It’s the Poles, I believe, who awaken Karl Liedke’s lust for research. In the industrial history of Braunschweig, or indeed in any German industrial history, Poles cannot be avoided. In June 1944, over two million Poles are employed by force in German industry under the euphemism “civilian workers,” Zivilarbeiter. The only civil aspect of the civilian worker system is the name. The civilian workers are housed in camplike barracks, live under prisonlike restrictions, and work in slavelike conditions; they’re obliged to wear a P on their clothing to prevent them from using public transportation or going to restaurants or swimming in pools strictly reserved for Germans.
Not only Poles are forcibly conscripted as civilian workers. Little by little, the factories of Germany fill with civilian workers from all over German-occupied Europe and with prisoners of war from the battlefields in the east, and when the fortunes of war turn and the supply of civilian workers and POWs runs dry, with Jews from Auschwitz who are still fit to work.
The Auschwitz Jews represent an emergency solution, since the Jews have been brought to Auschwitz to be killed, but necessity knows no law. In September 1944, the German war industry finds itself in circumstances of direst necessity, and beneath the oily black smoke from the crematorium chimneys stand engineer Pfänder and finance director Scholmeyer, choosing or rejecting from among the still-able-bodied Jews who have just been delivered from the liquidated ghetto in Łódź.
Any study of Braunschweig’s industrial history will find it difficult to skirt around the formal delivery from Auschwitz of 1,000 to 1,200 Jews from the Łódź ghetto for slave labor in the truck factories of Firma Büssing.
Karl Liedke does not skirt around anything in the industrial history of Braunschweig, particularly not an activity like this, visible and familiar to all the residents of Braunschweig for as long as it lasts. He wants to know everything that happens to the little trickle of Jewish men still deemed fit for work who are delivered as slaves to Büssing’s factories in Braunschweig in September and October 1944. As a result, your particular road from Auschwitz is supplied with an incorruptible and tireless investigator who ascertains how you all are selected, how you survive, how you’re transported, and, when necessary, how you die.
He also investigates the silence afterward. In December 1945, under the supervision of the British occupying forces, the German police look into the slave activity at the Büssing factories. The man in charge of Büssing at the time, Rudolf Egger, says he had no reason to concern himself with the high death rate at Aussenlager Schillstrasse, “first because mortality in wartime is hardly surprising, and second because it was not my area of responsibility.”
On July 4, 1946, the public prosecutor in Braunschweig, Dr. Staff, writes to ask the British occupying authority whether the results of the police inquiry are to be presented to a court of the Allied occupying forces or to an authorized German court. Almost two years later, on March 1, 1948, the War Crimes Group (Northwest Europe) decides that the findings of the inquiry into slave labor at Büssing will not be presented to any court at all. Instead, Rudolf Egger becomes the chairman of the Braunschweig Chamber of Industry and Commerce, and a few years later he receives permission from the federal state government to add Büssing to his surname, for his services to the nation.
On February 25, 1957, Firma Büssing Nutzkraftwagen Ltd. claims in a letter to one of your surviving fellow prisoners from Unterkommando Vechelde, a man in Paris named Henryk Kinas (who is demanding reparation for his unpaid labor in the factory), that Rudolf Egger-Büssing personally made sure you all got more food and better clothing than the SS regulations allowed, thereby running the risk of being arrested by the local SS, von den örtlichen SS-Stellen verhaftet zu werden, on suspicion of sabotage.
Yes, that’s what the letter says, signed by Rudolf Egger-Büssing himself, and also — for the sake of appearances, I assume — by a Dr. Schirmeister. Payment of any damages to Henryk Kinas is consequently out of the question. If anything, he should rather be grateful for the management’s courageous solicitude for his well-being.
In short, by 1957 the time has arrived for Rudolf Egger-Büssing to shamelessly claim the status of hero and benefactor.
The road from Auschwitz is lined with such shamelessness, I should tell you, with people who initially say they heard and saw nothing and in any case had nothing to do with it, and then say they opposed what they neither saw nor heard. Nothing to be surprised at, unfortunately, since a blatant lie is a well-tested weapon against the memory of something too many people have seen and heard for it to be forgotten. A blatant lie loosens the ground beneath what can’t be forgotten and turns it into a quagmire. In its defense against such a weapon, therefore, memory must time and time again mobilize its collected arsenal of witnesses, documents, and relics to fortify, time and time again, the loosening ground beneath it.
There are those who testify against Rudolf Egger-Büssing’s shameless discovery of his heroic contribution to the well-being of slave laborers, among them truck driver Erich Meyer, who was employed by Firma Büssing to take back-axle parts from the factory in Braunschweig to the factory in Vechelde. In the police investigation of 1946, Meyer says that in the same truck he also took paper bags and wooden boxes with a total of four hundred to five hundred dead bodies from Aussenlager Schillstrasse to Aussenlager Watenstedt.
Further testimony against Rudolf Egger-Büssing is provided by the memorial stones in the cemetery at Jammertal, outside the former camp at Watenstedt, to which Dr. Karl Liedke takes me one chilly day in March when a virginal layer of snow is covering the names of those who didn’t know how to make the most of Firma Büssing’s care for their well-being. I carefully brush the snow aside from Paweł Diamant, Tadeusz Goldman, and Jakob Urbach.
A final testimony against Rudolf Egger-Büssing is the fact that even two SS officers from the main camp in Neuengamme, inspecting the satellite camp in Schillstrasse in January 1945, feel impelled to order the immediate transport of two hundred slave laborers, sick or unfit for work, to the concentration camp hospital in Watenstedt.
The Jews among them do everything they can to avoid the transport, having learned in Auschwitz that in a concentration camp, hospital is a euphemism for gas chamber. The non-Jews, however, particularly the Frenchmen and the Russians brought here from Neuengamme and not from Auschwitz, can imagine nothing worse than Aussenlager Schillstrasse and see the transport of the sick as a gift from above. One fellow prisoner, a French doctor called Georges Salan, is surprised by the Jews’ reaction: “You have to have seen it with your own eyes,” he writes,
the cunning, trickery, and desperate energy they employed to avoid going.… None had any desire to be labeled sick any more. The same individuals who recently stood in never-ending queues at the end of the working day to request a day’s dispensation from work, their legs and feet so swollen with edema that they could hardly walk, suddenly summoned their last drop of strength to look as though they could still be good for something (pour donner l’illusion qu’ils sont encore bons à quelque chose).
This is what Georges Salan writes on page 163 of his book Prisons de France et bagnes allemands (French prisons and German slave camps), which is published as early as 1946 and could thus have served as evidence for the prosecution in the trial of Rudolf Egger that never takes place.