rather closely, believes that feelings of inferiority vis-à-vis the ‘‘real’’ Germans
prompted Kaduk to be,whenever he could, harsher, more brutal, and ‘‘harder’’
than they. Pozimski rounds off his characterization by saying that ‘‘schnapps
was everything to him.’’
Kaduk was the most unpredictable ss roll call leader; but there was even
more blood on the hands of his colleague Gerhard Palitzsch. This Saxon en-
tered Eicke’s school in Dachau at the age of twenty and proved to be an apt
pupil. As an experienced and energetic ss roll call leader, he largely deter-
mined the atmosphere in Auschwitz from the beginning.
This is what Höß wrote about him:
P. was always present at the executions, and he probably also killed the
greatest number of inmates by shooting them in the neck. I often observed
him but never noticed the slightest stirring of an emotion in him. He per-
Subordinates of the ssLeaders n 391
formed his horrifying tasks nonchalantly, with an even temper and a
straight face, and without any haste. Even when he was on duty at the gas
chambers,I could not detectany trace of sadism inhim. His facewasalways
expressionless and immobile. He was probably so hardened emotionally
that he was capable of killing constantly without thinking about it. P. was
also the only one of those directly involved in the exterminations who never
spoke to me in a quiet hour and poured his heart out concerning the cruel
doings.
Pery Broad has given a graphic description of Palitzsch’s behavior at execu-
tions: ‘‘Theexecutioner mechanically reloads his gun and performsone execu-
tion afteranother. If thereis a delay, he puts his weapon down, whistles a little
tune, or converses with those around him about studiedly unimportant sub-
jects. With this cynical attitude he wants to demonstrate how little it matters
to him ‘to bump this riffraff off’ and how ‘hard’ he is. He is proud of kill-
ing these innocent people without any stirring of his conscience. If someone
moves his head, he presses the muzzle of his gun against the inmate’s neck
and his face to the wall.’’ In a letter from the resistance movement, Palitzsch
is succinctly characterized as ‘‘the biggest bastard in Auschwitz.’’ The inmates
called him ‘‘William Tell’’ because he was often seen walking to the bunker
block with his rifle. Elsewhere, Höß characterized his ss roll call leader in
thesewords: ‘‘Palitzschwas theshrewdest and craftiest creature that I met and
experienced in my long and varied service in various concentration camps. He
literally walked over dead bodies in order to satisfy his lust for power!’’
The ss man Johann Becker remembers that the same Palitzsch once took
exception in the slaughterhouse to the inmates’ slaughtering the cows in too
rough a manner.
n Theharshest judgment in Frankfurt was passed on thessmedic Josef Klehr,
who was sentenced to 475 life terms in the penitentiary for that number of
murders committed ‘‘on his own initiative and with special malice,’’ not to
mention an additionalsentence foraidingand abetting thousands of murders.
Every court must base its judgment on minimal numbers, and the presiding
judge repeatedly pointed out that in all likelihood the number of victims was
considerably higher.
Like Kaduk, Klehr was from Upper Silesia and two years older than his col-
league. After attending an elementary school, he learned carpentry, but he did
not work at this tradeforlong. At the age of thirty he became a nurse in a sana-
torium and two years later worked as an assistant guard in a prison. In 1932
Klehr joined the ss and was made a medic in Dachau and later in Auschwitz,
presumably on the strength of his earlier work in a sanatorium.
392 n the jailers
Klehr’s nickname was ‘‘Professor’’ because he loved being in the limelight.
When he went to Block 20 to administer poisonous injections, he put on a
white physician’s coat. Czeslaw Glowacki, a corpse carrier who frequentlyob-
servedhim, asserted that ‘‘killing was a pleasure forhim.’’ Evidently hewanted
to enhance this pleasure for himself because he killed not only those whom
an ss physician had selected but chose additional victims. One arbitrary selec-
tion has particularly stuck in the memory of Tadeusz Paczula, a Polish roll
call clerk: ‘‘On Christmas eve (1942) the ss physician scheduled to be on duty
telephoned to say that he was unable to come. I notified Klehr, and he said,
‘Today I am the camp physician.’ On that day the number of victims, including
the medical presenters, probably was around 200.’’ Paczula has also described
how Klehr made his selections: ‘‘Klehr usually sat on the table (in the ward).
He kept his headgear on, and the inmates had to approach him with their tem-
perature charts. All the patients in the ward had to pass by him. Klehr took the
charts and put some on each side. While he was doing this, he kept his pipe
in his mouth.’’ The clerk of Block 20 remembers that on one or two occasions
Klehr had to cut a selection short because he was too drunk.
Karl Lill was able to overhear many conversations among ss meninthe
office of the ss infirmary. ‘‘I was never able to perceive any human feelings
in Klehr,’’ he said. ‘‘Others would say when they were just back from a leave
that they would now have to return to this murderers’ den. Klehr was capable
of killing a few hundred human beings the way a cobbler rips a frayed sole
from a shoe.’’ Jan Weiß recalls that for Klehr there was only one reason for
expediting the daily murders. ‘‘Often two inmates were taken to the room at
the same time. I believe this happened when Klehr was in a hurry. You see,
he raised rabbits in the yard. When he wanted to go there, he injected faster.’’
Weiß had to present the doomed men to Klehr.
I have met no member of the ss who savored his feeling of power as much
as this utterly uneducated man, who needed a lot of time to write his short
name and was described as semiliterate by the Frankfurt court.
Tadeusz Paczula has vividly described the way in which Klehr wanted to be
receivedinthehkb:
First of all, an inmate had to clean the motorcycle on which he always ar-
rived. Then he went into the physicians’ room and had an inmate take off
his boots and wash his feet. At the same time another inmate had to brush
and polish his fingernails.Afterthat, hewould sit in the middle of the room
with a pipe in his mouth and his feet in a bucket. Sometimes he made eight
inmates dance attendance on him, and they had to anticipate his very wish.
He behaved just like a pasha. Forexample, an inmate tailor had to come and
take his measurements, and he dictated some letters to another inmate. At
Subordinates of the ssLeaders n 393