What I have said certainly applied to the majority of the female supervisory staff. It is true that there were good, decent, reliable women among them, but they were very few. There is no need to emphasize that these suffered greatly from their surroundings and from the general conditions at Auschwitz. But they could not escape, being bound by their war service obligations. Many of them complained to me. about their troubles, and even more so to my wife. We could only tell them to hope that the war would soon be over. This was indeed a poor means of consolation.
Attached to the women’s camp, for the purpose of guarding the working parties employed outside the camp, were the dog handlers.
Already at Ravensbrück the female supervisors in charge of outside working parties had dogs allotted them, so as to reduce the number of guards. These supervisors were of course armed with pistols, but the Reichsführer SS believed that a greater terror effect would be produced by the_use of dogs. For most women have a powerful respect for dogs, whereas men do not bother about them so much.
Because of the mass of prisoners at Auschwitz, how to guard the outside working parties effectively was a constant problem. There were never enough troops. Chains of sentry posts were useful, in that they could be used to enclose the larger working areas. But the constant moving of work parties from one site to another, and the mobility necessitated by the nature of the work itself, made proper supervision impossible in the case of agricultural work, ditch-digging, and so on. Owing to the small number of female supervisors available, it was necessary to employ as many dog handlers as possible. Even our one-hundred-and-fifty-odd dogs were not enough. The Reichsführer SS calculated that one dog should be able to replace two sentries. This was probably so, as far as the female working parties were concerned, owing to the universal fear caused by the presence of the dogs.
The Auschwitz dog squad contained the most astonishing military material. Astonishing in the negative sense. When volunteers were sought for training as dog handlers, half the SS regiment applied. They imagined that such work would be easier and less monotonous. Since it was impossible to take on all the volunteers, the companies hit upon a cunning solution, and gave up all their black sheep, so as to be rid of them. Someone else could have the headaches now. Most of these men had been punished for some offense or other. If the commander of the guard unit had looked at these men’s conduct sheets a little more closely, he would never on any account have allowed them to be sent away for training.
At the Training and Experimental Establishment for Dog Handlers at Oranienburg some of the trainees were returned to their units before they had even finished their course, because of total unsuitability.
When those who had completed their training returned to Auschwitz they were formed into a unit, the Hundestaffel,[70] and it was not hard to see what a splendid new formation had here been created. And now it was time for them to be put to work. Either they played games with their dogs, or they found an easy hideout and went to sleep, their dogs waking them up on the approach of an “enemy,” or else passed the time in pleasant conversation with the female supervisors or the prisoners. A great many of them formed a regular liaison with the “green” controllers. Since the dog handlers were always employed in the women’s camp, it was not difficult for them to continue this liaison.
When they were bored, or wanted to have some fun, they would set their dogs on the prisoners. If they were caught doing this, they would maintain that the dog had done it of its own accord, owing to the peculiar behavior of the prisoner, or that its lead had been lost, and so on. They always had an excuse. Every day, according to their regulations, they had to give their dog further training.
Because of the time and trouble it took to train fresh dog handlers, they could only be relieved of their posts if they had been guilty of some grave offense, such as one that entailed punishment by SS court-martial, or alternatively if they had badly ill-treated or neglected their dogs. The kennelman, a former police sergeant, who had looked after dogs for more than twenty-five years, was often driven to despair by the behavior of the dog handlers. But they knew that nothing much could happen to them, and that they were unlikely actually to lose their jobs. A better commanding officer might have been able to knock this gang into shape. But the gentleman concerned had far more important things to think about. I had much trouble with the Hundestaffel, and many clashes with the commander of the guard regiment over this.[71]
I had no understanding of what was actually required of troops, at least according to Glücks’s way of thinking. Hence I was never able to get him to post away officers as soon as they became intolerable at Auschwitz.
A very great deal of trouble could have been avoided if Glücks’s attitude toward me had been different.
As the war went on the Reichsführer SS was constantly insisting on ever greater economies in the manpower employed on guard duties. The men were to be replaced by devices such as movable wire fencing, by encircling permanent places of work with electrified wire, by mine fields, and by ever larger numbers of dogs. Should a commandant manage to devise a really efficient method of economizing in the use of guards, he was given immediate promotion. But all this achieved nothing at all.
The Reichsführer SS even imagined that dogs could be trained to circle around the prisoners, as though they were sheep, and thus prevent them from escaping. One sentry, aided by several dogs, was supposed to be able to guard up to one hundred prisoners with safety. The attempt came to nothing. Men are not sheep. However well-trained the dogs were in recognizing the prisoners by their uniforms and their smell and so on, and however accurately they were taught to know how close prisoners might be allowed to approach, they were all only dogs, and could not think like human beings. If the prisoners purposely attracted them to one spot, the dogs would then leave a wide section unguarded through which they could escape.
Nor were the dogs any use in preventing a mass breakout. They would of course savagely maul some of the escapers, but they would be immediately slaughtered along with their “shepherds.”
It was also proposed that dogs should replace the guards in the watchtowers. They were to be allowed to run loose between the double wire fencing that encircled the camp or the permanent places of work, each dog guarding a certain sector, and would give warning of the approach of a prisoner thus preventing a break through the wire. This, too, came to nothing. The dogs either found a spot in which to go to sleep, or they let themselves be tricked. If the wind was in the wrong quarter the dog would notice nothing, or its barking would not be heard by the sentry.
The laying of mines was a two-edged weapon. They had to be accurately laid and their precise situation plotted on the plan of the mine field, since after three months at the most they became defective and had to be replaced. It was also necessary to walk through the mine field from time to time, and this gave the prisoners a chance to observe the lanes where no mines had been laid.
Globocnik[72] had used mines in this way at his extermination centers. But despite the carefully laid mine fields at Sobibor, the Jews knew where the lanes through the mine field ran, and were able by force to achieve a major breakout during which almost all the guard personnel were wiped out.
Neither mechanical devices nor animals can replace human intelligence.
Even the double electrified fence can be neutralized in dry weather with a few simple tools, provided a man is sufficiently cold-blooded and gives the problem a little thought. This has frequently succeeded. Often too the sentries outside the wire have come too close to it, and have had to pay for their lack of caution with their lives.
71
The commander of the SS guard regiment at Auschwitz from 1942 on was Friedrich Hartjenstein.