Neither of us ever harboured the illusion that the fulfilment of these difficult leadership tasks would only ever meet with applause, or that general popularity would be the result of the work we did. On the contrary, no thoughtful employee, working for the benefit of the entire firm, will kid himself that he will therefore be the most popular person with every one of his workmates.
Nonetheless, Topf concludes, the company must continue to be run as it was – while always maintaining the sensitivity towards its workers for which it was renowned.
This brings us to a very important point that we have listed under the general heading of ‘sensitivity’. Personal sensitivity is one of the main features of our entire workforce. This has been the tradition for many decades now, and we know of countless individual examples, not just from hearsay, but from our own experience, too. We absolutely must get it through to every individual person that no new organisational measure is ever directed at them personally, but has, rather, been conceived and ultimately implemented for their benefit.
Perhaps he was carried away with the relief of no longer being under investigation by the Third Reich – for it is not clear that Topf employees appreciated the brothers’ sensitivity. Nor had the series of air-clearing staff meetings resolved the mutual distrust between workers and directors. With little settled and emotions still running high, the Topf brothers met again, in secret in June 1942, to discuss the results of their investigation into the anonymous letter writer – and their conclusions were far nastier in style and substance than some of Ernst Wolfgang’s high-flown rhetoric: ‘Regarding further investigations into the identity of the anonymous letter writer, we again discussed the likelihood that it was someone from within the company.’
The Topf brothers go on to discuss the ‘dirty liars’ in the company, working through the names of possible culprits one by one. Cyriax is ‘dishonest’, Geiling is a ‘stirrer’ who predicts that Germany is going to lose the war, Loffler was ‘born to complain’ and will ‘seize any opportunity to drag the names of the company directors through the mud’.
These men have varied complaints and issues with management, but the Topf brothers conclude that they all have one thing in common:
Without a doubt, the main culprits responsible for the complaints and moaning, as well as the attacks on the honour of the company directors, are located in Department D. It is a sorry situation that can only be improved if one of them leaves the company and finds a better future for themselves elsewhere.[61]
In other words, the men the Topf brothers suspect of the greatest treachery towards the company all work in Department D – the most secretive location within Topf and Sons – alongside Fritz Sander and Kurt Prüfer.
CHAPTER SIX
AUSCHWITZ
‘When the doors opened for the last time we saw that the train had brought us to the place we dreaded the most – the flat, fetid swamp lands of South West Poland. We had arrived at Auschwitz, a death centre the size of a small city with thousands of workers busily dedicated to perfecting mass murder, and the extermination of the Jewish race.’[62]
Auschwitz-Birkenau was a world of its own. For its inmates it was a world of filth and depravity; starvation and death. For its captors it was a world of solidarity, comfort and varied pleasures. A world where life and death sat literally side by side, where tens of thousands of slaves laboured in appalling hardship to drive forward the Nazi war effort, while hundreds of thousands of others experienced the camp for only a few moments, a few hours, before they were led straight to their deaths in the gas chambers. It was a place where the children of the camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, could enjoy picking fruit from the garden of their family villa – so long as they remembered to wash the strawberries that were always covered in a strange grey soot that blew over the wall from the crematorium next door.
Although the concentration camp system had been a central feature of Nazi policy since 1933, its purpose and organisation had evolved – just as the Nazi policy towards the Jews had progressed towards its final, terrible conclusion. In truth, the Nazis were not as efficient, or monolithic, as they would have liked to believe – or as simplistic as historical accounts sometimes make them seem. Nazi policy was ever-changing and often subject to a surprising amount of internal criticism, although that criticism was about implementation and never about the ultimate objective.
All concentration camps came under the central control of the SS, but different camps had different designations. Some, in occupied countries like France and the Netherlands, were transit camps intended to dispatch Jews to the East, while others, like Dachau and Buchenwald in Germany itself, were officially ‘work camps’ where inmates were punished and subjected to hard labour. Tens of thousands of people died in these camps, but they were not technically designated as ‘death camps’. After a series of discussions between Hitler and Himmler about the fate of the Jews in the winter of 1941, followed by a meeting about the implementation of this ‘Final Solution’, organised by Reinhard Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, four camps were built in Poland: Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibór and Bełżec. The sole purpose of these camps was the killing of the Jews. People who were transported there were virtually all murdered upon arrival. These were the ‘extermination camps’, and they were actually very small in size. There was no need to build barracks or administration buildings as huge numbers of victims were led through the woods and gassed immediately.
In total, the Nazis operated more than 300 concentration camps across Europe, but the largest and, later the best known, of these was Auschwitz-Birkenau, which held a unique place in the concentration camp system.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was unique because it was both an extermination camp and a vast labour complex consisting of forty separate camps including an industrial plant operated by IG Farben, a coal mine and a farm. The Nazis were very proud of Auschwitz; it was the jewel in their concentration camp crown and, under the watchful eye of Himmler himself, who personally oversaw the camp’s expansion and development, it became the engine of the Holocaust.
Until the autumn of 1939, Oświęcim was an unassuming town with 12,000 non-Jews and 5,000 Jews in an industrial part of Upper Silesia with good railway connections. But the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 transformed the town’s fate in unimaginable ways. Suddenly the Nazi regime had three large, and completely self-created, problems to solve: how to find homes and land for the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of ‘ethnic Germans’ that it had agreed with the Soviet Union would be allowed to emigrate from the Baltic states and northern Romania; how to manage a large Polish population (which the Nazis regarded as a sub-human species to be treated as slave labour); and what to do with Poland’s two million Jews.
The first of these issues had been resolved by the spring of 1940. Poland was divided into two areas – the ‘New Reich’, technically a part of Germany where ethnic Germans would live in homes and on land Poles had recently been evicted from, and the ‘General Government’ an area that encompassed Warsaw, Kraków and Lublin where Poles would live. Jews would initially be ‘relocated’ to ghettos within the cities – starting with the Lodz ghetto in February 1940.
61
Memo about Department D being the department that complained the most, Landesarchiv Thüringen - Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar.