On the road between Auschwitz and Birkenau I once saw an entire column of Russians, several hundred strong, suddenly make a rush for some nearby stacks of potatoes on the far side of the railway line. Their guards were taken by surprise, overrun, and could do nothing. I luckily happened to come along at this moment and was able to restore the situation. The Russians had thrown themselves onto the stacks, from which they could hardly be torn away. Some of them died in the confusion, while chewing, their hands full of potatoes. Overcome by the crudest instinct of self-preservation, they came to care nothing for one another, and in their selfishness now thought only of themselves. Cases of cannibalism were not rare in Birkenau. I myself came across a Russian lying between piles of bricks, whose body had been ripped open and the liver removed. They would beat each other to death for food. Once, riding past the camp, I saw a Russian hit another on the head with a tile, so as to snatch a piece of bread which the man had been secretly chewing behind a heap of stones. I happened to be outside the wire and by the time I found a gate and reached the spot the man was dead, his skull bashed in. I could not identify his assassin among the crowds of Russians swarming around. When the foundations for the first group of buildings were being dug, the men often found the bodies of Russians who had been killed by their fellows, partly eaten and then stuffed into a hole in the mud.
The mysterious disappearance of many Russians was explained in this way. I once saw from a window of my house a Russian dragging a food bucket behind the block next to the command building and scratching about inside it. Suddenly another Russian came around the corner, hesitated for a moment, and then hurled himself upon the one scrabbling in the bucket, and pushed him into the electrified wire before vanishing with the bucket. The guard in the watchtower had also seen this, but was not in a position to fire at the man who had run away. I at once telephoned the duty block leader and had the electric current cut off. I then went myself into the camp, to find the man who had done it. The one who had been thrown against the wire was dead, and the other was nowhere to be found.
They were no longer human beings. They had become animals, who sought only food.
Of more than 10,000 Russian prisoners of war who were to provide the main labor force for building the prisoner-of-war camp at Birkenau, only a few hundred were still alive by the summer of 1942.[50]
Those who did remain were the best. They were splendid workers and were used as mobile squads wherever something had to be finished quickly. But I never got over the feeling that those who had survived had done so only at the expense of their comrades, because they were more ferocious and unscrupulous and generally “tougher.”
It was, I believe, in the summer of 1942 that a mass breakout by the remaining Russians took place. A great part of them were shot, but many managed to get clear away. Those who were recaptured gave as reason for this mass escape their fear that they were to be gassed, for they had been told that they were to be transferred to a newly built sector of the camp. They took it that this transfer was merely a deceptive measure. It was, however, never intended that these Russians should be gassed. But it is certain that they knew of the liquidation of the Russian politruks and commissars. They feared that they were to suffer the same fate.[51]
It is in this way that a mass psychosis develops and spreads.
The next largest contingent were the gypsies.
Long before the war gypsies were being rounded up and put into concentration camps as part of the campaign against asocials. One department of the Reich Criminal Police Office was solely concerned with the supervision of gypsies. Repeated searches were made in the gypsy encampments for persons who were not true gypsies, and these were sent to concentration camps as shirkers or asocials. In addition, the gypsy encampments were constantly being combed through for biological reasons. The Reichsführer SS wanted to insure that the two main gypsy stocks be preserved: I cannot recall their names. In his view they were the direct descendants of the original Indo-Germanic race, and had preserved their ways and customs more or less pure and intact. He now wished to have them all collected together for research purposes. They were to be precisely registered and preserved as a historic monument.
Later they were to be collected from all over Europe and allotted limited areas in which to dwell.
In 1937 and 1938 all itinerant gypsies were collected into so-called habitation camps near the larger towns to facilitate supervision.
In 1942, however, an order was given that all gypsy-type persons on German territory, including gypsy half-castes, were to be arrested and transported to Auschwitz, irrespective of sex or age. The only exceptions were those who had been officially recognized as pure-blooded members of the two main tribes. These were to be settled in the Odenburg district on the Neusiedler See. Those transported to Auschwitz were to be kept there for the rest of the war in a family camp.
But the regulations governing their arrest were not drawn up with sufficient precision. Various offices of the Criminal Police interpreted them in different ways, and as a result persons were arrested who could not possibly be regarded as belonging to the category that it was intended to intern.
Many men were arrested while on leave from the front, despite high decorations and several wounds, simply because their father or mother or grandfather had been a gypsy or a gypsy half-caste. Even a very senior Party member, whose gypsy grandfather had settled in Leipzig, was among them. He himself had a large business in Leipzig, and had been decorated more than once during the First World War. Another was a girl student who had been a leader in the Berlin League of German Girls.[52]
There were many more such cases. I made a report to the Reich Criminal Police Office. As a result the gypsy camp was constantly under examination and many releases took place. But these were scarcely noticeable, so great was the number of those who remained.
I cannot say how many gypsies, including half-castes, were in Auschwitz. I only know that they completely filled one section of the camp designed to hold 10,000.[53]
Conditions in Birkenau were utterly unsuitable for a family camp. Every prerequisite was lacking, even if it was intended that the gypsies be kept there only for the duration of the war. It was quite impossible to provide proper food for the children, although by referring to the Reichsführer SS I managed for a time to bamboozle the food offices into giving me food for the very young ones. This was soon stopped, however, for the Food Ministry laid down that no special children’s food might be issued to the concentration camps.
50
On August 18, 1942—that is to say after the mass escape referred to below—only 163 Soviet prisoners of war were registered in Auschwitz. Of these, 96 survived until the end.
51
Of the 10,000 Russian prisoners of war who came to Auschwitz, a Special Commission from the Gestapo Office, Kattowitz, in November 1941, pronounced some 300 to be commissars or fanatical Communists. These were separated from the others and executed.
53
Lucie Adelsberger, in