21

The Schroth Era: Winter–Spring 1944

In survivor memory, the phases of camp life were associated with the most visible and notorious German of each era. The prisoners referred to them as “commandants,” though that was not their official German title. In this succession, Willi Althoff and Walter Kolditz were followed by Willi Schroth, who was the most visible German presence in camp life in the first seven months of 1944.

Schroth was born in 1905 in the town of Langenbielau in Silesia. He left school at fourteen, initially apprenticed to follow in his father’s footsteps as a horse slaughterer, and then—allegedly against the will of his unpleasant and authoritarian father—became a dyer. Married in 1931, he rapidly fathered eight daughters. His wife died during her ninth pregnancy in 1939. After the sixth daughter had been born and his wife had received the Mutterkreuz (Mother’s Cross), he joined the Nazi Party in 1937, allegedly in order to receive more ample housing for his rapidly growing family. Schroth remarried in 1941. He was drafted into the army but was soon released from service as a “father of many children” (kinderreicher Vater). In September 1942, the local Labor Office found him work with the Werkschutz of the German factories in Starachowice, where, for the first time in his life, he escaped from relative poverty and began receiving a handsome salary.¹

Originally supervising Ukrainian guards at one of the factory gates, Schroth claimed that he was not involved in marching Jews from the Wierzbnik marketplace to Strelnica on October 27, 1942. Clearly he had become involved in the guarding of Jewish prisoners at some point. Possibly in May 1943 he killed his first Jew. A worker’s legs had been crushed in an industrial accident, and the victim—screaming in pain—was being attended to by the Jewish physician in camp, Dr. Kramarz. Schroth arrived, surveyed the situation briefly, then drew his pistol and shot the injured worker in the head. The man gasped that he was still alive. Schroth’s failure to kill his first victim with an initial shot at point-blank range perhaps indicated his nervousness on the occasion. Schroth then killed the man on his second try, with a shot to the heart.² In the summer of 1943, according to three witnesses, Schroth urinated into the open mass grave of Jewish typhus victims, remarking sarcastically that the dead Jews should “drink up.”³ Urinating on Jewish corpses was apparently a common ritual of degradation on the part of Germans in Starachowice, as two others were accused of performing the same debasing act on other occasions.⁴

By his own admission, Schroth accompanied Kolditz during the selection of November 8, 1943, witnessed his shooting of the Jewish policeman (Wilczek’s son-in-law, Chaim Kogut), and accompanied the selected victims as they were taken by truck to the execution grounds in Firlej.⁵ Several weeks later, after Kolditz had amused himself tormenting the two brothers recently arrived from Cracow who had tried to escape, Schroth was in charge of the execution squad of Ukrainian guards that ordered the two brothers to run and then shot them down from behind.⁶

During the Kolditz era, Schroth was one of three Germans in the Werkschutz who supervised the Ukrainian camp guards in rotation. The others were the Sudeten German Alois Schleser and a man named Wolf. Of the three, Schroth—whom many prisoners assumed to be Ukrainian or an ethnic German from Eastern Europe (Volksdeutsch) rather than German⁷—was the most memorable, since he was clearly trying to distinguish himself.⁸ Indeed, it was Schroth who provided Kurt Otto Baumgarten with the information concerning Kolditz’s illicit womanizing with Poles that helped Baumgarten get him sacked.⁹ The great hypocrisy here was that Schroth himself was openly living with a Polish woman who had already borne him a child. But Schroth was protected by the new commander of the Werkschutz, a sixty-year-old former army man named Schumann. Other Germans in the Werkschutz could not understand this obvious favoritism of Schumann toward Schroth, since they were such opposites. Simply put, Schumann was very intelligent, while Schroth was just plain “dumb.”¹⁰ But Schroth’s protected position presumably had a higher source than Schumann. Schroth’s ultimate reward for siding with Baumgarten against Kolditz came after the New Year, when Baumgarten ended the system of rotating German supervisors at Majówka and named Schroth permanent commander of the camp guard.¹¹

Kolditz was not the only German deeply involved with the exploitation of Jewish slave labor who suddenly disappeared from Starachowice at the end of 1943. On December 13, 1943, Leopold Rudolf Schwertner—who was in charge of recruiting non-German workers for the Braunschweig Steel Works in Starachowice and who had profited handsomely from selling work cards to desperate Jews before the liquidation of the Wierzbnik ghetto—was summoned to the office of the factory director, Fritz Hofmann. There he was accused of taking bribes from Jews and was placed under arrest by Walther Becker. His apartment was searched, uncovering silverware he had received from Jews. Schwertner claimed after the war that he had received the silverware in order to purchase medications that were to be smuggled into the camp through Otto von Ribbeck of the Konsum. The German engineer Willi Frania—who, like Schwertner, had earlier been quite active in selling work permits to desperate Jews—was arrested on the same charge that same day. They were both taken to Radom and held under arrest until April 17, 1944. Schwertner and Frania were then released but forbidden to remain in the General Government, on the grounds that their behavior there had damaged German “prestige.” Without his exemption for performing work vital to the war economy, Schwertner was soon drafted into military service.¹²

That Kolditz could be removed at least in part for womanizing with Poles, based on the testimony of Schroth who was openly living with a Polish woman and their child, and Schwertner and Frania could be removed for accepting Jewish bribes, while Baumgarten and Becker were notorious in this regard, indicates that sexual and monetary improprieties were not the real reasons for these dismissals. Taking Jewish bribes and consorting with Polish women were blatantly pervasive practices among the occupying Germans, but these “offenses” could be used conveniently and selectively to get rid of rivals.

One other figure associated with the factory management also disappeared during this period, though in very different circumstances. Major Lemberger was a former officer in the Austrian army who had been taken into the Wehrmacht following the German absorption of Austria. In Starachowice, he served as the military liaison for munitions production. When it was discovered that he was a Jew, he was arrested. He allegedly then took his own life.¹³

After his appointment as permanent commander of the camp guard, Schroth was almost constantly at Majówka. He emulated his patron Baumgarten in his willingness to take bribes. As Wilczek’s surviving son testified, “He was corruptible and could be used by the Jewish council for its own goals. Schroth was at the camp leaders’ beck and call.”¹⁴ According to another prisoner, Schroth committed many atrocities but he also “turned a blind eye” to various happenings in the camp, particularly concerning the hiding of children.¹⁵ Schroth even claimed that in cooperation with the Jewish camp leadership he checked out the children’s hiding place they had constructed to ensure it would not be discovered by visiting inspectors from Radom and that on Baumgarten’s instructions he warned when such inspections were imminent.¹⁶ Given his limited intellect and the unimaginative nature and transparent mendacity of the lies that he did tell during postwar interrogations, he was probably telling the truth in this case. After all, the discovery that children were still in the camp in 1944 would have threatened not only Baumgarten’s and Schroth’s continued income from bribery but also their comfortable positions—safe from the war.

Schroth was basically a primitive nonentity whom one prisoner called “a nothing and a nobody.”¹⁷ But his unpredictability made him dangerous. He could smile and be “friendly” and “a little human” at one moment.¹⁸ He could become “rabid” and kill “for pleasure” the next.¹⁹ Precisely because the Baumgarten-Schroth era was the “quietest” in the history of the camp,²⁰ and killing was no longer an “everyday” event,²¹ three subsequent killing actions by Schroth were remembered in vivid detail by numerous witnesses. There is no consensus, however, concerning either the approximate dates or even the chronological order of these killings.

Szmul Wajsblum was a wealthy miller from Opatów.²² He was accompanied to the labor camp in Starachowice by his beautiful daughter Tobka, who was described as having blonde hair and “sky-blue” eyes.²³ Before they left Opatów, they allegedly hid their considerable wealth. Szmul apparently had access to at least some of his hidden wealth, for on one occasion he paid off Becker for the rare return of prisoners from a grave-digging detail when such an assignment usually meant the disappearance of the grave diggers as well as those for whom the graves were dug.²⁴ In late 1943, Tobka Wajsblum offered Becker hidden money if he would take her out of the camp.²⁵ Chanka Laks, the prisoner clerk at the camp office, was struck by how obligingly Becker treated her when he fetched her from the camp in his automobile.²⁶ After Tobka returned to the camp, needless to say, the rumor soon spread that more was involved in her relationship to Becker than a monetary transaction.²⁷ Some two months later, Becker arrived and fetched Tobka once again. This time he was not so polite, and this time she did not return.²⁸ After the war, survivors learned from local Poles where they had found and buried her body. She had been killed by a shot to the head.²⁹

Shortly after Tobka’s disappearance, her father, Szmul, had returned from his work shift and was sitting in front of his barracks, reading the bible. Jeremiah Wilczek appeared and ordered Szmul to dig a grave outside the camp wire. Szmul said such work should be given to a younger person, not a fifty-year-old like him. Wilczek said he had been specifically instructed by Schroth to fetch “the old Wajsblum,” and the latter left carrying a shovel. Nonetheless, even his nephew was not particularly alarmed.³⁰ Wajsblum began digging just outside the fence, fully visible from the back side of the camp. Some people who had been watching suddenly ran through camp, shouting that Schroth was shooting old Wajsblum. Thus there were many witnesses when Schroth shot the old man as he stood in his freshly dug grave. Wilczek sent Wajsblum’s nephew to collect his coat and boots.³¹

On May 15, 1944, two women in their thirties, Mala Szuch from Opatów and Jadwiga Feldman from Skarysko-Kamienna, were summoned by Schroth and taken out the back gate of the camp to roughly the same spot where Szmul Wajsblum had been shot and buried.³² According to numerous witness accounts, the women had refused to go to work that day.³³ Feldman was resigned to her fate and went quietly. But Szuch screamed at Schroth, resisted, and spat on him. Schroth pulled her by the hair the entire way and then shot both of the women outside the wire, in plain sight of the prisoners.³⁴

The two Lewkowicz sisters from Łód, Malwina and Romana, blonde-and red-haired beauties, were renowned in camp for their artistic brilliance. They recited poetry from memory, composed their own poems, and sang songs.³⁵ They were, in short, memorable figures in the cultural life of the camp. As closure of the camp loomed, they decided to escape but were caught. In one version, they paid a gentile to provide them with false papers, but they were betrayed, and the false papers were discovered.³⁶ In another version, they were caught outside camp trying to make good their escape.³⁷ In any case, they were clearly planning an escape, and the Germans decided to make an intimidating example as a deterrent against the growing wave of such attempts. The women prisoners were assembled to witness the execution.³⁸ Schroth shot one sister. Then his pistol jammed when he tried to shoot the other. She begged for her life and kissed his boots, but he procured another pistol and shot her as well.³⁹ The bodies of the two sisters were then thrown into the drainage ditch of the camp latrine.⁴⁰

There were two other memorable killing actions, but they centered on Baumgarten and Kaschmieder. Baumgarten was a much more distant figure than Schroth, meeting regularly with the Jewish leadership but not often appearing in camp. A number of survivors noted that in comparison with other Germans, Baumgarten was “not so bad,”⁴¹ “not so feared,”⁴² and even relatively “decent.”⁴³ Several survivors perceptively noted, however, that while Baumgarten never shot anyone personally, he clearly had given orders for or induced shooting by others.⁴⁴ The most memorable case involved a Jewish worker named Brenner. One day Baumgarten assembled a number of workers, before whom he accused Brenner of sabotage and announced the death sentence. Some workers were forced to watch as Brenner dug his grave and, on Baumgarten’s orders, was shot by a Ukrainian guard on the factory grounds.⁴⁵ After the war, Baumgarten claimed that a Jew whom he had appointed as a foreman, Moishe Weinberg, had told him of Brenner’s inattention to faulty production, and said that Brenner had been repeatedly warned. On the fourth occasion, Baumgarten telephoned the Security Police in Radom. A police official from Radom arrived and ordered Brenner’s execution for sabotage, which was carried out by a Ukrainian guard in front of some twenty assembled workers. Baumgarten dated this event to the spring of 1944.⁴⁶ Moishe Weinberg admitted that he had been appointed to a supervisory position by Baumgarten because of his good German but he vehemently denied ever having informed on Brenner.⁴⁷

Kaschmieder’s killing was connected to a key turning point in the history of the Starachowice factory slave-labor camps that occurred in April 1944, when a transport arrived from the concentration camp of Majdanek in Lublin carrying 150 to 200 Jewish prisoners. The survivors of numerous Aktionen and selections as well as the horrific Erntefest massacre, they were literally the remnant of a remnant of a remnant—a handful of Jews in the Lublin district still alive in the spring of 1944 against all imaginable odds. Because of the large letters “KL” (for Konzentrationslager) painted on their clothing, they were referred to as “Klneks,” or alternatively as the “Lubliners.” In the typical black humor of camp life, the initials KL were said to stand for kein Leben or “no life.”⁴⁸

Of the six Lubliners who gave postwar testimony, five talked about the incredible odysseys that took them to Starachowice.⁴⁹ Moishe Burman was born in Pinsk in 1915. Drafted into the Polish army, he was taken prisoner in 1939. Initially kept in a German Stalag near Königsberg, he was transferred to a labor camp in Biala Podlaska in the northern Lublin district in October 1940. He escaped to the Miedzyrzec Podlaski ghetto in January 1942. He survived the first great deportation Aktion there, August 21–22, 1942.⁵⁰ Eventually caught and put on a train for Treblinka, he pried off a door board with a knife that he had kept in his boot and jumped. Finding survival in the forest impossible, he insinuated himself into a workforce of some fifty Jewish artisans and mechanics being kept alive by the Gestapo in Biala Podlaska. In the spring of 1944, these skilled Jewish workers were sent to Majdanek, kept there for one week, and then put on the train to Starachowice.⁵¹

Chaim Ehrlich was born in Miedzyrzec in 1924. He survived a stint in a work camp in Osowa in 1940, digging a canal between the Vistula and Bug Rivers. By hiding in a bunker his family had prepared, he also survived the first great deportation from Miedzyrzec. Finding a position as a skilled worker in the workshop of the military commandant, he managed to survive all the additional Miedzyrzec roundups as well, hiding in a prepared bunker at the crucial moments. He too then joined the Gestapo’s small private camp of skilled Jewish workers in Biala Podlaska, from where the prisoners were sent to Majdanek in March 1944 and then on to Starachowice.⁵²

Szmul Chaim Wolfowicz was born in Nowogródek near Baranowicz (now in Belarus) in 1914, served in the Polish army, was captured, and eventually was sent with other Jewish POWs to the labor camp in Biala Podlaska. He escaped from that camp, found various jobs, and evaded various roundups, but he was finally arrested and taken to the Gestapo, which put him to work until the transport to Majdanek in the spring of 1944.⁵³

Daniel Goldfarb was born in Krasnik in 1926 and moved to Warsaw in 1937. When the ghetto was created there, part of his family returned to Krasnik. He survived the first great deportation there in October 1942 but was caught in the second and sent to the concentration camp at Budzýn. These Budzýn Jews worked in a Heinkel aircraft factory and also produced items for the particular needs of the Lublin SS and police. They were thus spared during the Erntefest massacre of November 1943. From Budzýn, Goldfarb was shipped to Majdanek for two weeks in the spring of 1944, and then on to Starachowice.⁵⁴

Abram Goldman was born in Wloclawek in 1924 and fled to Warsaw in 1939. Working as a courier for the Resistance, he was caught, spent two weeks in the Pawiak prison in Warsaw, and in March 1943 was sent on to the Poniatowa camp in the Lublin district, where he was soon joined by other survivors of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In October 1943, shortly before the Poniatowa camp was liquidated in the Erntefest massacre, Abram was among 1,000 men and 200 women sent to Zamo for airfield construction. By the time the airfield was completed in the spring of 1944, this contingent of Jewish workers had shrunk to a mere seventy-five men and five women. Taken by train to Majdanek, they worked there for three weeks before they joined the transport to Starachowice in April.⁵⁵

The Lubliners were not a homogenous group before arriving in Starachowice. They were either natives of the Lublin district, captured Jewish soldiers of the Polish army sent to the labor camp in Biala Podlaska, or prisoners sent to the Lublin district in connection with the repression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. They survived the near-total destruction of all Jews in the Lublin district by virtue of one of three protected niches: the Budzýn concentration camp, the skilled workers camp of the Biala Podlaska Gestapo, or the contingent of airfield construction workers sent to Zamo. In the context of their insertion into the prisoner community in Majówka, however, they appeared very much as a single, homogeneous group of distinct (and, in some survivors’ views, disruptive) “outsiders.”

The arrival of the Lubliners in Starachowice set off shock waves in numerous directions. First, they brought with them direct and credible information about the course of the Final Solution in the Lublin district in general and the gas chambers at Majdanek and Treblinka in particular.⁵⁶ The earlier waves of Jews entering the Starachowice camps had seen their work in the German war economy as the best chance for survival, and, with a few exceptions, Jews generally had tried to get into these camps as havens, not escape from them. The shocking confirmation of the existence of gas chambers, combined with the foreseeable approach of the Soviet army (which had already caused the Lubliners’ evacuation westward from Majdanek), made clear to many now that the safe haven offered by the Starachowice camps would not last much longer. Escape became a rational choice and a valid alternative to placing continued faith in the German need for their labor. As a result, the quiescence and seeming stability of the Schroth era came to an end, and the number of escape attempts rose precipitously.

At the forefront of the escape attempts were the Lubliners themselves. They had no illusions about the stability of their position in Starachowice, and in comparison to their previous places of incarceration, the relatively lax camp security virtually invited escape attempts. While the Zamo contingent had been sent off as a separate group to construct new barracks on the factory grounds of the munitions plant,⁵⁷ many of the other Lubliners—like so many waves of newcomers before them lacking connections and protekcya—were assigned to work in the stifling heat of the blast furnace. Ten Lubliners from one blast-furnace shift promptly escaped as a group.

The German response to such an unprecedented mass escape was twofold. First, the camp commander or Lagerführer gave a speech to the assembled prisoners. From the context of the entire testimony, the key witness was referring here to Baumgarten, not Schroth. He addressed the “talk” about crematoria and the extermination of the Jews and said these were all a “big lie” made up from “A to Z.” The crematoria did not exist, and those spreading such rumors, he threatened, would be severely punished.⁵⁸

Second, the Germans carried out the largest killing action since the Firlej massacre of the previous November. In addition to the Ukrainian guards and their German officers, two German detectives had been attached to the Werkschutz to investigate cases of sabotage, spying, and theft at the factories. They dealt primarily with Polish, not Jewish, workers. On occasions requiring investigation, however, such as the camp-council accusation against Abraham Finkler as temporary head of the camp police under Kolditz in the fall of 1943, the two detectives—Heribert von Merfort and Gerhard Kaschmieder—had become involved in camp affairs. Von Merfort was drafted into military service at the end of 1943.⁵⁹ The task of dealing with the escape of the ten Lubliners fell to Gerhard Kaschmieder alone.

Born in 1912, Kaschmieder was from Silesia, like so many of the other Germans in Starachowice. He trained to become a cabinetmaker but switched to truck-driving in 1934. After a brief stint in the SA in 1933–34 (which he left in a timely manner in mid-June 1934, just weeks before the “Blood Purge” of the SA leadership), he joined the Nazi Party and SS in 1937. Following two years of service in the army, he became a driver for the Gestapo in Troppau in 1940. He was then sent to police school as a detective candidate in training but failed the exam. He returned to Troppau reluctantly and thus applied for a position with the Werkschutz in Starachowice, where he arrived in mid-November 1942.⁶⁰ If his boss, Baumgarten, was remembered by Jewish survivors for his summer costume of Lederhosen, Kaschmieder was remembered for wearing knickerbockers.⁶¹

The day after the escape of the ten Lubliners, Kaschmieder—dressed on this occasion in his SS uniform rather than knickers—appeared in Majówka. Even before the mass escape by the ten prisoners, the Germans had tried to deter the increase in escape attempts through collective responsibility. Through written announcements posted on the barracks, they warned that in case of further escapes, members of the same work groups from which such Jews escaped would be shot. Kaschmieder now made good on that threat. Calling out some thirty Lubliners who worked at the blast furnace, he selected ten by pointing with his whip. Negotiating desperately, Shlomo Einesman persuaded Kaschmieder to substitute two terminally ill Jews from the sick barracks for two of the selected workers. The ten victims, including the two sick Jews carried on stretchers, were marched out the back gate, accompanied by four Ukrainian guards and members of the camp police. There they were forced to dig their own graves. One young Jew, Moishe Zemelman, desperately flexed his muscles for Kaschmieder to demonstrate that he was a valuable worker, but in vain. Lying face down on the ground, the ten Jews were shot by Ukrainians from behind.⁶² After the shooting, Kaschmieder performed the ritual urination on the bodies.⁶³

News of this rising epidemic of escape attempts apparently reached the Radom SS. On the night of June 5–6, 1944, Schroth ordered the former head of the Jewish council, Symcha Mincberg, to report to the camp’s guard station. There he was taken into custody by two Gestapo men, incarcerated in the Wierzbnik jail for the rest of the night, and early the next morning taken by train to Radom. At SS headquarters in Radom, he was subjected to three days of intense interrogation and torture about how many Jews were actually in the camp at Majówka and who was planning to run away. Mincberg replied that he did not know, for if anyone were planning to escape, he would surely keep it a secret. Mincberg then languished in the Radom prison under the continuous torment of a vicious jailer for five weeks, until he was shipped via the Gross Rosen concentration camp to its satellite camp at Fünf Teichen.⁶⁴ The fact that the Radom SS would select Symcha Mincberg, the once-prominent head of the Wierzbnik Judenrat but since October 1942 totally marginalized by the new power structure of Wilczek and his coterie, as the target of their interrogation indicates how little they were aware of what was actually going on between Baumgarten and Wilczek within Majówka.

The arrival of the Lubliners also affected the dynamic of the prisoner community and the hitherto-unchallenged position of the camp elite. After their harrowing experiences in the Lublin district, the newcomers were astonished to discover that a place like Starachowice, where Jewish families—men, women, and children—were still together, even existed.⁶⁵ As one later noted,

That I would never believe. I saw a few thousand Jews…women and men, and they had everything there. They had food. They had stores, you could have bought food for money, for anything. And it was like a different kind of world…. We were surprised…. Some of the eldest of the Jews, the machers, they were living very good. They were getting nice civil dress…they had their own women and they had everything there…. The Judenrat of the ganzen Ding, they lived in nice houses and the leader had a car at his disposition.⁶⁶

Astonishment soon gave way to resentment and challenge. As one earlier newcomer from Wolanów testified:

And the people from Majdanek came to us, to Starachowice. And when they came in and when they went into the kitchen, and you know, staying in line for the soup, and when they seen what came in the soup, they said you can’t feed people like this, you are not going to feed us like this, you’re going to give food, where is all the food you getting. We are from Majdanek, we are already trained, and you better give us food. And for the short time they were with us, there was no hunger, no hunger, plain and simple. There was no hunger.⁶⁷

Another witness concurred that thereafter the elite’s “stealing” from the common food supply was not as open as before, since they were now afraid of the consequences.⁶⁸

But the Lubliners wanted more than just a more equitable distribution of food. They challenged for a share of power in the camp. According to Mendel Kac’s detailed 1945 testimony, one of the Lubliners, a man named Zyg, was temporarily made a member of the camp council and proved to be a good organizer, but it did not last. “The money won,” Kac cryptically noted, presumably referring to bribes paid by the old guard to Baumgarten to restore their former position.⁶⁹

Opinion about the Lubliners among the earlier prisoners was mixed. To some of those who had entered Starachowice in 1943 from camps such as Wolanów, the Lubliners were seen as champions of the disadvantaged newcomers who successfully curtailed some of the most blatant abuses perpetrated by the camp elite. But some of the original Wierzbnikers also admired them. One deemed them the “very strong est” and “best” people.⁷⁰ To another, they included intelligent and educated Jews from Warsaw, and they were strong, young men “made out of iron.”⁷¹ To Rachela Szachter, whose father was a close friend of Einesman on the camp council, however, the Lubliners were “troublemakers from the beginning” whose past experiences had made them “immune to violence.”⁷² According to Josef Friedenson from Łód, this “gang” from Lublin had “a lot of chutzpah” to come with “demands” that they should be “privileged.” Though there were some assimilated Jews from Warsaw among them, most of them in his view were “primitive.”⁷³ To others, such as Henyek Krystal, the Lubliners were simply aloof and incommunicative. “I never got to talk to them and they never, they were not willing to just talk.”⁷⁴

The arrival of the Lubliners in April 1944 marked the end of a period of relative stability and quiet in the Starachowice camps. Thereafter, the prisoner community could no longer view the camps as a safe haven and rely on the hitherto relatively successful strategies of survival through labor and bribery as offering the best chance for the future. Whatever the future might hold, they knew for certain that the current situation would not last long. Once again, with too little information upon which to make decisions and too little power to control their own lives, they would face a series of “choiceless choices” that would help determine their fate.