1938: Hitler's Gamble by MacDonogh Giles

Author:MacDonogh, Giles [Giles MacDonogh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Publisher: Constable

BUCHENWALD

Ernst Wiechert had been in Gestapo custody in Halle for weeks. Now he too was taken to Buchenwald. The train journey to Weimar was torture in itself. Then there were cars to take them to the camp:

The doors slammed shut and the motors started up, and then they set off towards the Ettersberg, the same hill from which Goethe and Charlotte von Stein had looked out over the Thuringian Forest and where now, wrapped in electrified fences, the camp now awaited them.vi

Wiechert was a Gentile. Jews had been sent to Buchenwald since the round-ups in Berlin and other large cities in May and June. Maximilian Reich was one of those who were transferred from Dachau later that summer. He noted that Dachau was a kindergarten beside Buchenwald, where brutality and sadism were coupled with a degree of corruption he had yet to experience. One favourite method of creating space in the camp was to toss the prisoners’ caps into the no-man’s-land next to the wire. They were forbidden to approach the fences. When guards ordered them to fetch their caps the machine guns opened up from the towers. He estimated that 117 prisoners had been killed in this way since the camp opened.93

The senior prisoner in Dachau saw them off with a stirring speech about what good people the Jews were, something he had not known before he had met them in the camp. Compared to the Bavarian camp, Reich’s new home was filthy and the huts only half built. The food was even more paltry, and as a Jew Reich would have received only half as much bread as the Gentiles, and nothing whatsoever on Sunday. Prisoners were expected to work for thirteen hours a day in gruelling summer heat, without a drop of water. The only liquid provided was half a cup of warm broth at lunch. In July alone, 103 prisoners died.94 A homosexual guard (‘Johnny’ Hartmann, thought to have been the son of a Lutheran pastor95) wandered around the buildings at night, hoping to find the prisoners indulging in illegal sex – presumably with a view to punishing them. It was quite prevalent, with the older, richer prisoners buying favours from the younger men. Very few of those who indulged in homosexual sex were incarcerated under article 175.96

The smell of corruption in Buchenwald went all the way down to the capos. In the beginning these had been members of the Communist and Social Democratic parties, who had been locked up after the Reichstag fire. In 1938, the reds were replaced by greens (criminals). They brought all their knowhow to bear and very soon anything could be obtained in the camp for those with money: food, alcohol, cigarettes. Money was pumped from the prisoners on all occasions. When the SS had something to celebrate, a ‘contribution’ was raised from the prisoners. The inadvertent killing of Commandant Rödl’s pet wolf cost the inmates 8,000 RM. News of the corruption in the camp got out when production began to drop off.

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