Rather than the swift victory they’d anticipated, by the winter of 1941 the German invasion of Russia had ground to a standstill, with German forces halted at the gates to Moscow. Realising that there was unlikely to be a fresh influx of Soviet prisoners, the SS recognised that those still alive and in captivity were too valuable a labour resource to waste.
Auschwitz-Birkenau would be transformed into the final destination for millions of deported Jews, starting with the arrival of Slovakian Jews in March 1942.
The camp at Birkenau eventually covered a vast area, more than 432 acres, and was teeming with many different groups of people. In the four years of its existence, the camp housed Jews of all nationalities from as far away as Norway and Greece, Roma and Sinti children, political prisoners and criminals – at one stage there was even a ‘family camp’ with a kindergarten for Roma children that had pretty pictures on the walls and story books. But this camp was eventually ‘liquidated’ and all of the children were sent to the gas chambers.
There was even a Birkenau orchestra, led by a Viennese violinist called Alma Rose, who was forced to play during executions and entertain the SS guards at camp concerts. Alma Rose was the daughter of the leader of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the niece of Gustav Mahler; she was known to exact the same professional standards that she had been used to before the war. In one memorable incident, she told some SS women guards to be quiet when they were chatting in the middle of a piece and, with German respect for ‘authority’, they recognised her role as the orchestra leader and fell silent. Like most things at Birkenau, however, Alma’s story ended in tragedy, with various accounts suggesting that she was either murdered or died of botulism.
As at Buchenwald, and other concentration camps, there was a strict camp hierarchy with the criminal prisoners and Kapos at the top, and the Jewish prisoners at the bottom.
Over time non-Jewish prisoners accrued small concessions and benefits; they could receive food parcels, and in Auschwitz I some could even avail themselves of a rudimentary swimming pool (really a water tank with a wooden plank diving board created for the Auschwitz fire-fighters) and a brothel. Non-Jewish prisoners also received better medical care and sanitation – and could sometimes rise up the camp hierarchy into positions of authority in relation to other prisoners.
Jewish prisoners received no concessions – the Nazi goal was extermination by any means possible. For Jews the world was turned on its head, with all the normal experiences of life perverted. A non-Jewish prisoner might get a brief consultation with a doctor and some basic medicine; an ill Jewish prisoner receiving ‘medical attention’ was injected in the heart with a lethal dose of poison. Pregnant women were either subjected to late-term abortions, or had their babies killed at birth.
Of course, there were divisions between the Jewish prisoners, too. Kept in fenced-off areas of the camp depending on nationality, some groups fared better than others. Polish Jews, who were already accustomed to very harsh conditions in the ghettoes, usually outlasted Dutch and French Jews who had been living much more comfortable lives. Those who could not adjust to camp life acquired a vacant gaze, gave up hope and died. In camp language these people were called muselmann, because their lifeless stoop was perceived to resemble Muslims bent over in prayer.
As the first Polish prisoners of Auschwitz had quickly realised, survival very much depended on what work you were assigned. The main aim of every prisoner was to get a job with a ‘roof’, as being protected from the harsh weather could guarantee they would live longer.
Occupations varied from barbers to office workers (there were even German-speaking Jewish women working for the Gestapo) to manual labourers to the team of Sonderkommandos – prisoners who worked in the gas chambers sorting through possessions, pulling out gold teeth and clearing away the bodies. This was a truly horrible task, but these prisoners would usually be given extra food and had better living conditions (although they were usually gassed themselves after several weeks). Most workers were ordered to take part in different types of manual labour: some were sent to the laundry room, others joined an external labour unit making German ammunitions and many worked in the warehouses, sorting out the endless piles of clothes and belongings taken from people arriving on the transports.
Working in the warehouses, which were referred to as ‘Canada’ because they were the land of plenty, was a sought-after job for many reasons: women prisoners got to grow their hair back, take cold showers and could often pilfer extra food rations from the provisions that came in on the transports.
Eva Schloss remembers:
‘Canada’ itself seemed like a strange wonderland – full of surprising things. I approached one huge metal pile, glinting in the sunlight, and discovered to my amazement they were thousands of pairs of spectacles. Another warehouse was piled up to the ceiling with eiderdowns, while another housed nothing but false legs and arms.
There were shoes in every shape and size, and thousands and thousands of suitcases and trunks. ‘One area had children’s suitcases with their names and date of birth, usually carefully painted on to the front of the cases by their parents. Another room was filled with hundreds of empty prams – like a perpetual waiting room for a nursery that no babies ever returned from.’[67]
The purpose of ‘Canada’ was to plunder every conceivable piece of Jewish property and send it back to Germany, where it would be distributed to soldiers and their families, as well as ordinary people. “Canada” was nothing more than a gruesome graveyard of things,’ Eva Schloss wrote.[68] German men were shaving with Jewish razors, while good German mothers pushed Jewish prams and grandparents put on Jewish glasses to read newspaper reports about the war effort. In July 1944, 2,500 wristwatches were sent to the residents of Berlin who had suffered damage from Allied air raids. A former Polish inmate named Wanda Szaynok remembered watching a transport of empty baby carriages, five abreast, making its way to Auschwitz station. There were so many prams it took an hour to go past.[69]
In a crazed effort not to ‘waste’ anything, the Nazis even piled up the hair they had shaved off prisoners, and made it into carpets and socks. All clippings over 2 cm in length were reused, and the proud Aryans of the Third Reich walked around wearing the hair of dead Jews.
It was theft and plunder on a truly mammoth scale. In the crematoria, teams of workers pulled out gold teeth from the victims, which were soaked in acid to remove tissue and muscle, and then melted down into gold ingots and shipped to Germany. This gold was supposed to be reused by the SS dental service (one year’s supply from 1942 would have been sufficient for the whole of the SS for the full six years of the war), but, inevitably, much of it made its way into the hands of camp guards and Swiss bank accounts, including the International Bank of Settlements in Basel.
While institutional plunder was sanctioned, individual theft by guards was not. Nazis regarded stealing as a major problem – not to mention a deep moral failing. All officially plundered property was supposed to be accounted for in Berlin, but many soldiers posted in the camps were involved in brazen corruption – and made personal fortunes by stealing from ‘Canada’. Later, in 1943, the Nazis launched a full-scale investigation into corruption at the camp and arrested many guards, as well as temporarily removing founding commandant Höss (He was in fact promoted to overseeing all concentration camps from Berlin, but he kept his family housed at Auschwitz, and returned to his role overseeing the camp in May 1944.)
69
Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (eds),