12 
12 Jasmine took her children and drove up to Lublin the next morning, where they caught a train to Warsaw and then, from there, an express to Berlin. When Guth found out about it, he calmly told her to return home, immediately. She refused and said that if he wanted to talk about the matter further she’d be at her parents’ house in the district of Charlottenburg. They came from good money and they had a huge stockpile of tinned food, jam, sugar, and flour. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was hunkering down with people that she loved.
When she hung up, Guth stood beside his desk and stared out the window. A breeze kicked up some leaves and they skittered away in a small tornado of wind. He replaced the telephone in its holder and snapped wrinkles out of his uniform. He had other problems to deal with. Rather large problems, as it turned out.
The machinery of the camp moved along with unstoppable terror and the killing took on a rushed, frantic schedule all its own. It didn’t matter if it was blazing hot or if a thunderstorm crackled overhead—the timetable of murder never changed and Guth had gotten used to it. He liked how predictable everything was. It made him feel calm. Soon a week passed without his family, then two weeks, then three, and he adapted to life without them. He let Lubizec absorb him so completely that he began to sit in his office thinking up new ways to streamline the slaughter and make everything more cost effective. Even though Guth was a skilled bureaucrat who snuffed out innocent life, and even though he was responsible for implementing the Final Solution with no moral qualms whatsoever, his superiors in Lublin and Berlin began to ask questions about his leadership. It had nothing to do with the gas chambers or the number of Jews he was killing—not at all—not that. It had to do with a small area of camp we have not talked about yet.
“Zurich” was located in Camp I and it was made up of eight long, wooden barracks surrounded by barbed wire. On each door were painted signs that either read Bekleidungslager or Effektenlager, but no one ever used these labels. Each barrack was stuffed with items stolen from the transports and it all needed to be sorted and tallied before being sent on to Berlin. One barrack held nothing but folded trousers and jackets. Another held nothing but shoes, thousands and thousands of shoes. It was possible to walk into one barrack and see piles of jewelry as tall as a desk, as well as barrels full of wedding rings. There was an enormous pile of glasses in one barrack because, if someone entered Lubizec with poor eyesight, they were, as a rule, immediately sent to the gas chambers. It made no sense to have prisoners bumbling around in the rain if they couldn’t see properly, and the guards quickly realized that hitting a prisoner on the head often resulted in eyewear flying off and breaking anyway. Why save someone with poor eyesight when they were only going to be a burden later on? It was therefore decided that no Jew with glasses would ever be saved at Lubizec. As a result of this camp law, there were now so many glasses that Guth had them stored in a barrack until he could figure out what to do with them all. There were also thousands of wallets, purses, and photographs. The guards called this area of camp Zurich because it was like walking into a Swiss bank. Anything you could possibly want was there: clothes, booze, hats, watches, gold, silverware, money, diamonds. It was a place of unlimited wealth.*
Thanks to Chaim Zischer’s book, The Hell of Lubizec, we know a surprising amount about this area of camp, as well as many of the guards. Names like Rudolf Oberhauser, Christian Schwartz, Sebastian Schemise, Gustav Wagner, and Heinrich Niemann have become synonymous with the brutality of the place. Zischer’s role as a dentist (that is, a prisoner who extracted gold teeth from the dead) meant that he was under the command of Unterscharführer Peter Franz, who was called “Birdie” because he had the odd habit of saying, “I’ve got you now, birdie,” before shooting a prisoner in the head. He ordered them to lie on the ground with their faces turned away and then he pointed his pistol at that little spot above the ear. Before he fired he always said that phrase, “I’ve got you now, birdie.” It had become such a scripted line that other guards would often ask him, “How many today?” Birdie would hold up three fingers or maybe seven to show his tally.
“He was short,” Zischer says in his book. “His eyes were hard green marbles and you didn’t want his attention for too long because you might hear that dreaded phrase, ‘I’ve got you now, birdie.’ Then it was off to the Roasts with you.”
Things that made Birdie angry ranged from stealing, to yawning, to slapping mosquitoes, to having your tummy rumble, to needing the toilet, to hiccupping, to passing wind, to wearing a watch. Any one of these infractions could make him bring out his pistol and then a prisoner would hear that phrase, “I’ve got you now, birdie.”
Peter Franz was directly responsible for the murder of hundreds of prisoners. Maybe thousands. He was also in charge of Zurich and it was his job to make sure everything was sorted, labeled, weighed, boxed, catalogued, tracked, and placed onto railcars. Faceless men in the halls of Berlin seemed to think the amount of gold and money had gone down at Lubizec even though the number of transports had gone up. They wanted to know why profits had declined when traffic into the camp had become so brisk.
A stern letter was written telling Guth that his guards were under investigation and that special attention would be given to Peter Franz. It was made known that an SS judge was on his way to Lubizec. A review was going to be carried out but the letter also stated that “under no circumstances should the resettlement of the Jews slow or stop. The primary function of your camp must continue while the secondary, more economical function, is under scrutiny.”
After yet another transport of human beings had been turned into a truckload of ash, he ordered his men into the Rose Garden and snapped them to attention. This was designed to knock them off balance because this was where the Jews were ordered to separate; it was a place where husbands and wives were torn apart, it was place of shrieking violence. Above all else, it was a place where the SS were in total control but, now, Guth made them stand there, uneasy and scrutinized.
Dov Damiel was stunned to see his tormentors fixed at such attention. He worked all the harder because forty guards were watching his every move.
“It was terrifying,” he later said. “Guth lined them up in the Rose Garden and I had never seen such a thing. It was like he was reminding them who was the chief bully at Lubizec. He was saying, ‘This is my camp.’ He was saying that everyone, Jew and gentile alike, was under his fist. No one was allowed to disobey him.”
Guth paced. He said nothing at first but then he started shouting.
“I mean really shouting,” Dov Damiel said in a 1977 interview. “We had never heard him shout before. No one had. His whole face, it becomes a purple beet, and then this killer, he holds up a single finger and that’s when the shouting really begins. No matter where you stood in camp you could hear this raging. I thought he was going to pull out his pistol and shoot a guard. I really did.”
Guth stood in front of his uniformed men like a thunderhead. He paced and said this was no way for the SS to act and that stealing from Zurich must stop immediately. He said he wouldn’t have his camp taken away from him because he had worked too goddamn hard to become commandant and he’d be damned if someone took away his camp, his camp. Any guard caught stealing was a “miserable fucking thief” and he would be sent to the Russian front.
“You assholes better shape up! I expect you to be as hard as Krupp steel!”
Dov Damiel and Chaim Zischer also worried about an SS judge nosing around the camp because they wondered if all the prisoners would be shot beforehand. It would be easier for the guards to shoot them with machine guns and then repopulate the camp with fresh prisoners who had never seen the stealing firsthand. Why take any chances? Liquidate everyone. Purge and start over. Wipe the slate clean.
Zischer was certain he would die. “Why keep me alive when I had personally seen Birdie steal suitcases of gold? Suitcases, I tell you. Huge leather suitcases that took two hands to carry.”
As for Guth, his anger cooled like cracking lava. He adjusted his peaked hat with both hands and there was a long ragged sigh as if he were dealing with stupid children.
He lit a cigarette, walked across the sandy ground for his office, and yelled out one final command.
“Birdie. My office. Now.”
*Other death camps had similar such stockpiles. These heartbreaking warehouses become inevitable when you murder thousands of people a day (final possessions have to be stored somewhere). Auschwitz, of course, was the largest and most infamous. The huge barracks there were called “Canada.” They were the size of several football fields.