Gestapo (23 page)

“September 6—Today, Sunday, excellent lunch: tomato soup, half a hen with potatoes and red cabbage, sweets and marvellous vanilla ice.… In the evening at eight o'clock outside for special action.

“September 9—This morning the most pleasant news from my lawyer, Profesor Dr. Hallermann in Muenster: I was divorced from my wife on the first of this month. (
Note:
I see colors again: a black curtain has been drawn back from my life.) Later on, present as M.O. at a corporal punishment of eight prisoners and an execution by shooting with small caliber rifles.… In the evening present at my fourth special action.

“September 10—Present in the morning at my fifth special action.

“September 20—Listened to a concert of the prisoners' band this afternoon in bright sunshine. Bandmaster:
conductor of the Warsaw State Opera. Eighty musicians. For lunch We has pork, for diener baked tench.

“September 23—Present last right at sixth and seventh special actions. In the morning Lieutenant General Pohl [Chief of the Concentration Camp Administration under Himmler] arrived with his staff at the house of the Waffen S.S.… At eight o'clock in the evening dinner with Lieutenant General Pohl in the
Fuehrerhaus
, a real banquet. We had baked pike, as much as we wanted, good coffee, excellent ale and rolls.”

Professor Dr. Hans Hermann Kremer stayed at Auschwitz until November 18th, returning then to normal duty. He took part in fourteen special actions all told, and cared less and less about them, although the eleventh was tiresome—a special action againt Dutch women on a cold, wet, Sunday morning, some of whom so far forgot themselves as to beg for mercy: “Shocking scenes with three women, who beseech us for bare life.” But he was settling down to his new existence, enjoying the food, and conducting interesting experiments with liver, spleen, and pancreas taken from living prisoners. On November 1st he had to fly off to Prague, but he got back six days later and felt happy to be home at Auschwitz, “where I had a really good meal again and ate myself good and properly full.” His last special action was on November 8th. “In the evening we had a good time in the Leaders' Club, invited by Colonel Wirth. We had Bulgarian red wine and Croatian plum-schnapps.”

It is of interest to note that Professor Dr. Kremer of the University of Westphalia was sentenced to death by a Polish Court at Cracow and was duly executed. It is not certain that this would have happened had he been tried farther West.

There are no extant descriptions by Germans of the horrors of the special actions, so to picture the scenes which Professor Kremer had to witness before getting back to his comfortable meals we must put together the evidence of survivors. When pressure was not too great the proceedings were orderly. Naked and shorn, the prisoners were marched to the gas chambers, some of which were sunk in the ground, others on the same level as the crematoria which disposed of the corpses. It was all very clean and
tidy, with a neat lawn all around, broken only by what might have been ventilation shafts, but which, in fact, were the orifices through which the blue crystals of Cyklon B were dropped into hollow columns of perforated sheet metal, which ran down to the floor of the chamber. There were douches in the ceiling to maintain the impression of a bath-house, but these were dummies, and there were no drainage channels in the floor, which was level and not sloped.

It was through these perforated columns that the gas made its way into the chamber, and, whatever the people may have felt while they waited, they knew in their last minutes what was happening, and then they would stampede away from the columns and pile up against the great metal door, shrieking, and fighting in mass panic, even in the moment of death. The shrieks would die down to nothing, and then, as Hoess said in his affidavit, those outside would wait perhaps half an hour; the great metal door would slide back, and the Jewish
Sonderkommandos
would go into action with hoses to wash out the blood and excrement and with hooks and ropes to drag the intertwined mass of naked corpses apart. But sometimes it was not as orderly as this. When Auschwitz was working at its highest pitch, in the summer of 1944, when, in a last maniacal effort, Eichmann was trying to sweep all the Jews left in Europe into his gas chambers before it was too late, the pressure was too great.

Then the victims would be driven into the chambers with their hands held high so that more could be squeezed in, and the children were piled up on top of them. The
Sonderkommandos
would have to work like fiends to deal with the packed mass, and, as they worked, the S.S. overseers would be flogging them with sticks and rubber truncheons to make them work faster, while, outside, because they could not be packed in, others would be moving among the waiting victims, gathering them into little groups and shooting them down then and there to save space. It was this kind of pressure which proved the inadequacy of the crematoria, and it was found quicker by far, though also more conspicuous, to flood the bodies with petrol and burn them in the open. At the Lueneberg trial it was stated by Dr. Bendel that all five furnaces of Crematorium No. 4, so
ingeniously constructed by the firm of Toepf of Erfurt, could consume only one thousand corpses a day, whereas in open pits, with petrol, they could burn the same number in an hour.

None of the people we have lately encountered belonged to the Gestapo, which here, as in other matters, cannot serve as an alibi. On the other hand, every man, woman, and child in that fantastic death-factory was consigned there by the Gestapo.

It is said sometimes of the Gestapo, and not only of the Gestapo, but also of the S.S. in general, and of those members of the Armed Forces and of the civilian bureaucracy (they may fairly regard themselves as an ill-used minority) who have been unable to escape being implicated in the slaughter of the Jews and the Slavs, that they had become so conditioned to regarding these people as not people at all, as subhuman types, that they felt not merely no compunction in removing them from the earth but also a positive pride. This contention has a basis of truth. We remember Himmler's description of the extermination of the Jews as a delousing operation, and we may cite the words of S.S. Lieutenant General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski at Nuremberg, when asked to comment on the massacres of the
Einsatzgruppen:
“I am of the opinion that when, for years, for decades, the doctrine is preached that the Slav race is an inferior race and Jews not even human, then an explosion of this sort is inevitable.” Bach-Zelewski was an educated man, an old soldier, a Higher S.S. and Police Leader in charge of operations on the Rusian Front, and a member of the Reichstag from 1932 until the end.

We shall return to this view later. The point to be made immediately is that the Gestapo, the S.S., and others did not confine their extraordinary activities to people whom they considered inferior or subhuman. They operated with equal cruelty against the nations of the West. It is true that there was no campaign of extermination
directed against, for example, the French; but this was due to a political decision made by Hitler. We have no reason to doubt that had the Fuehrer decided to eliminate ten million Frenchmen in order to make room for Germans, the relevant organizations, including the Gestapo and the S.D. would have carried out his orders, even thought they had not been taught for years that the French were subhuman. Indeed, although extermination of whole sections of the population was never practiced in Western Europe—always excepting the Jews, whom the people of several nationalities, and especially the French, perversely insisted on regarding as their own compatriots—there were some by no means inconsiderable massacres, not only of civilian populations but also of prisoners-of-war; and on those occasions when the Gestapo were required to act with severity against groups and individuals, there was nothing to choose between their behavior in Bourges and their behavior in Borisov. Only those who think that, in these days, individual murder must be multiplied a thousand-fold before it may be considered reprehensible will find any fundamental variation in the general attitude and behavior of the Gestapo wherever it happened to be stationed. If there is some confusion about this, it may be found to be due very largely to the invention of a new word to describe what was, at Nuremberg, considered to be a new crime: the word genocide, which may be seen as one of those camouflage terms. It is meant to sound formidable; but in fact it serves all too well to conceal the simple fact of murder.

There was plenty of murder in Western Europe, but no genocide. Most of it took place—always excepting the mass-murder of the Jews—when Germany was hard put to it to hold her own against the Allies; and most of it came into the category of kiling for punishment, or as a deterrent, rather than into the category of killing to exterminate. There was the shooting of hostages on a large scale, to cow the spirit of resistance; there was the torturing and killing of individuals suspected of sabotage; there was the killing of prisoners-of-war, mainly British, who made a nuisance of themselves; there was the killing of captured parachutists and Commandos, mainly British, to discourage the others. There were special expedients, such
as the decree which instructed the police not to interfere with angry crowds when they started lynching Allied bomber-crews who had been shot down, or such as the notorious
Nacht und Nebel
(Night and Fog) Decree, which provided that all suspected resisters who could not be shot out of hand were to be sent in conditions of the utmost secrecy to Germany, where their fate would be concealed, even after death, from their families—the object of this being to create an atmosphere of secret and mysterious terror inimical to the spirit of resistance. In all these operations the Gestapo and the S.D. operated in the foreground, as in the rounding-up and deportation of the Jews—not, as they were compelled to do at Auschwitz and elsewhere, in the background at comparatively long range.

At Nuremberg on February 4th, 1946, the courtroom was suddenly invaded by a sense of humanity. Until then the onlookers had become so attuned to tales of wickedness and horror that their feelings had been numbed; and even when, as very often, they were required to listen to the pitiful evidence of individuals, ordinary men and women who had been assailed by the Nazi machine, but had miraculously escaped, the scale of inhumanity was so immense that the personal disaster seemed to count not as a human tragedy but simply as one more squalid item in the tremendous case being so laboriously assembled. But now, for once, there was a real human being speaking and in language all could understand: the Belgian scholar, the historian, van der Essen, General Secretary of the University of Louvain.

Nothing much had happened to Professor van der Essen. He had had a lucky war. His beloved university library had been wrecked by the Germans, but he had not been hurt, and he had moved about, a free man, during the whole period of the occupation. He was detached from the suffering all around him (if he had allowed himself to participate he would have gone mad) and, his body unbroken, his mind unclouded, and in no immediate personal fear, he was in a position to observe the afflictions of the less fortunate. Thus his evidence, though unspectacular and almost dull, in which he gave an account of life as lived in the shadow of the Gestapo, has a point and actuality
which helps to make sense in the catalogue of horrors to which we must soon return.

“I think I understand,” said M. Faure, a member of the French Prosecution, who was later to become Prime Minister of France, “that you yourself were never arrested or seriously worried by the Germans. I would like to know whether you consider that a free man, against whom the German administration or police have nothing in particular, could during the Nazi occupation lead his life in accordance with the concept a free man has of his dignity?”

So this rare, this almost unique, apparition at Nuremberg, a man who had neither suffered physical violence nor inflicted it, set himself earnestly to trying to give a sober impression of the German occupation as experienced by a man with nothing to fear. He held the court. His story on the face of it was an anticlimax; but in fact it underlined more than anything else the reality behind the fantasy of murder and cruelty which, until then, had dominated the whole proceedings. He started off by saying that he weighed eighty-two kilos “before May 10th, 1940, before the airplanes of the Luftwaffe suddenly came without any declaration of war and spread death and desolation in Belgium.” He now weighed sixty-seven kilos. There was that small fact to begin with. One of the German defense counsel, who failed to sense the mood of the court, Herr Dr. Babel, tried a remark that was half a joke and half a sneer: “During the war, I also, without having been ill, lost 35 kilos. What conclusion would you draw from that, in your opinion?” There was laughter in court, but the President cut in, “Go on; Dr. Babel, we are not interested in your experiences.”

Professor van der Essen said:

“I don't want to dwell on personal considerations or enter into details of a personal nature or of a theoretical or philosophical nature. I should like simply to give an account—it will not take more than two minutes—of the ordinary day of an average Belgian during the occupation.

“I take a day in the winter of 1943: at six o'clock in the morning there is a ring at the door. One's first
thought—indeed we all had this thought—was that it was the Gestapo. It wasn't the Gestapo. It was a city policeman who had come to tell me that there was a light in my office and that in view of the necessities of the occupation I must be careful about this in future. But there was the nervous shock.

“At seven-thirty the postman arrives bringing me my letters; he tells me that he wishes to see me personally. I go downstairs and the man says to me, ‘You know, Professor, I am a member of the secret army and I know what is going on. The Germans intend to arrest today at ten o'clock all the former soldiers of the Belgian Army who are in this region. Your son must disappear immediately.' I hurry upstairs and wake my son. I make him prepare his kit and send him to the right place. At ten o'clock I take the tram for Brussels. A few kilometres out of Louvain the tram stops. A military police patrol makes us get down and lines us up—irrespective of our social position—in front of a wall, with our arms raised and facing the wall. We are thoroughly searched, and having found neither arms nor compromising papers of any kind, we are allowed to go back into the tram. A few kilometres farther on the tram is stopped by a crowd which prevents the tram from going on. I see several women weeping, there are cries and wailings, I make enquiries and am told that their men folk living in the village had refused to do compulsory labor and were to have been arrested that night by the Security Police. Now they are taking away the old father of eighty-two and a young girl of sixteen and holding them for the disappearance of the young men.