8

Unworthy of Life

NOBODY EVER REALLY KNEW the reason for Philipp Hamber’s death, but everyone heard about the circumstances in which it was done. The camp SS required no reasons for their brutalities; a bad mood, drunkenness, a hangover, a perceived slight, a prisoner looking askance at a guard, or just a sadistic impulse—these were enough. When SS-Sergeant Abraham knocked Philipp Hamber to the ground and killed him, nobody took note of the cause because there was none; but they remembered the atrocity itself vividly, and its terrible repercussions.1

Like Gustav Kleinmann, Philipp Hamber was a Viennese Jew and worked in the haulage column, but he was in a different team under a kapo called Schwarz. They had made a delivery to the site where the camp’s economic affairs building was under construction.2 SS-Sergeant Abraham happened to be on-site. He was one of the cruelest, most feared Blockführers in Buchenwald. Something—some misdirected glance from Philipp, a mistake, perhaps a dropped sack of cement, or just something about the way he looked or moved—drew Abraham’s attention. He singled Philipp out, shoved him, knocked him to the ground, and kicked him. In a sadistic fury, he dragged the helpless prisoner through the churned mud of the building site and heaved him into a foundation trench full of rainwater. As Philipp floundered and choked, Sergeant Abraham planted a boot on the back of his head and held him beneath the surface. Philipp’s struggling gradually subsided, and his body went limp.

News of the drowning of Philipp Hamber spread through Buchenwald. The prisoners were used to murder as a constant presence in their everyday lives, but whereas they had learned to live in spite of it and to avoid it as best they could, now they were becoming resentful.

“Again there is unrest in the camp,” Gustav wrote. He hardly ever took his diary from its hiding place these days. During the past nine months he had scarcely filled two of the notebook’s little pages. His last entry had been in January 1941, when they were moving snow. Now it was spring. In the intervening months the prisoners’ submission to SS oppression had been tested more severely than ever.

At the end of February, a transport of several hundred Dutch Jews had arrived. Since falling to German invasion the previous year, the Netherlands had been ruled by Arthur Seyss-Inquart—the Austrian Nazi who had helped facilitate the Anschluss in 1938. The large Jewish population had been confined to their own districts and expelled from certain professions but were otherwise not persecuted by the German occupiers to the same degree as in Germany, Austria, and Poland. The homegrown Dutch Nazis were not content with this situation; they persistently harassed the Jews, who sometimes responded violently. In February 1941 violent clashes took place in Amsterdam in which the Nazis suffered a severe beating at the hands of young Jewish men. A German police officer was killed. The SS rounded up four hundred Jewish men as hostages, a move which triggered a wave of strikes by communist trade unions, paralyzing the docks and transport system. Open warfare erupted between the strikers and the SS, and at the end of the month, 389 of the Jewish hostages were transported to Buchenwald.3

They were all fit, spirited men, many of them dock workers, and had already proven themselves unwilling to submit to abuse. A few were housed in block 17, where Fritz lived with the Austrian Prominenten, but most were put in block 16, where Gustl Herzog was now block senior (and where Richard Paltenhoffer had once been confined). Fritz spent a lot of time with the Dutchmen, many of whom spoke German. They were astonished to find so many Austrians in the camp; they had come to associate the Austrian accent with the Nazi forces occupying their country, and strangely it hadn’t occurred to them that there were Austrian Jews.

Fritz and the others taught the Dutchmen the ways of the camp, but it did them little good. They weren’t easily cowed, and the SS treated them with an unprecedented level of brutality. All were put to work as stone-carriers in the quarry, and in the first couple months around fifty were murdered. Many fell sick or suffered injuries and were barred from medical treatment. Gustl Herzog did what he could to help; when the SS doctors had left the building, he and a couple other functionaries smuggled sick and injured Dutchmen into the prisoner infirmary. Pneumonia and diarrhea were rife, and some of them had festering wounds, but the SS, determined to grind them down to dust, still forced them to work.

Gustl Herzog wasn’t the only prisoner who helped them; the political prisoners did everything they could for their fellow socialists. By spring, the SS had decided that under these circumstances the Dutch could not be broken quickly enough, and so in May all the survivors were transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. None ever returned.

Gustav had recorded none of this in his diary, but the murder of Philipp Hamber—which occurred in the atmosphere of resistance generated by the treatment of the Dutch—prompted him to bring it out of hiding to set down how Philipp had been “drowned like a cat” and that the prisoners were not taking it quietly. There was unease and resentment, and much of it came from one man: Philipp’s brother, Eduard, who also worked in the haulage column and had witnessed the murder.4 They were unusually close. Both had been movie producers in Vienna before the Anschluss, and Eduard was politically active in the Social Democratic party, hence they had been arrested soon after the Nazi takeover. Eduard wanted justice for his brother.

Unfortunately for the SS, the murder—having occurred on a large construction site outside the main camp fences—had been witnessed by a civilian visitor, and Commandant Koch had no option but to enter the death in the camp log and hold an inquiry. At the same time, Eduard Hamber lodged an official complaint with Koch’s deputy. He knew the danger he was putting himself in. “I know that I must die for my testimony,” he told a fellow prisoner, “but maybe these criminals will restrain themselves a little in the future if they have to fear an accusation. Then I will not have died in vain.”5

At the next roll call, all the members of kapo Schwarz’s haulage detail were called to the gatehouse. Their names were taken, and they were asked what they had seen. They all denied having seen anything. Only Eduard persisted in his accusation. They were all sent back to their blocks. Eduard was interrogated again by several officers, including Commandant Koch and the camp doctor. Koch assured him, “We want to know the whole truth. I give you my word of honor that nothing will happen to you.”6 Eduard repeated his account of how Abraham had beaten his brother and deliberately, brutally drowned him.

They let him go back to his block, but late that night he was called out again and was placed in a cell in the Bunker—the cell block that occupied one wing of the gatehouse. The Bunker had an evil reputation; tortures and murders were known to be perpetrated in there, and no Jew who entered it ever came out alive. Its principal jailer was SS-Sergeant Martin Sommer, whose boyish looks belied years of experience in concentration camps and a hideous cruelty. All the prisoners knew Sommer well from his regular performances wielding the whip when victims were taken to the Bock, besides his reputation as the Bunker’s chief torturer. After four days, Eduard Hamber’s corpse was brought out for disposal. Sommer claimed that he had committed suicide, but everyone knew that Sommer had beaten him to death.7

This wasn’t enough to satisfy the SS. At intervals over the following weeks, three or four of the witnesses from the Schwarz detail would be named at roll call and brought to the Bunker. There they were interrogated by Deputy Commandant Rödl (the music lover) and the new camp physician, SS-Doctor Hanns Eisele. A virulent anti-Semite, Eisele was known to the prisoners as the Spritzendoktor (Injection Doctor) because of his willingness to dish out lethal injections to sick or troublesome Jews. He was also known by the nickname Weisser Tod—White Death.8 He used randomly selected prisoners for vivisection for his own personal edification, administering experimental injections and unnecessary surgery—including amputations—and then murdering the victims.9 He would be remembered as perhaps the most evil doctor ever to practice at Buchenwald. As with Eduard Hamber, the prisoners were told by Koch and Eisele that they had nothing to fear if they told the truth; again they denied that they had seen anything. Their silence didn’t save them; they were murdered to the last man.

“Three or four of the thirty men are brought daily to the Bunker,” Gustav wrote in his diary, “and taken care of by Sergeant Sommer: even Lulu, a foreman*1 from Berlin, and (so kapo Schwarz believes) Kluger and Trommelschläger from Vienna are among the victims. Thus our rebellion shrivels up.”10

Eduard Hamber’s heroic sacrifice had been fruitless, based on the idea that the SS could be brought to account for their crimes, or at least be made to fear that they might. They were immune and their power was limitless.

Summer returned to the Ettersberg, and more besides. “Fritzl and I are now receiving money regularly from home,” Gustav wrote. Somehow or other, Tini was managing to scrape together whatever she could from charity or work, knowing that it would make their lives in the camp a tiny bit more comfortable. She also sent occasional packages of clothing—shirts, underpants, a sweater—which were invaluable. Whenever something arrived for them, Gustav or Fritz would be called to the office to collect and sign for the items; usually the package would be opened and the contents itemized on their record cards.11

Gustav’s love for his son had grown to fill his whole heart during their time in Buchenwald, as had his pride in the man he was becoming—this June he would turn eighteen. “The boy is my greatest joy,” he wrote. “We strengthen each other. We are one, inseparable.”12

On Sunday, June 22, the camp loudspeakers announced momentous news. That morning, the Führer had launched an invasion of the Soviet Union. With three million troops, Operation Barbarossa was the biggest military action in history, with a front spanning the whole of Russia, north to south, intended to engulf it in one huge wave. The war had entered a new phase. Before the summer was out, Buchenwald would come to feel the change.

Tini sat at the table where her family had once eaten together.

“My beloved Kurtl,” she wrote. “I am extremely happy that you are doing fine and you are well. I am really curious to hear about your summer vacation. Actually, I almost envy you; one cannot go anywhere anymore here . . . For that reason, I would be so glad if I could be with you now. Here, we cannot enjoy ourselves anymore . . .”13

It was true. Existing restrictions on Jews had been tightened in May 1941 with the issue of a declaration reinforcing long-standing laws: Jews were forbidden to visit all theaters, concerts, museums, libraries, pleasure parks, sports grounds, and restaurants; they were barred from entering shops or buying goods outside certain specified times. Some rules were expanded: whereas previously Jews had been barred from sitting on designated public benches, now they were forbidden to enter public parks at all. The declaration also introduced some new and deeply sinister rules: Jews were not allowed to leave Vienna without special permission, were barred from making inquiries to high government offices, and the spreading of rumors about resettlement and emigration was strictly forbidden.14

Everything was conspiring to keep the Jews in Europe. Not long after Kurt’s departure, Portugal had implemented a temporary ban on transmigrants, due to a bottleneck at Lisbon, and in June President Roosevelt, pandering again to the xenophobes, banned the transfer of funds from the United States to European countries, hamstringing the refugee aid agencies.15 Liberal organizations lobbied for the rights of Jewish refugees and New Republic magazine accused the State Department of caving in to bigotry, calling the refugee effort “a football for anti-Semitism.” Roosevelt and the State Department were victims of a “clever German strategy” to spread Nazi propaganda in democratic nations “where the seeds of anti-Semitism and anti-liberalism are already sprouting.”16 They had been germinating since the early 1930s through what Elmer Holland, Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, called the “Vermin Press”—papers like the New York Herald Tribune, which called for “a fascist party to be born in the United States.” There were accusations of undue Jewish influence in Washington from the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Times-Herald, and the New York Daily News, along with apologetics on behalf of Hitler.17 And—as in Britain—there was a rising panic over a mythic immigrant fifth column. Suspected fifth columnists were threatened and even murdered; the finger was pointed at the Jehovah’s Witnesses for refusing to salute the flag; vigilante groups formed; and even Jewish child refugees were labeled by some as potential spies. Even before the nation joined in the war, the FBI was receiving up to twenty-eight hundred reports from the public every single day about alleged spies.18

Accordingly, the inflow of refugees was squeezed tight until it became barely a trickle. By June 1941, there were 44,000 Jews still in Vienna, only 429 having been able to emigrate to the United States so far that year.19 In July, US immigration regulations were altered, making existing affidavits invalid.20 Escape became all but impossible, especially with the meager sums of money Tini could scrape together. She’d had a brief stint working in a grocery store but had been fired because as a Jew she was not a citizen.

But still Tini went on trying. It wore her down; some days the depression weighed so heavily on her soul that she couldn’t drag herself out of bed. During the past two months, news had come to the neighboring Orthodox families of Friedmann, Heller, and Hermann that their menfolk had died in Buchenwald. They had been persecuted by Blank and Hinkelmann to the point that they committed suicide by running through the sentry line. All the time Tini expected to hear similar news about Gustav or Fritz, knowing the kind of grueling labor her husband was being made to do. “He is not a young man anymore,” she wrote. “How can he bear that?”21 Every time a letter from them was delayed, it sent her into a panic. So she persevered and fought on, refusing to give up hope of at least getting Herta to safety.

“Life is getting sadder by the day,” she wrote to Kurt. “But you are our sunshine and our child of fortune, so please do write often and in detail . . . Please give my regards to your aunts and Uncle Barnet. Millions of kisses from your sister Herta, who is always thinking of you.”22

That first summer was all about absorbing the new world.

Judge Barnet and his sisters hadn’t wasted any time in putting Kurt to school, despite his speaking no English. Rather than waiting for September, the judge used his influence to have him enrolled right away in the local grammar school. Although he was eleven, they put him in second grade; after two weeks he was bumped up to third grade, then the fourth. Kurt picked up English quickly, thanks in large part to Ruthie, the Barnets’ niece, who came to live with them that summer.

Having his own room hadn’t lasted long; soon after Kurt’s arrival, Ruthie moved in. She was from Brockton, near Boston, where her father had a hardware store; she’d graduated college and taken a job as a teacher at Fairhaven, across the estuary from New Bedford. Sam Barnet gave her Kurt’s room, and Kurt moved in with Uncle Sam. This was more like back in the old apartment, when the whole family had shared a room. Each day Kurt would come home from school and Ruthie tutored him in English. She was a good teacher, kind and good-natured, and Kurt grew to adore her; in time she would become a surrogate sister to him. Cousin David next door would become a little brother, their relationship echoing Kurt’s bond with Fritz.

In those first months, the presence of a Viennese refugee boy in the Barnet household caused a stir in New Bedford society. Kurt was photographed for the newspaper sitting on Sarah Barnet’s knee, with David and his baby sister, Rebecca, alongside; he was interviewed for the radio, and when he graduated fourth grade in June, the teacher placed him front and center in the class photograph. It seemed like Kurt could hardly move without having his picture in the paper.

The Jewish community of southeast Massachusetts was a warm, welcoming place for him, insulated from the colder, darker places into which some of his fellow refugees were sent. In later years, Kurt would be surprised and dismayed to learn of other children placed with uncaring, neglectful families or in neighborhoods where their German accents or Jewishness brought hostility. Judge Barnet and his huge extended family seemed to know everyone and everything, and they were all eager to make Kurt feel right at home. He spent weekends with Ruthie’s parents, Abe and Goldie, in Brockton and at their summer home on the coast. Abe’s hardware store was a wonderland, and Abe an amiable soul. Later on, after the United States joined the war, Uncle Sam played an active role in the war effort, recruiting Kurt as a mascot to help sell war bonds.

That first summer of 1941, when he was still finding his feet, Kurt went away to camp. Avoda was a camp for Jewish boys, founded in 1927 by Sam and Phil Barnet through the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. It ran on an ethos of taking boys from deprived urban environments and giving them a grounding in traditional Jewish family and social values. But in every other respect Camp Avoda was a typical boys’ summer camp, set among the trees on the shore of Tispaquin Pond, near Middleborough, halfway between New Bedford and Boston. It was a simple environment: a group of utilitarian dorm huts surrounding a baseball field. Kurt had the time of his life, playing sports and swimming in the warm, shallow waters of the lake. In Vienna he had floundered in the Danube Canal with a rope tied around his waist and a friend on the bank holding the other end; here he learned to swim properly. Had Fritz been able to see this place, he might have been reminded of the paradise of the camp in Makarenko’s Road to Life.

Normally Kurt didn’t like to write letters, but now he wrote profusely to his mother, telling her all about this wonderful new world he had found.

Tini was heartened to hear that at least two of her children were now safe. But she couldn’t shed her anxiety that something would go wrong, that somehow Kurt’s idyll would be destroyed. “Please be obedient,” she wrote back, “be a joy for your uncle, so that the counselors have good things to say about you . . . Darling, please be well-behaved.” A photograph he sent her with the other Barnet children filled her with pleasure: “You look so nice . . . so handsome and radiant. I almost didn’t recognize you.”23

Kurt was losing his old life in the brightness of the new. Looking back on this later, he might have hardly recognized himself.

“Every day the roar of the radio,” Gustav wrote despairingly. The camp loudspeakers, which had always been an intermittent source of unwelcome noise—regularly blaring out Nazi propaganda, German martial music, terrifying commands, and morale-grinding announcements—were now set to an almost constant stream of Berlin radio, crowing with triumphal news from the Eastern Front. The glorious crushing of Bolshevik defenses by the might of German arms, the encirclement of this division or that corps, the seizing of city after city, the crossing of rivers, the triumph of some Waffen-SS division, the glory of a victorious Wehrmacht general, the surrender of hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers. Germany was devouring the lethargic Russian bear like a wolf disemboweling a sheep.

For the Jews under Nazi rule—especially those in the Polish ghettos—the news had been received as a glimmer of hope; Russia might win, after all, and liberate them from this miserable existence. But to the political prisoners in the concentration camps, most of whom were communists, the news was depressing and stirred up resentment. “The Politicals hang their heads,” Gustav noted. The unrest that had been felt in the camp throughout the year—with the Dutch arrivals and over the Hamber murder—was stirring again, and there were disturbances in the labor details, incidents of disobedience, minor acts of resistance. The SS dealt with it in their usual way. “Each day the shot and slain are brought into the camp,” wrote Gustav. Each day, more grist for the crematorium, more smoke from the chimney.

In July 1941, a new horror came to Buchenwald. It was supposed to be veiled in secrecy, but the veil was thin and full of holes. The previous September, the American journalist William L. Shirer, based in Germany, had reported a “weird story” told to him by an anonymous source who “says the Gestapo is now systematically bumping off the mentally deficient people of the Reich. The Nazis call them ‘mercy deaths.’”24 The program, codenamed T4, involved a number of specialized asylum facilities equipped with gas chambers, together with mobile gas vans that traveled from hospital to hospital, collecting and exterminating mentally handicapped and physically disabled patients—those deemed by the regime as “unworthy of life.” The scheme had drawn some negative public attention, particularly from the church, and this, together with the demands of the war in the Soviet Union, had led to the T4 program being suspended. However, the Nazis did not terminate it altogether; instead, they began to experiment with using the techniques on concentration camp inmates, specifically those judged mentally or physically deficient. This new program, given the codename Action 14f13, was to focus particularly on disabled Jewish prisoners.25

Sometime in April or May 1941, Commandant Koch summoned his camp doctors and senior SS officers to a meeting, and informed them that a secret order had been received from Himmler: all “imbecile and crippled” inmates, especially Jews, were to be exterminated.26

The first the inmates of Buchenwald knew of Action 14f13 was in June, when a small team of doctors arrived in the camp to inspect the prisoners. “We got orders to present ourselves at the infirmary,” Gustav Kleinmann wrote. “I smell a rat; I’m fit for work.”27 The doctors selected 187 prisoners, variously classed as mentally handicapped, blind, deaf-mute, and disabled, including some who had been injured by accidents or abuse in the camp. They were told that they would be going to a special recuperation camp, where they would be properly looked after, and in due course they would be allotted easy work in textile factories. The prisoners were suspicious, but many—especially those most in need of care—chose to believe the hopeful lies. A month later, on July 13 and 14, transports came to the camp and took away the 187 men. They were taken to an asylum at Sonnenstein and murdered. “One morning, their effects came back,” wrote Gustav. The grim delivery included clothing, prosthetic limbs, and eyeglasses. “Now we know what game is being played: all of them gassed.” They were the first of six transports of predominantly Jewish prisoners murdered under Action 14f13.

At the same time, Commandant Koch began an ancillary program: the elimination of prisoners carrying tuberculosis. SS-Doctor Hanns Eisele was in charge. It was for his part in this program that Eisele earned his sobriquets as the Injection Doctor and the White Death. In July, a few days before the first transports left for Sonnenstein, two transports arrived from Dachau carrying 2,008 transferred prisoners. Those identified as having tuberculosis—around five hundred, diagnosed on the basis of general appearance rather than a proper medical examination—were sent to the infirmary. There they were immediately killed by Dr. Eisele with lethal injections of the sedative hexobarbital.28

Within a handful of months, the character of Buchenwald had altered irrevocably, and with it what it meant to live as a prisoner. From now on, sickness or injury or anything that incapacitated a man was as good as a death sentence. Such things had always carried a severe risk of death here, but now it became a stone certainty that being rated unfit for work or “unworthy of life” was enough to put a man’s name on a list to be exterminated.

And then the first Soviet prisoners of war arrived, and a door opened into a new department of hell.

In the Nazi mind, Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same—Jews, they claimed, had created Bolshevism, had spread it and now ran it (along with the global capitalist conspiracy they were also, contradictorily, alleged to be running). It was true that many of the leading Bolshevik revolutionaries of 1917 had been Jews, and it was also true that the Soviet regime had liberated Russian Jews from the repression they had suffered under the tsars. But the hopeful dawn of the early revolution had turned to gloom under Lenin and Stalin, and the alleged connection between Jewishness and communism was just a fantasy in the minds of Nazi ideologues, a banal modern equivalent of the blood libel. But it was a mythology potent enough to inspire the invasion of the USSR and breed a campaign of murder across the conquered Soviet territories, with death squads following behind the army and slaughtering Jews in tens of thousands. Captured Red Army soldiers, meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of whom had been rounded up in the first weeks of the invasion, were regarded as subhuman—if not Jews, then the thralls of Jews: degenerate, dangerous Bolsheviks and Slavs who were not fit to live. At the same time, their own leader, Josef Stalin, was labeling them cowards and traitors; beset from all sides, Soviet prisoners of war were among the most wretched men on Earth.

Within this mass of the despised, some were more hated and feared by the Nazis than others—political commissars, fanatical communists, intellectuals, and Jews. These were singled out for immediate disposal. The task couldn’t be accomplished in the POW camps because of the risk of spreading panic among the bulk of the prisoners; thus the SS decided to use the concentration camps. The program was codenamed Action 14f14.29

The first small group of fifteen Soviet POWs arrived in Buchenwald in September 1941 and were dispatched immediately.30 During roll call, the Russians were marched off by SS-Sergeant Abraham and four other guards toward the eastern sector of the main camp. On the roll-call square, the other prisoners were ordered to give a loud, spirited rendition of the “Buchenwald Song.” Their thousands of voices filled the camp. As they sang, from the corners of their eyes they glanced in the direction the Russians had been taken. That area was occupied by a small factory—the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke (DAW), whose prisoner workforce manufactured military equipment for the Germany army. Behind the factory was an SS shooting range. Under cover of the singing, the Russians were lined up there and shot.

A couple of days later, another thirty-six Russians were brought to the camp, and again the prisoners at roll call had to sing to drown out the gunshots as the Russians were dispatched in the same way.

“They say they were commissars,” Gustav wrote, “but we know everything . . . How we feel is not to be described—now shock is piled upon shock.”

This method of execution was an improvisation; in the long term it would be far too inefficient. Therefore, while these small groups of Russians were being murdered on the shooting range, a new facility was being prepared. In the woods a little way off the road to the quarry, the SS had a riding hall. Its stable building was no longer required, and a team of carpenters from the construction detail was hard at work inside building interior walls, dividing the building into rooms. The facility was officially code-named Commando 99, a reference to the telephone number of the stables.31

The work was completed in mid-October, and a few days later a contingent of around two thousand Soviet POWs arrived from Stalag X-D, near Hamburg. Barrack blocks 1, 7, and 13, in the southwest corner of the main camp, were fenced off with barbed wire, forming a special camp for them. They had been brought in primarily as laborers; with around three million Russians now in captivity, they were both plentiful and, in the Nazis’ eyes, eminently expendable.32 But they also served to test the new facility.

Each day, the Russians selected for liquidation were taken in groups to Commando 99, where they were told they would undergo a medical inspection. They were greeted by blaring music from loudspeakers outside the building. Inside, they were shepherded into a reception room under SS guard. Men in white coats took them, one at a time, along a corridor to the far end of the building. There the prisoner passed through a series of small rooms filled with medical paraphernalia and staffed by more men in white coats. His teeth were examined, his heart and lungs listened to with a stethoscope, his eyesight tested. Finally, he was led into a room with a measuring scale marked on the wall. He was ordered to stand with his back against it to have his height measured. What was not apparent, unless the prisoner was exceptionally perceptive, was that the men in white coats were not doctors but disguised SS guards; also that there was a narrow slit in the wall at neck-height, obscured by the measuring scale. Behind it was a tiny cubicle in which stood an SS man armed with a pistol. While the prisoner was being measured, the white-coated attendant tapped on the partition, and the concealed guard shot the prisoner in the back of the neck.33 The body was removed through the back door into a truck. Outside and in the waiting room, the loud music drowned out the sounds of the shots. While the next victim was being brought through, the previous man’s blood was hosed off the floor of the measuring room.

Some of the Soviet victims were taken from the Russian enclosure within the main camp, but the majority were driven in from POW camps for the sole purpose of extermination. Despite the cloak of secrecy, the prisoners of Buchenwald knew perfectly well what was going on. The carpenters who converted the stable were prisoners, and the others saw the truckloads of Russians arriving daily. And even without this clear evidence, most were astute enough to guess the nature of the “adjustments” (as the SS officially called the executions) being carried out in the former stable.34

Before long, the SS ceased even attempting to be discreet about Action 14f14, especially when the camp crematorium became unable to cope with the number of corpses coming out of Commando 99—sometimes several hundred in a day. Mobile ovens had to be brought up from Weimar to cope with the overload. They were parked outside the crematorium, on the very edge of the roll-call square, incinerating the bodies right in front of the other prisoners.35

“In the meantime the shootings continue,” Gustav recorded. The closed truck that carried the bodies from Commando 99 dribbled trails of blood along the road, all the way up the hill to the gate and across the square to the crematorium. After a while, the truck was fitted with a metal-lined container to prevent leakage and keep the camp tidy.

Surely one must finally lose one’s ability to be appalled? It must get worn down like a stone with the passage of use, blunted like a tool, numbed like a limb. One’s moral sense must scar and harden under an unending series of lacerations and concussions.

For some, perhaps that was so; for others, the opposite was true. Even some of the butchers of the SS could only withstand so much. The effect of murdering thousands of Soviet prisoners of war produced varied effects on the camp guards, who all had to take turns handling the victims in the execution room and wielding the pistol behind the killing slot. Continuous, orchestrated shootings, every single day—this was not the same as the sporadic, random murders they were accustomed to. Many of them reveled in it; they saw themselves as fighting soldiers, and these killings were their contribution to the war against Bolshevik Jewry. Others were shaken and even broken by it and tried to avoid duty in Commando 99; some fainted when faced with the carnage or suffered mental breakdowns after prolonged exposure; a few worried that if word got out, as it inevitably would, it could lead to retaliatory murders of captured German troops by the NKVD, the Soviet Gestapo.36

For the other prisoners, all of whom were witnesses to the open secret of Action 14f14 and some of whom were forced participants in the cleaning-up, the effect was corrosive and traumatic. And it was far from being the end. The new demon introduced to Buchenwald at the end of 1941 was of a different kind, and was once again perpetrated by the camp’s medical officers. There was no limit to the depths to which the Nazis would go in thinking up new monstrosities. That same year, prisoners began to be subjected to lethal medical experiments designed to develop vaccines for German troops.

Everyone knew that something was afoot when they fenced off block 46—one of the two-story stone-built barracks that stood down the hill near the vegetable gardens. The block’s inmates were moved to other barracks, and the building surrounded by a double cordon of barbed wire. It was hardly the first time such a thing had happened, usually indicating the arrival of some new contingent of prisoners. But this time there was no such intake.

After roll call one winter’s day, the adjutant produced a list and stood surveying the massed ranks of prisoners before beginning to call out numbers. The hearts of Fritz, Gustav, and every man there beat a little faster; whenever the SS compiled a list, or singled out any prisoner, it was almost never for anything good, and nearly always for something dreadful. The drone of numbers went on and on, dozens of them, and each selected man turned pale as his was called.

It was doubly unnerving that among the SS officers stood SS-Major Dr. Erwin Ding,*2 a trim, nervous-looking little man who had served with the Waffen-SS (and wore his hat in the crumpled style of a fighting soldier). Ding had been camp physician and was known for his incompetence, but although he was unfit to be a doctor, his skills were adequate for the task now assigned to him.37 The same could be said for his deputy, SS-Captain Waldemar Hoven; a remarkably handsome fellow, Hoven had spent a few years in Hollywood working as a movie extra before returning to Germany to work in his family’s sanatorium. He was even more medically incompetent than Ding; still unqualified, Hoven had pressed two prisoners into service to write his doctoral dissertation for him. But he was very handy with a needle, and he killed many hundreds of prisoners with lethal injections of phenol.38

The prisoners whose numbers were called—a mixture of Jews, Roma, and Aryan political prisoners and green-triangle men—were ordered to the gate, and from there they were marched to block 46 and disappeared inside.

What happened within block 46 only became known through rumor when the surviving prisoners were let back out. The whole truth was not revealed until much later. Dr. Ding and Hoven injected the prisoners with unknown substances; the subjects immediately fell ill, some of them gravely. They suffered bloating, headaches, bleeding rashes, hearing loss, nosebleeds, muscle pains, paralysis, abdominal pains, vomiting . . . the list went on and on. Many died, and the survivors were left in a pitiable state. The substances with which they were injected were typhus serums that were being developed in collaboration between the SS, the IG Farben chemical corporation, and the Wehrmacht, with the aim of producing a vaccine for German troops serving in Eastern Europe, where typhus was endemic.39

At periodic intervals, more batches of prisoners were sent to block 46 to be ruined and killed in the pursuit of incompetent medical research. Eventually, the Typhus Research Station was extended, with block 50 closed off and repurposed as a Serum Institute.40 In this, prisoners were injected with typhus bacilli with the intention of extracting a serum from their blood. Several old friends of Gustav’s from Vienna—Otto Herschmann, Oskar Kurz, Hans Kurzweil, Ludwig “Max” Matzner—were among the prisoners selected for this new torment, but they were saved when a conference of SS top brass deemed it improper for Jewish blood to be used in the development of a vaccine that was to be injected into the veins of German soldiers. The very idea was outrageous, and the Jewish subjects were released from block 50.41

Tini and Herta sat opposite each other at the table in the kitchen, plying their needles and thread. Mending had always been a part of Tini’s life; with little income and four children, there had always been socks to darn, torn pants to stitch, jackets and sweaters with elbows worn through. Now, their sewing kits were in nearly perpetual use; they had scarcely enough money to keep from starving, and what little surplus Tini had she sent to Gustav and Fritz, guessing that their need was more urgent. It was little enough; she’d been able to send them each a package of spare bits and pieces of underclothing in May, and she might be able to send them something in the next few weeks—perhaps a pair of socks or a pullover.42 Month by month her own and Herta’s clothes got shabbier and more threadbare, and their needles worked overtime to keep them in one piece.

Their sewing today was not mending, however. On September 1, 1941, it had been announced by the Ministry of the Interior in Berlin that as of the nineteenth of the month, all Jews living in Germany and Austria must wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes—the Judenstern.

The yellow mark for Jews was a medieval practice. The Nazis had revived it for use in Poland and the other occupied territories, where the Jews were perceived as even more degenerate and untrustworthy than those in Germany. During the invasion of the Soviet Union, it was claimed that German soldiers had met “the Jew in his most disgusting, most gruesome form,” and that this had made the state realize that all Jews, including those at home, must be deprived of their ability to be camouflaged within society.43

Along with everyone else, Tini and Herta had had to go along to one of the collection points set up by the IKG to get their stars. They were manufactured in factories, printed onto rolls of fabric, with the word Jude printed in black lettering styled to resemble Hebrew.44 Each person was allotted up to four. The final bitter insult was that they had to pay for them: 10 pfennigs each. The price was set in Berlin; the IKG bought them in huge rolls from the government for 5 pfennigs a star and used the profit to cover administrative costs.45

Tini had fought to the very end to get Herta away from this nightmare. The closure of the US consulate in Vienna meant that all applications had to be routed via Berlin, which added to the already excruciating bureaucratic obstructions. There were girls Herta’s age and even younger being sent to concentration camps now. In desperation, Tini had written to Judge Barnet in America, begging for him to act on her behalf. “Regarding Herta, I am devastated that she has to stay here. I was informed by an unofficial source that relatives in the US can petition Washington to obtain a visa. May I ask you to do something for Herta? I do not want to have to reproach myself like in Fritz’s case.”46 Sam Barnet acted right away, filing the necessary papers and putting up 450 dollars to cover all Herta’s expenses,47 but it had done no good. The maze was too complex and the barriers impossible to surmount. Herta’s visa had not been approved.

Their needles plied in and out, through the cheap yellow calico of the stars and the worn wool of their coats. Tini glanced across at Herta; she was fully a young woman now—nineteen, going on twenty, about the age Edith had been when she went away. Nineteen and pretty as a picture. Imagine how beautiful she could have been if there were nice clothes for her and there hadn’t been this life of constant containment and deprivation. When Herta looked at her mother, she saw lines etched by worry and cheeks sinking below the bones from hunger.

The appearance of the Judenstern in Vienna over the following days and weeks produced varying reactions among non-Jews. They had grown so used to the idea that the Jews had largely disappeared from the country—vast numbers had emigrated, and the supposedly dangerous ones had been sent to the camps—that to the less perceptive Viennese it was as if thousands of Jews now suddenly materialized in their midst, clearly marked for all to see. Some people were ashamed of what the state had done; they believed that it was right and proper to send Jews away and bar them from public life, but to stigmatize them in this highly visible way was wrong somehow. Shopkeepers who had been willing to sell to Jews were faced with the embarrassment of having their other customers know that they did so. Some braved it out; others began to shut their doors to wearers of the yellow star. And for those Jews who had been willing—and sufficiently Aryan-looking—to ignore some of the restrictions about where one could go and what one could do, that was now out of the question. The Gestapo, conversely, was delighted by the measure, which enabled the thorough enforcement of racial laws. Some members of the public, shocked to find so many Jews still about, began to demand that harsh action be taken.48 It seemed that life could not possibly get any worse.

But of course it could; the bottom of the pit had not yet been reached, not by any means. On October 23, 1941, the head of the Gestapo in Berlin relayed an order from Heinrich Himmler to all Reich security police: with immediate effect, all emigration of Jews from the Reich was banned.49 From this moment on, removal of Reich Jews would be solely by resettlement to the eastern territories, where several large ghettos had been established in cities such as Warsaw, Łódź, and Minsk. Deportations from Vienna to the east had been going on sporadically since the beginning of the year; from now on, they would apply to all Jews. Tini’s only hope, to which she had dedicated so much time, hard work, and motherly love—of sending Herta to join Kurt in America—was snuffed out in an instant with the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen.

In December America joined the war against Germany, and the final barrier fell.