The summer and autumn of 1944 is the time of hastily established slave labor camps in rapidly disintegrating Nazi Germany. The flow of civilian forced labor from occupied Europe is drying up, and German industry turns its gaze on the concentration camps. This is the time when the roads from Auschwitz open up. The war industry needs slave laborers, and the German annihilation machine is asked to provide them. The request is a source of some conflict, since the German annihilation machine needs to kill people, while the German war machine needs to keep them more or less alive. The conflict remains unresolved to the last. People are annihilated and people are delivered.
It happens that German industrial managers turn up in person at the gas chambers and crematoriums in Auschwitz to make sure that Jews are being delivered rather than annihilated. Wherever German industries need slave labor, makeshift slave labor camps are set up, sometimes on the factory property, sometimes inside the factories themselves, sometimes in the middle of German cities and towns. Behind the retreating German front, a rapidly growing and increasingly incomprehensible archipelago of slave camps, through which the reluctantly opening roads from Auschwitz unfathomably fork and branch, unexpectedly changing direction and destination as German industries are bombed to pieces and the slave camps are of no use any longer, and the slave transports on their circuitous journeys are left with the primary task of removing all traces of themselves.
In front of me I have a list of names of places no one remembers anymore, or at least doesn’t remember them the way you must have remembered them when, much later, you try to forget them.
Much later, I follow in your tracks on your road from Auschwitz.
On road number 191, between Neu Kaliss and Heiddorf, in Landkreis Ludwigslust, in the German federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, just east of the former border between East and West Germany, I am photographed. The photograph is taken through the windshield of a rental car, an Opel Astra with the registration number EU AO 2199, and my gaze is set on the distant view, as is recommended when driving, and therefore I don’t see the camera that takes the photograph. Perhaps I should have seen it, or realized it might be there; my gaze, however, is focused not on speed cameras but on the well-kept villages that keep passing by in the snowy landscape, on their pretty, half-timbered houses, lining the road as I pass through, and on the sensibly dressed people making their way along the slushy pavements as if they all know exactly where they’re going.
I don’t know exactly where I’m going, because the road I’m trying to follow doesn’t always lead where I expect, and sometimes doesn’t seem to be where it ought to be. It’s true that the road is narrow and winding in places, and that I’m apparently driving at eighty-two kilometers an hour on a stretch where the limit is fifty, but there’s very little other traffic on the road and my thoughts are flying off in all directions, and one of the thoughts flying off is that not a single human being knows at this moment where I am and where I’m going.
Nobody except Frau Gorny at the traffic monitoring unit in Landkreis Ludwigslust in the German federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, it turns out. In a letter bristling with official crests, enclosing pictorial evidence, that finds its way with impressive speed to my home address in Stockholm, Frau Gorny brusquely informs me that on 4.3.2005 at 12:49 I infringed § 55 of the law pertaining to violations of the public order, Gesetzes über Ordnungswidrigkeiten; I’m exhorted to admit my guilt by return of post and to pay what it costs (€225.60). It’s a formal, correct letter, addressing me as “Highly esteemed Herr Rosenberg,” and offers me the option of denying the charge within one week.
I have no intention of denying anything; the pictorial evidence is incontrovertible, but I do react slightly to the German legal terminology for my crime, where widrig in my language (vidrig) means “repulsive.” This is not proportionate to the crime, in my view. Particularly not to a crime committed on this road, which is the road from Auschwitz to the town of Ludwigslust, in which the park between the palace and the city church is filled with the victims of Wöbbelin.
And particularly not in a language like this, with its documented capacity for concealing the most repulsive acts behind the most formal and correct terms.
Slave labor in the German camp archipelago goes under the formal designation of “prisoners’ work contribution,” Arbeitseinsatz der Häftlinge, and is administered by the SS Central Office for Financial and Administrative Affairs, Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, called the WVHA for short, and superintended by SS-Gruppenführer Oswald Pohl. Formal applications from German industrialists for allocations of labor from Auschwitz are handled by SS-Sturmbannführer Gerhard Maurer, head of WVHA Department DII, responsible for prisoners’ work contributions, but less formal approaches can be addressed to his superior, SS-Brigadeführer Richard Glücks, and on occasion highly informal requests go direct to Oswald Pohl himself. In the end, it’s only the language that’s formal. Repulsive acts know no formality.
In early September 1944—the exact date is unknown — two representatives of the Büssing truck company, Otto Pfänder (engineer) and Otto Scholmeyer (finance director) turn up at Auschwitz in person to select slave workers for the company’s operations in Braunschweig. This is presumably not the formally correct procedure, since it is the SS that makes formal decisions about life and death in Auschwitz, but the links between the SS and German industry have grown more informal, as the production of goods has become increasingly dependent on the delivery of slaves. By autumn 1944, most large German companies are implicated in repulsive acts, demanding that the SS build them a slave camp at their factory gate.
The SS provides not just one slave camp but two for Firma Büssingwerke in Braunschweig. One is on Schillstrasse, in the center of Braunschweig, the other in the village of Vechelde, ten kilometers west of the town. The slave camp in Vechelde is an Unterkommando of the camp in Schillstrasse, which is an Aussenlager, or satellite, of KZ Neuengamme, which is the command center of the SS machinery for the swiftly expanding slave labor archipelago in the area between Hamburg, Hannover, and Braunschweig. In Schillstrasse, the slaves live in hastily built barracks, and every morning and evening they’re marched a good kilometer under SS supervision through central Braunschweig to a big factory complex with the name H. Büssing in white letters on the curved facade of the brick-red main building. Most of the slaves wear the striped concentration camp garb, which is never changed and over time turns black with soot and stiff with dirt. All the slave laborers, including those who must drag themselves along, are marched through the streets of the town for all to see. No one in Braunschweig can be unaware of the formally correct atrocities that are committed in the truck factory in the midst of their city.
In Vechelde, Firma Büssing has set up a separate factory for the production of back axles. Since the past summer, it’s housed in a disused jute mill in the middle of the village, a stone’s throw from houses and gardens. There are no daily slave marches to disturb the idyll here, as the SS camp has been set up in one of the factory halls and the slaves sleep by their machines. One thing that may possibly disturb the residents of Vechelde is the weekly transport of corpses from the camp in Schillstrasse, as these are loaded onto the same vehicles that transport raw materials for the back axles from the factory in Braunschweig. In Vechelde, the back-axle materials are unloaded and any additional corpses are loaded, after which the combined corpses from Schillstrasse and Vechelde are transported another twenty kilometers to Aussenlager Watenstedt, where they are unloaded and buried. Emptied of corpses, the truck is then loaded with food for the slave laborers in Vechelde. Emptied of both corpses and food, the truck is then finally loaded with the completed back axles for the factory in Braunschweig. A most efficiently used truck, undoubtedly, but the Büssing factory is short on trucks for its own use, since all the trucks it manufactures must be delivered to the German state.