The doctor prepared a report for the Reichsführer SS, which concluded by saying that the prisoner ought to be in a nursing home and not in a concentration camp. Any attempt to cure him by hard work was doomed to failure from the start.
The report was sent off and while we were awaiting a reply the newcomer was given work, as had been ordered. His job was to cart sand. He could scarcely lift a shovel. He fell over while pushing an empty wheelbarrow. I had him taken back to his room, and informed the commandant. The commandant wished to see this performance with his own eyes on the following day. The man must work, for the Reichsführer SS had ordered it. On the next day he was staggering so that he could hardly get to the sand pit, although it was not far away. Work was out of the question; even Loritz realized this. He was taken back to his room and put to bed. That too was wrong, for he masturbated constantly. The doctor talked to him as to a sick child. It was all quite useless. They tried tying his hands, but that was not effective for long. He was given sedatives and kept cool. All in vain. He became weaker and weaker. Nevertheless he crawled out of bed in an attempt to reach the other prisoners. He was put under arrest, pending the decision of the Reichsführer SS. Two days later he was dead. He died while masturbating. Altogether he had been five weeks in the camp. The Heichsführer SS ordered a postmortem examination to be carried out and a detailed report sent to him. The examination, at which I was present, showed a complete physical debilitation but no abnormality. The professor at the Munich Institute of Pathology, who performed the post-mortem, had never before come across a similar case in all his experience covering a great many years.
I was present when the commandant showed the man’s corpse to his mother. The mother said that his death was a blessing, both for himself and for her. His uncontrollable sexual life had made him impossible to everyone. She had consulted the most famous medical specialists throughout Europe, but without success. He had run away from every sanitarium. He had spent some time in a monastery. But he could not stay there either. She had even, in her despair, suggested to him he take his own life, but he lacked the courage to do so. Now he would at least be at peace with himself. It makes me shiver even now when I remember this case.
In Sachsenhausen the homosexuals, from the very beginning, were kept in a special block. They were also kept away from the other prisoners at work. They were employed in the clay pit of a large brickworks. It was hard work, and each of them had to complete a definite amount of work per day.
They were exposed to all kinds of weather, since a stipulated number of truckloads of clay had to be filled daily. The process of baking the clay could not be held up through lack of raw material. For this reason they were forced to work in all weathers, summer and winter.
The effect of hard work, which was supposed to make them “normal” again, varied greatly according to the different types of homosexuals.
It had its most salutary effect on the Strichjungen. This was Berlin slang for the male prostitutes who thought to make a comfortable living and shirked any work, however easy. They could not be classified as true homosexuals—prostitution was just their trade.
Youths of this sort were soon brought to their senses by hard work and the strict discipline of camp life. Most of them worked hard and took great care not to get into trouble, so that they might be released as soon as possible. They avoided association either with the genuine or with the viciously depraved type of homosexual. They hoped thus to show that they really had nothing at all in common with homosexuals.
Many could be trained in this fashion and then released without any danger of their relapsing into their old ways of life. One lesson was effective enough, especially since most of them were young boys.
A proportion, too, of those who had become homosexual out of inclination, men who though overindulgence had grown weary of women and sought fresh excitements to enliven their parasitical existence, could also be cured of their vice.
This was not the case with those who had begun by dabbling in homosexuality for such reasons but had later become deeply addicted to their vice. They were comparable to the genuine homosexuals, of whom there were only a few examples. Neither the hardest work nor the strictest supervision was of any help in these cases. Whenever they found an opportunity they would fall into one another’s arms. Even when physically in a very bad way, they would continue to indulge in their vice. They were easy enough to pick out. Their soft and girlish affectations and fastidiousness, their sickly sweet manner of speech, and their altogether too affectionate deportment toward their fellows distinguished them from those who had put their vice behind them and wished to be free of it, and whose steps on the road to recovery were visible to any acute observer.
Those who really wanted to renounce their vice, and were sufficiently strong-minded to do so, were able to stand up to the hardest work, but the others, each according to his constitution, gradually broke down physically. Because they could not or would not give up their vice, they knew that they would never be set free. The effect of this psychological burden on men whose natures were for the most part delicate and sensitive was to accelerate their physical collapse.
Should one of these lose his “friend” through sickness, or perhaps death, then the end could be at once foreseen. Adany would commit suicide. To such natures, in such circumstances, the “friend” meant everything. There were many instances of “friends” committing suicide together.
In 1944 the Reichsführer SS had “renunciation” tests carried out in Ravensbrück. Homosexuals whose recovery was still in doubt would be unobtrusively set to work in company with whores, and their behavior carefully observed. The whores were ordered to approach the homosexuals inconspicuously and attempt to excite them sexually. Those who were cured at once took advantage of this opportunity, and scarcely required any encouragement. The incurable ones took no notice whatever of these women, and if approached in too obvious a manner would turn away, trembling with disgust. The procedure then was for those who appeared fit for release to be given an opportunity of intercourse with their own sex. Almost all of them spurned the opportunity thus offered and firmly rejected the advances of the real homosexuals. There were borderline cases, individuals who took advantage of both opportunities. Whether these men could be described as bisexual, I do not know.
I can only add that I found the habits and mentality of the various kinds of homosexuals, and the study of their psyches under prison conditions, extremely instructive.
In Sachsenhausen there were quite a number of prominent prisoners and also a number of special prisoners.
“Prominents” was the term given to those who had formerly played a part in public life. Most of them were treated as political prisoners and lived with others of their sort in the camp without any special privileges. At the beginning of the war their numbers were considerably increased by the re-arrest of former officials of the KPD, the German Communist Party, and the SPD, the German Social-Democratic Party.
Special prisoners were those who, for reasons of state policy, were accommodated separately in or near a concentration camp. They were not allowed to mix with other prisoners. No one except those directly concerned was allowed to know the place of their imprisonment, or indeed that they were under arrest at all. Before the war there were only a few of them; but as the war went on their numbers increased considerably. Later I shall return to this subject.