Hell's Cartel_IG Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine by Diarmuid Jeffreys

Author:Diarmuid Jeffreys [Jeffreys, Diarmuid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: War, History
ISBN: 9780805078138
Goodreads: 2556405
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 2008-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

11

BUNA AT AUSCHWITZ

As far as Denis Avey could remember, the day had begun much like any other. Early that morning his section had been marched to the site and allotted a task: laying cable for one of the plant’s soon-to-be-built electricity substations. As usual the men had gone about it as leisurely as they dared, fumbling with their equipment, deliberately getting in one another’s way, and grabbing the opportunity whenever their guards’ attention drifted elsewhere to discreetly put down their tools and take a rest. During one of these breaks, Avey stood up to stretch his aching back and looked around, his attention caught momentarily by the bright arc and sparks of a welding gun, high up on the scaffolding that surrounded one of the five giant smokestacks looming over building 921, the largest on the site. Some wag in the camp had dubbed these towers the Queen Mary, after the famous transatlantic liner, but it hadn’t really caught on.

A few dozen yards away, under the expressionless eyes of an armed SS trooper, a Kommando of “stripeys” was working in a ditch.* It had been raining for hours and the soil had long since liquefied into a freezing black slime that clung to their emaciated faces and hands and rendered them almost unrecognizable as human beings. Yet human they undoubtedly were, one group slipping and sliding in the mud as they grappled with a set of heavy ceramic pipes, another, armed with picks and shovels, fighting a losing battle against the sludge beneath their feet, flinging it up onto the lip of the trench, where it stuck for a moment before sliding back down. Avey knew that if any one of the men in the Kommando showed the slightest intention of easing up on this fruitless task, their gang leader, or kapo—his status as a favored criminal prisoner signified by a green triangle on his striped tunic—would bring a stick whistling down on their heads.

For the hundredth time he was struck by the contrast in their positions. As a British POW he was significantly more fortunate than the starving, exhausted Häftlinge in the ditch. He was better fed, better dressed, and less liable to be beaten. Under his battered army greatcoat, for example, he wore a thick battle dress tunic, which, though patched and ill fitting, at least afforded him some measure of protection against the biting wind and rain. He also had boots, whereas the stripeys were forced to shuffle along in broken wooden shoes that filled with water and were forever falling apart. Nevertheless, as he gazed around he cursed the fates that had brought him to this dreadful place. In every direction he could see groups of men, each with their gang leader and attendant SS sentry, being harried through the mud that lay between the half-completed buildings. Some pushed wheel-barrows piled absurdly high with bricks and bags of cement; others were bent double under the weight of monstrous iron girders or metal pipes or wooden railway sleepers.

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