Jonathan Littell - The Kindly Ones

I found this Horn to be nervous, agitated, overflowing with zeal but also with frustration. He was an accountant, educated at the Stuttgart polytechnic university; when the war started, he had been called up by the Waffen-SS, but instead of sending him to the front, they assigned him to the WVHA. Pohl had chosen him to set up Osti, a subsidiary of the German Economic Enterprises, the holding company created by the WVHA to consolidate the SS companies. He was strongly motivated, but faced with a man like Globocnik, he couldn’t hold his own, and he knew it. “When I arrived, it was unimaginable…chaos,” he told me. “There were all kinds of things: a basket factory and carpentry workshops in Radom, a brush factory here in Lublin, a glass factory. Already, right away, the Gruppenführer insisted on keeping a work camp for himself, for self-provisioning as he said. All right, in any case there was plenty to do. All this was managed any which way. The accounts weren’t kept up to date. And production was close to zero. Which is completely understandable, given the state of the workforce. So I set to work: but then they did everything they could to complicate my existence. I train specialists; they take them away from me and they disappear God knows where. I ask for better food for the workers; they tell me there is no extra food for Jews. I ask them at least to stop beating them all the time; they give me to understand that I shouldn’t interfere in what isn’t my business. How is anyone supposed to work properly in such conditions?” I understood why Höfle didn’t much like Horn: with complaints, one rarely succeeded at anything. But Horn had a good analysis of the dilemmas: “The problem too is that the WVHA doesn’t support me. I sent report after report to Obergruppenführer Pohl. I keep asking him: What is the priority factor? The political-police factor? In that case, yes, the concentration of Jews is the main objective, and economic factors recede to the background. Or the economic factor? If that’s it, production has to be rationalized, the camps have to be organized in a flexible manner so that a range of orders can be dealt with as they come in, and above all the workers have to be guaranteed a vital minimum subsistence. And Obergruppenführer Pohl answers: both. It’s enough to make you tear your hair out.”—“And you think that if they provided you with the means, you could create modern, profitable businesses with Jewish forced labor?”—“Of course. The Jews, it goes without saying, are inferior people, and their work methods are completely archaic. I studied the organization of labor in the Litzmannstadt ghetto; it’s a catastrophe. All supervision, from the reception of the raw materials to the delivery of the finished product, is carried out by Jews. Of course there’s no quality control. But with well-trained Aryan supervisors, and a rational, modern division and organization of labor, we could have very good results. A decision has to be made about this. Here, I encounter nothing but obstacles, and I know I have no support.”

Obviously he was looking for some. He had me visit several of his enterprises, frankly showing me the state of undernourishment and poor hygiene of the prisoners placed in his charge, but also the improvements he had been able to introduce, the increase in quality of the products, which mainly served to supply the Wehrmacht, and the quantitative increase too. I had to acknowledge that his presentation was convincing: he did seem to have found a way here to reconcile the requirements of war with increased productivity. Horn, of course, was not informed of the Einsatz, at least not of its extent, and I took care not to speak of it to him; so it was difficult to explain to him the causes of the obstructions from Globocnik, who must have found it difficult to reconcile Horn’s requests with what he regarded as his main mission. But at bottom Horn was right: by choosing the strongest or most specialized Jews, by concentrating them and adequately supervising them, one could certainly provide a considerable contribution to the war economy.

I visited the KL. It was spread out along a rolling hill just outside the city, west of the road to Zamosc. It was an immense establishment, with rows of long wooden barracks stretching all the way back inside barbed-wire fences, surrounded by watchtowers. The Kommandantur was outside the camp near the road, at the foot of the hill. I was received there by Florstedt, the Kommandant, a Sturmbannführer with an abnormally narrow, elongated face, who looked through my mission orders with obvious mistrust: “It is not stated that you have access to the camp.”—“My orders give me access to all structures controlled by the WVHA. If you don’t believe me, get in touch with the Gruppenführer, he’ll confirm it for you.” He went on leafing through the papers. “What do you want to see?”—“Everything,” I said with a friendly smile. Finally, he handed me over to an Untersturmführer. It was the first time I had visited a concentration camp, and I had everything shown to me. Among the inmates, or Häftlinge , there were all kinds of nationalities: Russians, Poles of course, as well as Jews, but also German political prisoners and criminals, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, and who knows what else. The barracks, long field stables of the Wehrmacht modified by SS architects, were dark, stinking, crowded; the inmates, most of them in rags, were piled up, three or four to a bunk, on several levels. I discussed the sanitary and hygienic problems with the head doctor: it was he, still with the Untersturmführer trailing behind, who showed me the Bath and Disinfection barrack, where on one side newcomers were given a shower, and on the other those unfit for work were gassed. “Up until spring,” the Untersturmführer said, “it was only dusting out . But since the Einsatz transferred some of its load to us, we’ve been overflowing.” The camp didn’t know what to do with the corpses and had ordered a crematorium, equipped with five single-muffle furnaces designed by Kori, a specialized company in Berlin. “They’re competing for the business with Topf und Söhne, of Erfurt,” he added. “In Auschwitz, they work only with Topf, but we thought Kori’s conditions were more competitive.” The gassing, curiously, was not carried out with carbon monoxide, as in the vans we used in Russia or, according to what I had read, in the fixed installations of the Einsatz Reinhard; here, they used hydrocyanic acid, in the form of tablets that released the gas when in contact with air. “It’s much more effective than carbon monoxide,” the head doctor assured me. “It’s quick, the patients suffer less, there are never any failures.”—“Where does the product come from?”—“It’s actually an industrial disinfectant, which they use for fumigation, against lice and other vermin. Apparently it was Auschwitz that had the idea to test it for the ‘special treatment.’ It works very well.” I also inspected the kitchen and the supply warehouses; despite the assurances of the SS-Führers and even of the prisoner employees who distributed the soup, the rations looked insufficient to me, an impression that was confirmed for me in veiled terms by the head doctor. I came back several days running to study the files of the Arbeitseinsatz ; each Häftling had his individual index card, filed with what was called the Arbeitstatistik , and was assigned, if he wasn’t sick, to a work Kommando, some inside the camp, for maintenance, others outside; prisoners in the largest Kommandos lived at their worksite, like that of the DAW, the German Armament Works, in Lipowa. On paper, the system seemed solid; but the losses in manpower remained considerable; and Horn’s criticisms helped me see that most of the prisoners employed—poorly fed, dirty, regularly beaten—were incapable of any consistent, productive work.