In Rudolf Egger’s defense, it could nevertheless have been argued that the slave labor camps at Firma Büssing were superior to Auschwitz. That they in fact offered salvation from Auschwitz. That by comparison with Auschwitz, they were paradise. That in any event they were camps where death was not an end in itself but at the very most a regrettable setback to production. At Firma Büssing, the goal was trucks, as distinct from Auschwitz, where the goal was annihilation. Had engineer Otto Pfänder and finance director Otto Scholmeyer not presented themselves underneath the smoke from the crematoriums and personally selected a thousand or so men fit for work and assigned them for onward dispatch and delivery to Firma Büssing in Braunschweig, Auschwitz might well have been the final stop for them too.
And that’s how it is. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the intended terminus for all of you. Ever since May 1944, the trains of cattle cars have been heading straight to Birkenau, practically straight to the gas chambers. From a newly constructed ramp, you can see the four crematorium chimneys rising toward the sky from behind a thin curtain of foliage. From mid-May to mid-July 1944, a steady stream of transports unload here a total of 437,000 Hungarian Jews, of whom 320,000 are immediately selected and sent down the short path to the changing rooms and shower rooms, and a few hours later have been reduced to smoke and ashes.
It is to this terminus, purposely built for the reception, killing, and disposal of thousands of people every day, that the last Jews of the Łódź ghetto are brought in August 1944, and it’s here that two-thirds of those who boarded the train in Radogoszcz get off and are never heard from again. Of the approximately 67,000 people transported from Łódź to Auschwitz, only about 22,000 survive the initial selection process and the gas chambers. Of these, some 1,200 able-bodied men are selected in three separate instances in September and October 1944 to serve as slave labor for Firma Büssing in Braunschweig. Anyone thereby asserting that this particular group of men may owe their lives to Firma Büssing is not wholly wrong. Not all of those selected survive Firma Büssing, and not all of those surviving Firma Büssing survive the evacuation and the liberation, but compared to Auschwitz, Firma Büssing can be said to have been a sort of paradise, after all.
Yes, this is roughly how a defense for Rudolf Egger, later Egger-Büssing, could have been constructed. It could perhaps even have been reinforced by witness statements of survivors, mainly from the factory in Vechelde, where at times something approaching job satisfaction and camaraderie is said to have occurred, and where something akin to human feelings is said to have been shown by German foremen and civilian workers. Those working hard enough to exceed the rigidly set quotas could even be rewarded occasionally with coupons to be cashed in for cigarettes, pickled gherkins, and beetroot, and the most proficient workers could even advance to more specialized tasks. One of your workmates in Vechelde, M.Z., proudly told me much later how skilled he grew at the lathe, turning the casings for drive shaft housings; how in a twelve-hour shift he could turn casings for fifty drive shaft housings, to be mounted in fifty trucks; and that his German foreman, whose name was Hans, occasionally showed his appreciation by sticking an extra bit of bread to the lathe. And in fact a year later, you yourself write: “The first four weeks at Vechelde quite bearable, no problems with the food.”
There’s no denying that beatings occurred, that the food situation deteriorated over time, and that an SS guard used to station himself outside the privy to deliver a kick in the balls as a deterrent to anyone needing to go. There’s no denying that you were slaves, and that many died, but I can imagine a clever lawyer might nonetheless have succeeded in turning Rudolf Egger, later Egger-Büssing, into something of a hero.
All this is belied, of course, by the fact that the operation was built on, and entirely dependent on, the most repulsive of acts. Without Auschwitz, no slaves for Firma Büssing. Without the transports of Jews to the gas chambers, no able-bodied Jewish men for engineer Otto Pfänder and finance director Otto Scholmeyer to pick from. At a trial, Rudolf Egger might possibly have been able to claim that Auschwitz was beyond the scope of his responsibility, but he could hardly have claimed that he was unaware of the nature and conditions of the place from which Firma Büssing recruited its slave labor in the autumn of 1944. Nor does the fact that he was never brought to trial mean that the occupying Allied authorities deemed him innocent of war crimes, only that they deemed him to be more important for the reconstruction of the economy than for the restoration of justice.
The same calculation did not apply, however, to the head of Steinöl Ltd., Prof. Solms Wilhelm Wittig, who had a slave labor camp built for him by the SS at Schandelah, outside Braunschweig. What happened in Aussenlager Schandelah did not differ substantially from what happened in Aussenlager Schillstrasse, but the two hundred or so prisoners who died at Schandelah while working as slaves for Steinöl Ltd. came largely from the main camp at Neuengamme and not from Auschwitz, and they died principally while mining oil shale rather than making trucks and were primarily non-Jewish citizens of the victorious Allied states, rather than stateless Jews from the Łódź ghetto, and perhaps it was this last little difference that ruined the calculation for Prof. Solms Wilhelm Wittig. On January 2, 1947, he was put on trial in front of a British military court and a month later sentenced to death by hanging for “treatment of Allied state citizens in contravention of international law.” Another factor that may have influenced the calculation was that operations at Steinöl Ltd. were of no postwar value, as there was no further demand for synthetic gasoline, whereas operations at Firma Büssing were considered to have a bright future. Admittedly, Prof. Wittig had his death sentence commuted to a twenty-year jail term from which he was reprieved in May 1955, so basically the same calculation applied to him as to Rudolf Egger, but the commandant of Aussenlager Schandelah, SS-Unterscharführer Friedrich Ebsen, was hanged with three of his subordinates on May 2, 1947, in Hamelin prison. It should here be noted that Friedrich Ebsen took his orders from the commandant of the Schillstrasse camp, SS-Hauptscharführer Max Kirstein, who was neither hanged nor sent to prison for his actions. Had there been a trial of Max Kirstein, it would have been revealed that he had a particular predilection for abusing his Jewish captives, referring to them by the abbreviation “3F,” faul, frech, fett (lazy, insolent, fat). If he was feeling talkative, he sometimes extended this into a whole sentence, incorporating 4 Fs: Wenn ein Jude zu viel frisst, dann wird er fett und faul und schliesslich auch frech (If a Jew stuffs himself he grows fat and lazy and in the end insolent).
So no sentence was ever passed on the repulsive acts in Braunschweig. People were enslaved, used, and destroyed, but no one was held to account. The shameless lie triumphed, as did the shameless calculation weighing the value of truck production against the value of justice — but as a wise rabbi has now been allowed to point out from a factory wall in Braunschweig, the future has a long past.
In the memorial area at Schillstrasse, Rudolf Egger-Büssing’s past has caught up with him. On three gray boards, made of unbreakable acrylic and screwed tightly to a wall topped with sharp spikes to deter vandals, Christoph Egger-Büssing writes of his grandfather: “The facts are incontrovertible. I belong to a family that profited, directly and indirectly, from National Socialism. My grandfather was responsible for the exploitation of concentration camp inmates at Firma Büssing. The camp that was built beside his factory was a scene of inhumanity, a Schauplatz von Unmenschlichkeit.”