r.@ GHRISTOPHER BURIUEY S0I.ITAHT CONFINEMEIUT and THE DUIUGEOIU IIEMOGRAGY a classic ol prison literature and the triumph oI the human spirit l{.ld GnU~dOU GdUlOJ1B"JA To the memory ~f Maurice Pertschuk, hanged in BuchenrIJald crematorium on the 29th of March, 1945, who fought more gallantly than an.y ~f us and died more sadly. - PREFACE DURING the next year there will be published a whole library of highly documented and highly flavoured books on the concentration camps of Germany. In them will be found the most complete anthology of horror and brutality, the most complete guide to the way of human degradation yet proffered by any bookseller. There will be tortures and suffering in their most intimate detail, and a gallery of fiends' portraits to delight the eye of the most morbid sensation-hunter. There will be passion and hatred of a heat to scorch the most ardent and the most harde'hed souls, concealed though it may be beneath words of lofty right eousness; and for the more cyni ca! there will be re vi ved a human zoo in which they will delight to stroll on many an idle afternoon. Many reasons would dissuade me from adding to this sea of words. I was only fifteen months in Buchenwald, never in another camp. I never saw it at its worst, although the last days were admitted by even the oldest inhabitants as being almost as bad as they had seen; and m y experience of Nazi horror is as mother's milk compared with the vitriol through which passed, for example, the men of Auschwitz or the early prisoners of Dachau. Then I fear passion in books, because passion clouds the mind, so that the eyes see only the horrible surface of events and cannot judge their real place in human history. They see, as it were, only the first two dimensions, while the third and fourth, which alone give true perspective and relation, remain hidden behind the impenetrable red fog of emotional reaction. Indeed, therein lies the whole reason for which I have ventured to contribute to this history. I suffered enough at 140 The Dungeon Democracy the hands of the Nazi of the elemental sufferings of mankind, of brutality and hunger and cold and fatigue, to be able to understand and speak of them at first hand and to see the danger of such suffering on one's judgment. I saw with my own eyes far worse sutIered by others. I have watched men die in filth and squalor and the stench of their own rotting flesh. Most were so far gone down the pit of inhumanity that they were unable to know or feel more than tortured, dying animals, but some had still kept enough of their own souls and their own values to appreciate the pathos of their agony. These things have ftIled me with loathing and pity. But vengeance is the right of God alone, and we must content ourselves with judgment and execution within our frail interpretation of the word justice. The evidence for con viction abounds, but for the sentence and execution we need balance, and above all we need clear sight to achieve the ultimate good of all evil experience and the ultimate end of every justiciary body, which is to avoid a recurrence of the evil. It is easy to make vengeance wear the clothes of punish ment, and with that most of those who have suffered will be content, but no man who has seen into the depths of that human tragedy can be content without correction. Those depths went far below the surface vice ofNazidom. The agitation of that surface revealed old and inflamed psychological sores which had no relation to any 'ism' or 'ist', mental cancers of great virility, which, unless they are treated in time, will produce results in no way less tragic than they did in this, their early period. One could see them clearly if one looked, for in Buchenwald was the amorphous raw material of human society and in particular of European society, and in the spasms and convulsions through which it went in its quest for form one could see more clearly than, perhaps, anywhere else the flaws and sicknesses in the com ponent cells, which were, first, the individuals themselves and then, more broadly, their accidents of national sentiment and prejudice, of ideology and false education, of tradition. Preface 141 Every European country was represented there, with the exception of Portugal and Finland, and of them every class and category of man. From the British Empire Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Malta, Cyprus and Guiana have had their witnesses to the play, a young pilot from the United States lost his life there. So intimately are we linked with this European Grand Guignol. Many of my fellow-prisoners (they would have me call them comrades, but that was seldom a well-chosen word) will resent my shaking of the false foundation which they had laid for those who have now come to see justice done. They will cry treason for my criticism now even as they jibbed at my intrusion then. But justice is whole. The sickness cannot be cured if it is removed from the head alone. The whole body must be purged, the symptoms examined and a cure established, or in twenty years' time the world will have seen sights and suffered agonies yet worse than those which a small part of it has seen and suffered during the past twelve years. Brutes are of equal danger to humanity whether their brutishness springs from one psychological source or the other. We must try to discover those who are capable of becoming brutes, either when the barriers are let down or when their passions are roused to the point where they break the barriers; we must isolate them in some sort and study them and cure them, and those who are incurable must be neutralized or even destroyed. Let no one think that I am attacking him personally. I have tried as far as possible to leave personal things alone. My interest is to see the world cured of a pestilence which will eventually cause the destruction of the human race unless a swift cure is found. That pestilence is inhumanity, and this book is designed simply to give warning of its presence and of its activity and especially to guard against the fatal tendency to think that it is a direct offspring of Nazi do m and will perish with its father. Nazidom was indeed infected with the germ as no other regime in history has been, but when N azidom is dead the germ will still be there, strengthened and more /' , 142 Preface virulent after its recent encouraging activity. It is perhaps unfortunate that I have been unable to include as many exact dates, tabulated statistics, etc., as might have been desired in a work of this kind. My note-books became too compromising for me to risk carrying them on my person during the uncertain mancruvrings of the last days and they disappeared in the pillage after the liberation of the camp from the block where I had left them. PART I Background THE Ettersberg is a small thickly-wooded hill, rising to some 2,400 feet above sea level, of which the summit lies eight miles by road north of the old town of Weimar, capital of Thuringen. Looking to the north over a wide shallow plain one can see lines of dull monotonous hills and beyond them the dark grey of the Hartz mountains, the home of the German secret industries. To the south-west stretches the high forest called the Thuringer Wald, and to the east the great plain of Saxony. In the old days you could see little of all this except from an occasional high clearing, and peaceful men like Goethe came there to be closeted quietly in the close company of trees and flowers. But when the Nazis came peace went. They chose the hill for the head quarters and depot of their crack Death's Head Division of the S.S. They built enormous cold concrete barracks for the troops and luxurious timbered villas for the officers. And they built a concentration camp. The concentration camp was no new invention even in 1933, when the Germans built their first at Dachau and on the moors of Estervegen, near Emden. For centuries the confinement of political enemies has been practised by the rulers of countries which have not reached the state of grace known to some as civilisation. The modern concentration camp, as used in Germany and Russia, is merely the rational development of the medieval dungeon, keeping in step with the Industrial Revolution. In the Middle Ages you left your enemies to rot in dank cellars; nowadays you keep him in the maximum of discomfort as before, but you extract from him his remaining statistical value in man-hours, thereby adding to your military power, the number of your prisoners, t 144 The Dungeon Democracy and so on ad lib. (theoretically). K. L. Buchenwald was started in 1937 with a few political prisoners from Estervegen and Dachau, and some long-term criminals. It was an acquisition for the Divison, because plans were already prepared for turning it into a slave-camp of considerable productivity, and the S.S. who were responsible for its administration (for want of a better word) received their fair share of the proceeds - or some of them did. The Camp Commandant was given a quota of shares in the firms to which he supplied man-power and Sauckel, gauleiter of Thuringen, and controller of the great Gustloff arms works, reserved his share of slaves and later caused to be built a great new subsidiary factory just outside the camp. He was happy because he got his building and labour dirt cheap, and the S.S. were even happier because he paid them six marks per slave per day, which cost them nothing at all, unless indeed they paid real money for the mangel-wurzels on which they fed them. The camp started with a theoretical strength of 3,000, which was to be increased ultimately to 11,000. The original distribution of the prisoners was fairly even between politi cals and criminals, and there was a small and impotent leavening of Witnesses of Jehovah, hard and unrelenting prophets of their faith who feared no man and took every hardship endured as evidence of their right. They were an object of mockery for some, but ignored it and kept their dignity of men when the others contemptuously bartered their own for supremacy in the tooth-and-claw struggle for survival which followed. At first the criminals obtained the advantage in this struggle. The S.S. who appointed chiefs for the working parties and leaders within the camp found them more of a kind and more of a mind with themselves as being by calling instruments of injustice and brutality, and for the first period of the camp's life, during which the wood was cleared, the living-blocks built, the paths and roads levelled and laid, this assortment of murderers, rapers, robbers and swindlers, Background 145 including some who had been certified criminally insane, enjoyed almost complete licence for their debased and un balanced instincts. Their brutality was inflamed by fear, for, although the S.S. were glad to use them for the dirty work for which they were so singularly well fitted, if their beating and cursing and murdering did not succeed in producing the required results, they were taken to task by their own masters and ended their miserable lives hanging from a tree or bleeding in the road from a laconic bullet in the neck. We, the late-corners, walked on the streets (we called them streets though they were no more than levelled mud divi sions) and on the roads of the camp, and perhaps few of us realized that every yard we trod was soaked with the blood of the unfortunates who came a few years earlier. We forgot that they were flogged down those roads at six o'clock every morning, driven to the end of endurance at their carrying and digging, and then flogged back again to stand for three, four or five hours or more on the wind-swept square on the north face of the hill until the whim of their masters saw fit to send them staggering to their soup, cold by now, and to their sacks of straw. They went out by Kommandos, or working parties, and sometimes the S.S. would give orders that one or the other Kommando was too large. Then some would not return. Once a Kommando left the main gate forty strong and never came back. The guards in charge reported that they had tried to run, and the bodies were counted in the wood so that the premium for each shot runaway could be paid and the regulation two days' special leave granted. It was so easy for the S.S. man who found he had not enough money to pay for cigarettes in the canteen one night to correct the position in the morning by shooting a prisoner in the back and thereby establishing clearly that he had been in the act of running away. And even if his tradition ofT.euton 'chivalry' suggested to him that perhaps there was a trace of unfairness about it, he could always reconcile his conscience with the act by remembering that L