A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (14 page)

In the summer of 1981, Karl Liedke gets permission to go on holiday to France but travels instead, as planned, to West Germany, a country to which he as an ethnic half-German would never have received permission to go, but where as an ethnic half-German he’s received like a long-lost son. West Germany’s need for Polish-educated industrial economists in their forties is somewhat limited, however, and after a long search for work, Karl Liedke takes a job with a historical research society in Braunschweig. His task is to carry out a financial feasibility study for a proposed museum of the industrial history of Braunschweig. Karl Liedke’s study shows that while such a museum would not be financially viable, the industrial history of Braunschweig is well worthy of further study and in fact urgently demands it.

It’s the Poles, I believe, who awaken Karl Liedke’s lust for research. In the industrial history of Braunschweig, or indeed in any German industrial history, Poles cannot be avoided. In June 1944, over two million Poles are employed by force in German industry under the euphemism “civilian workers,”
Zivilarbeiter
. The only civil aspect of the civilian worker system is the name. The civilian workers are housed in camplike barracks, live under prisonlike restrictions, and work in slavelike conditions; they’re obliged to wear a
P
on their clothing to prevent them from using public transportation or going to restaurants or swimming in pools strictly reserved for Germans.

Not only Poles are forcibly conscripted as civilian workers. Little by little, the factories of Germany fill with civilian workers from all over German-occupied Europe and with prisoners of war from the battlefields in the east, and when the fortunes of war turn and the supply of civilian workers and POWs runs dry, with Jews from Auschwitz who are still fit to work.

The Auschwitz Jews represent an emergency solution, since the Jews have been brought to Auschwitz to be killed, but necessity knows no law. In September 1944, the German war industry finds itself in circumstances of direst necessity, and beneath the oily black smoke from the crematorium chimneys stand engineer Pfänder and finance director Scholmeyer, choosing or rejecting from among the still-able-bodied Jews who have just been delivered from the liquidated ghetto in Łódź.

Any study of Braunschweig’s industrial history will find it difficult to skirt around the formal delivery from Auschwitz of 1,000 to 1,200 Jews from the Łódź ghetto for slave labor in the truck factories of Firma Büssing.

Karl Liedke does not skirt around anything in the industrial history of Braunschweig, particularly not an activity like this, visible and familiar to all the residents of Braunschweig for as long as it lasts. He wants to know everything that happens to the little trickle of Jewish men still deemed fit for work who are delivered as slaves to Büssing’s factories in Braunschweig in September and October 1944. As a result, your particular road from Auschwitz is supplied with an incorruptible and tireless investigator who ascertains how you all are selected, how you survive, how you’re transported, and, when necessary, how you die.

He also investigates the silence afterward. In December 1945, under the supervision of the British occupying forces, the German police look into the slave activity at the Büssing factories. The man in charge of Büssing at the time, Rudolf Egger, says he had no reason to concern himself with the high death rate at
Aussenlager
Schillstrasse, “first because mortality in wartime is hardly surprising, and second because it was not my area of responsibility.”

On July 4, 1946, the public prosecutor in Braunschweig, Dr. Staff, writes to ask the British occupying authority whether the
results of the police inquiry are to be presented to a court of the Allied occupying forces or to an authorized German court. Almost two years later, on March 1, 1948, the War Crimes Group (Northwest Europe) decides that the findings of the inquiry into slave labor at Büssing will not be presented to any court at all. Instead, Rudolf Egger becomes the chairman of the Braunschweig Chamber of Industry and Commerce, and a few years later he receives permission from the federal state government to add Büssing to his surname, for his services to the nation.

On February 25, 1957, Firma Büssing Nutzkraftwagen Ltd. claims in a letter to one of your surviving fellow prisoners from
Unterkommando
Vechelde, a man in Paris named Henryk Kinas (who is demanding reparation for his unpaid labor in the factory), that Rudolf Egger-Büssing personally made sure you all got more food and better clothing than the SS regulations allowed, thereby running the risk of being arrested by the local SS,
von den örtlichen SS-Stellen verhaftet zu werden
, on suspicion of sabotage.

Yes, that’s what the letter says, signed by Rudolf Egger-Büssing himself, and also—for the sake of appearances, I assume—by a Dr. Schirmeister. Payment of any damages to Henryk Kinas is consequently out of the question. If anything, he should rather be grateful for the management’s courageous solicitude for his well-being.

In short, by 1957 the time has arrived for Rudolf Egger-Büssing to shamelessly claim the status of hero and benefactor.

The road from Auschwitz is lined with such shamelessness, I should tell you, with people who initially say they heard and saw nothing and in any case had nothing to do with it, and then say they opposed what they neither saw nor heard. Nothing to be surprised at, unfortunately, since a blatant lie is a well-tested weapon against the memory of something too many people have
seen and heard for it to be forgotten. A blatant lie loosens the ground beneath what can’t be forgotten and turns it into a quagmire. In its defense against such a weapon, therefore, memory must time and time again mobilize its collected arsenal of witnesses, documents, and relics to fortify, time and time again, the loosening ground beneath it.

There are those who testify against Rudolf Egger-Büssing’s shameless discovery of his heroic contribution to the well-being of slave laborers, among them truck driver Erich Meyer, who was employed by Firma Büssing to take back-axle parts from the factory in Braunschweig to the factory in Vechelde. In the police investigation of 1946, Meyer says that in the same truck he also took paper bags and wooden boxes with a total of four hundred to five hundred dead bodies from
Aussenlager
Schillstrasse to
Aussenlager
Watenstedt.

Further testimony against Rudolf Egger-Büssing is provided by the memorial stones in the cemetery at Jammertal, outside the former camp at Watenstedt, to which Dr. Karl Liedke takes me one chilly day in March when a virginal layer of snow is covering the names of those who didn’t know how to make the most of Firma Büssing’s care for their well-being. I carefully brush the snow aside from Paweł Diamant, Tadeusz Goldman, and Jakob Urbach.

A final testimony against Rudolf Egger-Büssing is the fact that even two SS officers from the main camp in Neuengamme, inspecting the satellite camp in Schillstrasse in January 1945, feel impelled to order the immediate transport of two hundred slave laborers, sick or unfit for work, to the concentration camp hospital in Watenstedt.

The Jews among them do everything they can to avoid the transport, having learned in Auschwitz that in a concentration camp, hospital is a euphemism for gas chamber. The non-Jews, however, particularly the Frenchmen and the Russians brought here from Neuengamme and not from Auschwitz, can imagine nothing worse than
Aussenlager
Schillstrasse and see the transport of the sick as a gift from above. One fellow prisoner, a French doctor called Georges Salan, is surprised by the Jews’ reaction: “You have to have seen it with your own eyes,” he writes,

This is what Georges Salan writes on page 163 of his book
Prisons de France et bagnes allemands
(French prisons and German slave camps), which is published as early as 1946 and could thus have served as evidence for the prosecution in the trial of Rudolf Egger that never takes place.

In Rudolf Egger’s defense, it could nevertheless have been argued that the slave labor camps at Firma Büssing were superior
to Auschwitz. That they in fact offered salvation from Auschwitz. That by comparison with Auschwitz, they were paradise. That in any event they were camps where death was not an end in itself but at the very most a regrettable setback to production. At Firma Büssing, the goal was trucks, as distinct from Auschwitz, where the goal was annihilation. Had engineer Otto Pfänder and finance director Otto Scholmeyer not presented themselves underneath the smoke from the crematoriums and personally selected a thousand or so men fit for work and assigned them for onward dispatch and delivery to Firma Büssing in Braunschweig, Auschwitz might well have been the final stop for them too.

And that’s how it is. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the intended terminus for all of you. Ever since May 1944, the trains of cattle cars have been heading straight to Birkenau, practically straight to the gas chambers. From a newly constructed ramp, you can see the four crematorium chimneys rising toward the sky from behind a thin curtain of foliage. From mid-May to mid-July 1944, a steady stream of transports unload here a total of 437,000 Hungarian Jews, of whom 320,000 are immediately selected and sent down the short path to the changing rooms and shower rooms, and a few hours later have been reduced to smoke and ashes.

It is to this terminus, purposely built for the reception, killing, and disposal of thousands of people every day, that the last Jews of the Łódź ghetto are brought in August 1944, and it’s here that two-thirds of those who boarded the train in Radogoszcz get off and are never heard from again. Of the approximately 67,000 people transported from Łódź to Auschwitz, only about 22,000 survive the initial selection process and the gas chambers. Of these, some 1,200 able-bodied men are selected in three separate instances in September and October 1944 to serve as
slave labor for Firma Büssing in Braunschweig. Anyone thereby asserting that this particular group of men may owe their lives to Firma Büssing is not wholly wrong. Not all of those selected survive Firma Büssing, and not all of those surviving Firma Büssing survive the evacuation and the liberation, but compared to Auschwitz, Firma Büssing can be said to have been a sort of paradise, after all.

Yes, this is roughly how a defense for Rudolf Egger, later Egger-Büssing, could have been constructed. It could perhaps even have been reinforced by witness statements of survivors, mainly from the factory in Vechelde, where at times something approaching job satisfaction and camaraderie is said to have occurred, and where something akin to human feelings is said to have been shown by German foremen and civilian workers. Those working hard enough to exceed the rigidly set quotas could even be rewarded occasionally with coupons to be cashed in for cigarettes, pickled gherkins, and beetroot, and the most proficient workers could even advance to more specialized tasks. One of your workmates in Vechelde, M.Z., proudly told me much later how skilled he grew at the lathe, turning the casings for drive shaft housings; how in a twelve-hour shift he could turn casings for fifty drive shaft housings, to be mounted in fifty trucks; and that his German foreman, whose name was Hans, occasionally showed his appreciation by sticking an extra bit of bread to the lathe. And in fact a year later, you yourself write: “The first four weeks at Vechelde quite bearable, no problems with the food.”

There’s no denying that beatings occurred, that the food situation deteriorated over time, and that an SS guard used to station himself outside the privy to deliver a kick in the balls as a deterrent to anyone needing to go. There’s no denying that you
were slaves, and that many died, but I can imagine a clever lawyer might nonetheless have succeeded in turning Rudolf Egger, later Egger-Büssing, into something of a hero.

All this is belied, of course, by the fact that the operation was built on, and entirely dependent on, the most repulsive of acts. Without Auschwitz, no slaves for Firma Büssing. Without the transports of Jews to the gas chambers, no able-bodied Jewish men for engineer Otto Pfänder and finance director Otto Scholmeyer to pick from. At a trial, Rudolf Egger might possibly have been able to claim that Auschwitz was beyond the scope of his responsibility, but he could hardly have claimed that he was unaware of the nature and conditions of the place from which Firma Büssing recruited its slave labor in the autumn of 1944. Nor does the fact that he was never brought to trial mean that the occupying Allied authorities deemed him innocent of war crimes, only that they deemed him to be more important for the reconstruction of the economy than for the restoration of justice.