During Wayne’s first workday in camp, a prisoner was singled out by a guard for slackness in his duties. The prisoner was trussed up on a tree in a special harness that the SS used for such a purpose.
“Why were you pissing off?” the SS guard who had singled the man out asked.
“I was not, sir,” the prisoner nervously said from his hanging position above the guard.
“Then you are calling me a liar,” the SS guard noted.
“No, sir. I would not say such a thing.”
“Either you were pissing off your work or I am a liar,” the SS guard commented.
The prisoner knew that by saying or even suggesting that the guard was a liar would be enough to get him killed. He decided to go the safer route and said meekly, “I was neglecting my work, sir.”
“Pissing off on your work?” the SS guard said loud enough so all of the other men, who continued to concentrate on their jobs at hand, could hear. “Lazy son-of-a-bitch. You are pissing off your work while everybody else out here is busy doing their share for the Reich. You will serve as an example for other vermin that piss off work. Your type will know that being a lazy motherfucker will not be tolerated at Hollenburg.”
The SS guard began to throw heavy rocks at the trussed up prisoner, specifically aiming the stones at the man’s head. Three more SS guards joined in the fun, and after only a few hits, the prisoners head was bleeding form deep cuts.
Wayne kept his eyes focused on his work as he continued pounding away at the cold ground with a pickax. Though it was a cold day, he sweated excessively. Wayne could hear the thumps of the stones hitting the man’s body, which could not have been more than 10 yards away, from where he stood. Wayne knew enough to know that the SS guards were using that unlucky prisoner as a model for him and the other new arrivals. It was yet another scare tactic to keep the prisoners walking on eggshells.
“There will be no pissing off of work at Hollenburg,” one of the SS guards said between throwing rocks at his human target, now bleeding heavily from the head and unconscious. The SS guard who had signaled the man out picked up his gun and put it to the man’s skull.
Wayne heard the pop of a gun being fired. He swallowed hard.
The prisoners received a fifteen-minute lunch break. Lunch was the standard pint of thin soup and a small piece of bread per man, an inadequate meal for a person doing hard labor.
To Wayne, it felt fantastic just to be able to give his aching back and feet a rest. He placed his soup down and rubbed his weary eyes, completely exhausted.
He did not look to be tired as Wayne appeared to be. “Let me give you some advice, son,” the older prisoner whispered to Wayne in a husky voice. “Work with your eyes more than your hands or you won’t last a week here. And you might make the rest of us look bad. Think about it.” Having said that, he walked off.
Wayne, on that day, did not pay much attention to what the man had told him. He was too worn out to concentrate on anything. Wayne went to grab his small bowl of soup, but it had vanished. He had a good idea, though, of who had taken it.
On Wayne’s second night in Hollenburg, the SS held one of their occasional night inspections. Though winter loomed on the horizon and it was already bitter cold, the prisoners were allowed only to wear shirts while sleeping underneath the paper-thin blankets that had been issued to them. Any prisoner caught wearing socks, underwear, or any other article of clothing, could expect to receive severe punishment. Block leader Hans Kammler, the SS corporal in charge of the barracks and with keeping the men in them disciplined and who was also fond of spending most of his evenings acting like the drunken buffoon that he was, always led those impromptu inspections. The new arrivals, including Wayne, had heard from the old timers that Kammler always held a late night inspection within three days of a new batch of prisoners arriving.
At three past midnight during that drizzly night, Kammler and three of his SS coadjutors held one of his surprise inspections of the men in Barracks 19. Block leader Kammler and his men stormed the barracks, which was quiet except for the snoring of a handful of prisoners. Kammler’s men flicked up the switch to the lights, illuminating the sleeping occupants.
They went around banging loudly on the bedposts with their shiny steel clubs and shouting, “Up, vermin!”
The inmates, wearing only their nightshirts, were made to line up beside their bunks as Kammler strutted through both wings of the barracks.
On that particular evening, all of the prisoners were dressed according to regulations. But that was not good enough to satisfy the tipsy Kammler. No, he had to find some reason to dish out pain to at least a few of the subhumans standing half naked before him. For block leader Hans Kammler and his men in reality could not care less whether or not any of the prisoners wore clothing to bed that they were not supposed to. The true purpose of a late night visit to a barracks was to fulfill their barbaric, sadistic urges. So, on the pretext that the prisoners did not get out of their bunks quick enough, the prisoners were forced to get down on the cold, wooden floor and do fifty pushups each, calling out the number of each pushup as they did them. Doing the pushups was a tough enough task for the average person to perform at any hour, but even more so difficult for a person having just awoken out of a deep sleep.
As the prisoners complied with the order to do the pushups, Kammler strolled about, yelling out, “Faster, you swine! All the way down or else you’ll spend thirty days in the hole!”
Wayne had always done pushups regularly as part of his exercise regiment, so the fifty to him was no big deal. Most of the men, though, struggled to get past thirty.
Some of the older and weaker men could not do the pushups fast enough for the block leader, no matter how much he prodded the man along. In those frequent cases, Kammler would have an SS aide issue a swift blow with their club to the unlucky inmate’s back or legs. Kammler personally kicked a large amount of the prisoners in their stomachs with his steel tipped leather boots with as much force as he could.
With the rising sun, Wayne and the other prisoners once again began the daily routine of living as concentration camp inmates. Roll call would always end with the command from Stepp, “Caps off! Caps on!” That was the morning salute for Captain Himmelmann, the camp commandant, who was always present at roll call with, of course, his beloved horse, Snowflake.
Stepp would next issue the command, “Labor details — fall in!”
With that, each prisoner would move out to his assigned work assembly point — the location where all members of a work detail would gather before moving out to their work detail site. As the prisoners dispersed in columns of five abreast out to a long backbreaking day of labor, the camp band played merry tunes as if a celebration or parade was taking place.
At Hollenburg, prisoners were categorized into one of three groups. The first group was the “shiftless elements”. That group included alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, wife beaters, people who showed up late for work one time too many, and other such types of persons that the Reich thought needed some time in a camp for “re-education” until they were ready to return to the racial community of German society as better men. The second group consisted of the political opponents. Those were men who were overheard saying something “anti-Nazi” or “anti-German”, which basically included any kind of criticism at all. One man had been sentenced to two years of hard labor at Hollenburg because, as he traveled on a public bus to work, he complained to a fellow worker, “I think we’re spending too much money and wasting manpower on building the new Reich War Museum.” The Gestapo had picked him up at his work place within three hours of him innocently making the former comment. The third group at Hollenburg was made up of the inferior races, which comprised anyone who was not of German blood who did not fit into the other two categories. Wayne had been interned as a political opponent.