Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (25 page)

Adler’s moral argument is incontrovertible: the maltreatment of innocent Germans is every bit as wrong as the persecution of innocent Jews. However, he is wrong to belittle the difference in scale between the two events. He also glosses over the fact that while Germans suffered at the hands of individuals, their torture and murder was never part of official government policy: the Czech authorities wanted merely to expel Germans, not to exterminate them. This, surely, constitutes a whole world of difference.

However, there are others who claim that while the wholesale extermination of Germans might not have been on the agenda in Theresienstadt it certainly was in other places. When millions of bruised and destitute refugees began flooding into Germany in the autumn of 1945, they brought with them some disturbing stories of places they called ‘hell camps’, ‘death camps’ and ‘extermination camps’. In these places, they said, Germans were routinely worked to death, starved to death and subjected to mass executions. The sadistic methods used by the camp guards were every bit as bad as, and perhaps worse than, those used by the SS at Auschwitz. In some camps, it was claimed, ‘only about five per cent’ of the inmates survived.
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Such allegations were taken extremely seriously by the German government, and were embraced by large sections of the population who preferred to see themselves as victims, rather than perpetrators, of atrocity. These beliefs would have political consequences long into the twentieth century and beyond.

Since the most notorious of these camps were not in Czechoslovakia but in Poland, it is to that country that we must turn our attention next.

The New ‘Extermination Camps’

In February 1945, after the Red Army had driven deep into German territory, an abandoned labour camp was discovered at Zgoda, near
wi
tochłowice, a small provincial town in what today is south-western Poland. Eager for retribution, the Polish paramilitary Public Security Service (Urz
d Bezpiecze
stwa Publicznego or UBP) decided to reopen it as a ‘punishment camp’.
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Thousands of local Germans were arrested and sent there for labour duties. While the local population was told that Zgoda was a camp only for committed Nazis and German activists, in reality almost anyone could end up there, and alongside the former Nazi prisoners were people who had been arrested for belonging to German sports clubs, for not having their papers on them, or occasionally for no reason at all.

Such prisoners might have guessed what was in store for them as soon as they arrived. The camp was surrounded by a high-voltage electric fence, with ominous signs on it displaying a skull and crossbones and the words ‘Danger of death’.
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According to several witnesses, these messages were reinforced by the sight of dead bodies hanging on the wire.
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Prisoners were met at the gates by the camp director, Salomon Morel, who told them that he would ‘show them what Auschwitz meant’;
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or he would taunt them by saying, ‘My parents and siblings were gassed by the Germans in Auschwitz, and I will not rest until all Germans have had their rightful punishment.’
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Zgoda had been a satellite camp of Auschwitz during the war: to reinforce this link, someone had scrawled the inscription ‘Arbeit macht frei’ above the gate.
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The torture began immediately, especially for anyone suspected of being a member of a Nazi organization. Members of the Hitler Youth were told to lie on the ground while the guards trod on them, or they were forced to sing the Nazi Party anthem, the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, with their arms raised while guards beat them with rubber truncheons.
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Sometimes Morel would throw prisoners on top of each other until their bodies formed a huge pyramid; he would beat them with a stool, or he would order prisoners to beat each other for the guards’ entertainment.
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Occasionally prisoners were sent to the punishment chamber, an underground bunker where they were made to stand for hours in freezing chest-deep water.
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Special occasions were marked with extra beatings. On Hitler’s birthday, for example, the guards entered Block No. 7 – the barracks reserved for suspected Nazis – and set about beating them with chair legs.
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On VE Day, Morel took a group of prisoners from Block No. 11 for another celebratory beating.
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The conditions in which these prisoners were forced to live were deliberately subhuman. The camp was built for a capacity of only 1,400 inmates, but by July it already had more than three and a half times this number. At its peak, 5,048 prisoners were interned here, all but sixty-six of them either Germans or Volksdeutsch.
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They were packed into seven wooden barrack buildings crawling with lice, where they were denied adequate food or access to proper washing facilities. Rations were routinely withheld by greedy camp staff, and food packages sent by concerned relatives outside the camp were confiscated.
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Two-thirds of the men were sent daily to the local coal mines, where they were sometimes literally worked to death.
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The suspected Nazi prisoners in Block No. 7 did not go to work, but were kept under the constant attention of the UBP guards inside the camp. When an epidemic of typhus struck, sick prisoners were not isolated but forced to stay in their overcrowded barracks. As a consequence the death rate accelerated rapidly – according to one prisoner tasked with burying the dead, up to twenty people died daily.
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Anyone who tried to escape this hell was immediately singled out for special treatment. Gerhard Gruschka, a fourteen-year-old German boy imprisoned in the camp, witnessed the punishment meted out to one escapee who had the misfortune to be recaptured. His name was Eric van Calsteren. Once he had been brought back to the barracks, a group of guards repeatedly beat him to the ground with fists and clubs, while the rest of the prisoners were made to watch. According to Gruschka, it was one of the most brutal beatings he ever saw.

Eric … suddenly tore himself away from the militiamen and clambered onto one of the plank beds. The four rushed round behind it and dragged it into the centre of the room. They were obviously extremely irritated by such an attempt at resistance. One of them fetched an iron bar from the corner of the room where we kept the vat used for fetching our food. When pushed through both handles of the vat this bar made it easier to carry the full container. Now however it became an instrument of torture. The militiamen took it in turns to strike Eric’s legs with unrestrained rage. Whenever he fell to the ground they worked him over with kicks, pulled him up again and beat him again with the steel bar. In his desperation Eric begged his torturers, ‘Just shoot me, just shoot me!’ But they beat him even harder. It was one of the most terrible nights at Zgoda. Every one of us believed that our fellow prisoner was going to be killed.
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Miraculously, van Calsteren somehow survived this beating. Like Gruschka, he was only fourteen years old. He was also a Dutch citizen, and so should never have been imprisoned in Poland in the first place.

These were the kinds of events that took place daily in Zgoda. It is not surprising that parallels are often drawn between this camp and Nazi concentration camps, especially since the camp commander himself appears to have been consciously trying to resurrect the atmosphere of Auschwitz. Such parallels were also drawn by outsiders at the time. A local priest passed on information about the camp to British officials in Berlin, who in turn forwarded it to the Foreign Office in London. ‘Concentration camps have not been abolished, but have been taken over by the new owners,’ reads the British report. ‘At Schwientochlowitz, prisoners who do not die of starvation or are not beaten to death, are made to stand up to their necks, night after night until they die, in cold water.’
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German prisoners who were released from Zgoda also made comparisons with Nazi camps. One, a man named Günther Wollny, had had the misfortune to have experienced both Auschwitz and Zgoda. ‘I’d rather be ten years in a German camp than one day in a Polish one,’ he later claimed.
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For all the torture that took place in Zgoda, it was the lack of food and the arrival of typhoid that proved to be the biggest killers. For those who survived, however, the epidemic proved to be their salvation. Details of the outbreak leaked to the Polish newspapers, and finally to the Polish government department in charge of prisons and camps. Morel was formally reprimanded for allowing conditions in the camp to deteriorate so badly, as well as for being too ready to use weapons on the prisoners, and one of the camp’s head administrators, Karol Zaks, was sacked for withholding rations.
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The authorities then set about releasing prisoners or transferring them to other camps. By November 1945, on the condition that they never spoke about what they had experienced, the majority of prisoners had been set free and the camp was closed down.

According to official figures, of the estimated 6,000 Germans who had passed through Zgoda 1,855 died – almost one in three. Some Polish and German historians have concluded that, despite being officially downgraded from a punishment camp to a work camp, it always functioned as a place where German prisoners were deliberately denied food and medical care in order to bring about their deaths.
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It would be tempting to dismiss Zgoda as the individual vengeance of a single, brutal camp commander, were it not for the fact that similar conditions prevailed at many other Polish camps and prisons. At the Polish Militia prison in Trzebica (German Trebnitz), for example, German inmates were regularly beaten for sport, and often had dogs set on them by the guards. One prisoner claimed he had been forced to crouch down and hop around his cell while his warder beat him with an iron-tipped stick.
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The prison at Gliwice (or Gleiwitz) was run by former prisoners of the Nazis, who used broomsticks, clubs and spring-loaded truncheons to beat confessions out of German prisoners.
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Survivors from the prison at Klodzko (or Glatz) tell stories of prisoners who had their ‘eyes beaten out with rubber cudgels’, and all kinds of other violence, including straightforward murder.
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