The following pages are an extract of the transcript of Dr. Karel Sperber’s testimony.
An extract from the testimony of Dr. Karel Sperber concerning Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
The train stopped in the morning, at 9:50 a.m., and I saw a lit sign which read “Auschwitz”. We were ordered to come out and form rows of five. Altogether, there were 89 of us, people of all European nationalities, including one German aristocrat (a count), lots of Czechs, and some Poles and Jews. Next, we were surrounded by a group of around 20 young SS men armed with automatic rifles and ordered to march. Nobody said anything, we were too focused on trying to march in a natural way. The guards were conversing, and I heard various dialects of German, mostly Bavarian and Austrian. After marching for some three quarters of an hour through fields which appeared very barren, I saw our camp, marked with tall, white posts with electric lights fixed to them, reaching over a white wall. When we got closer, I saw multi-story buildings, which seemed quite big to me. We stopped outside a huge gate, painted white, with a sign in capital letters: “Arbeit macht frei” – “Work sets you free”.
After I had told my story, I asked about the camp, but I was not given much information. Someone told me that in the morning I would be given a number around 82,000, that there were some 18,000 people at the camp, and that he could not tell me more, but that I could think what I wanted to. I was further informed that there was a camp hospital which comprised three barracks and could accept more than 2,000 patients, and also that a typhus epidemic was currently raging. Recently, many doctors interned at the camp had been employed there.
Each morning we had to do exercises and march, as well go through the “Mützen ab, Mützen auf” drill, whereby you had to grab your cap in your right hand and turn your head left, and then, upon hearing “Auf”, you had to put the cap back on. You always had to greet the SS men in this manner, and failure to do so was a punishable insult. It was not before long that some of the older prisoners showed signs of fatigue after the long hours of standing and marching. Before you could walk across the room, the floor had to be cleaned, but not wiped dry, and everybody had to remove their footwear and socks and stand barefoot. Standing on this wet floor, you felt rather cold…
On the second day, one of the room seniors in a room adjacent to mine hit one of the newcomers, a Norwegian. His brother wanted to defend him and attack this man. The incident was reported to the SS block commandant during roll-call, and when we were waiting to be counted, we heard a noise, as if someone had thrown a body on the floor, and the sounds of a fierce fight in the block senior’s room; after some 12 minutes the SS-man came out, breathing heavily, and began his usual count. After roll-call I saw the two Norwegian brothers, powerfully built men some 6-feet-4-inches tall, being taken outside, dead. I immediately understood what the noises had meant and why the SS-man had been breathing so heavily.
On the morning of the fourth day, the block senior came for me and told me to go to the hospital, where I was to work now. There were three of us: two Polish doctors, Grabciński [Grabczyński], who was a surgeon, another doctor, and myself. It was a cold December day, and the block senior took us to block 28, which had a sign reading “Internal diseases”. We had to strip naked, and we had numbers tattooed on our chests and left forearms with an indelible pencil. Our registration cards were filled in with our numbers, names, and nationalities. We were told to gather our clothes, fold them neatly and leave them in the stairwell, and then move to the waiting room. For the first time in the camp, I was completely stunned. On both sides of the room there were bunks occupied by patients, while grouped in the middle were some hundred naked creatures; the whole room stank. One man, completely exhausted, lay outside the door, while another, resembling a skeleton, was dead, and yet another one lay on a stretcher, one of his legs broken and without any bandage or splints, and one of his eyes completely black and bulging out of its socket. All the others were terribly thin and had swollen legs, three times the regular size, as in Elephantiasis, and their faces were at least twice the regular size and turgid, especially around the eyes. Many had large wounds, 8 or 10 inches in length, with large yellow swellings which seeped pus and were not bandaged. Others, lying on the bunks, were dying from exhaustion. Grabczyński and myself exchanged terrified glances and did not say a word. I had never looked at a more distressing sight in my life, though I later found out that I was going to have to get used to much worse, and for a very long time.
At 9:30 a.m. we were waiting in the big infirmary room for an SS doctor. Standing very calmly, we handed him our cards. Of course we were all naked, and the three of us, doctors, though we had lost some weight, were healthy individuals compared to those living dead. We stood to attention when the SS doctor entered in the company of the senior of the hospital block and another SS-man. The three of us were called to the front and ordered “About face, alright, dress”. We looked for the final time at those wretched beings – all of them could barely move – and went off to the stairs, collected our clothes and put them on. Next, we were sent to block 21, located opposite, to the surgical ward. I proceeded to the right wing and Grabciński to the left, on the first floor.
The stink that blew in my face was such that I almost fell down. The first floor was divided into two big wards. Each had 400 bunks, and on each bunk there lay at least three, but sometimes four patients with large, open infected wounds (phlegmonosa cellulitis) of a size that a surgeon does not normally come across. They had their dressings changed twice a week, but these were paper bandages that would stay on for at most 10, and usually only 5 minutes. Additionally, they were soaked through with pus, which dripped down the men’s limbs onto the other patients or into the straw mattresses, causing them to rot quickly. On some of the bunks, a corpse or two lay between the living. There was no room for me in the small space separated from the main hall by a few narrow cabinets, so the room leader – a policeman in civilian life and on the whole a good fellow – told me to sleep in the hall, along with the patients.
My responsibilities included removing full buckets, handing out tea at 5:30 a.m., soup at 11:30 a.m., and bread at 14:30 am, removing corpses (together with the orderlies), assisting in the morning replacement of dressings, scrubbing the floor of the room and corridor, clearing snow from the front door, and keeping the toilet clean. Aside from that, whenever the necessity arose, I had to stand in for the janitor, unload coal cars, carry coal, help with the delousing of newcomers, take louse-infested blankets and underwear for gassing and bring back clean items, and, out of hours, assist in the delousing of prisoners at regular blocks. We were not allowed to stand about idly and look around, while smoking was strictly prohibited during working hours. While at work, I could only have a handkerchief on my person; cigarettes and snuff were permitted only after work. Soon, I made friends with a couple of Germans from whom I learned a few things about the camp, however most of them treated me, a new prisoner, gruffly, and demanded that I do most of the work; basically, they wanted me to be the first to get up in the morning and to work the whole day while eating as little food as possible. I would only go to sleep when everything was done.
For the sake of providing a wider context, I will now present a full report detailing the organization and functioning of the Gestapo in the concentration camp system.
The outbreak of war coincided with the establishment of new camps. Auschwitz (Birkenau) near Katowice in Upper Silesia, 1939-40, Majdanek in Lublin in central Poland, Stutthof near Gdańsk, Flossenbürg on the Czech-Bavarian border, 1939, Groß-Rosen near Wrocław, Riga in Latvia, Bergen-Belsen near Hannover, Mittelbau in central Germany, and S III in Thuringia – these were the main camps. Each had numerous branches, where prisoners worked like slaves for the German war industry.
The worst extermination camp (where people were annihilated) was, unfortunately, Auschwitz-Birkenau. It occupied 12 square miles, while the camp proper, located in the former cavalry barracks, lay some 2.5 miles from the town of Oświęcim. As soon as the Germans captured Upper Silesia, they began to rebuild these barracks into a concentration camp. To that end, 35 long-term German prisoners – all of whom were common thugs – were transferred from Sachsenhausen near Oranienburg to Auschwitz, where they held important (key) positions. They could wear long hair and good clothes, and were not allowed to reveal to anyone that they were common criminals. They were treated as so-called prisoners of honor. Newly arriving prisoners received consecutive numbers, but when any of them died, their numbers were not given to newcomers, as was the case in other concentration camps. Häftlings (prisoners) were divided into special categories, not only according to nationality.
The first commandant of Auschwitz was Obersturmbannführer Höß, a 40-year-old Prussian, one of the worst murderers to have ever walked the earth and a good friend of Himmler’s. The first administrator of the camp was Hauptsturmführer Aumeier, a 5-foot-2-inch Bavarian, a long-standing member of the Nazi party and a deputy to the Reichstag from the Bavaria constituency. His deputy and successor, Hauptsturmführer Schwarz, was one of the worst scumbags I have ever seen, and I have seen many of them.
The administrator of the Birkenau camp, Hauptsturmführer Schwarzgruber [Schwarzhuber], supervised exterminations. He was an officer and a doctor, and played a big role under Standartenführer Dr. Lolling, the officer and doctor to whom all concentration camps in Germany were subordinated. They too were five-star thugs. Sturmbannführer Dr. Wirths from Hitler’s personal bodyguard (the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler), Hauptsturmführer Fischer, also from Hitler’s personal bodyguard, Prof. Dr. Clauberg, professor of gynecology and director of the obstetrical clinic in Królewska Huta near Katowice, temporarily at the University of Królewiec, who set up a special block for women selected to undergo medical experiments at the camp, and Lieutenant of the Luftwaffe Dr. Kaufmann, who was responsible for experiments concerning the sterilization and castration of young people – all of them were fanatical scumbags. But at the end of the day, the worst of all the doctors was Hauptsturmführer Dr. Entress, born in Poznań, in Poland, who selected many hapless prisoners from the extermination camps for torture and death in the gas chambers. I will talk about others later. Then there was the long-serving Head of the Political (Security) Division of SS Camps, Untersturmführer Grabner, who for no reason at all and acting in a meticulous, well-thought-out manner sentenced thousands of people to torture and death.
The following certainly deserve mention as the main executioners: Hauptscharführer Palitzsch and Oberscharführer Stiewitz, who specialized in the infamous “nape shootings”, Oberscharführer Klehr from the medical staff, who personally killed at least 30,000 people with intracardiac injections of carbolic acid, and, first and foremost among them, Hauptsturmführer Moll, who looked and behaved like a Bavarian butcher and who, together with Unterscharführer Scherth from Vienna, a member of the Führer’s SS regiment, was responsible for the gas chambers, crematoriums, and – worst of all – the so-called penal companies.
The SS put the so-called camp elder in charge of the camp’s internal affair. Until 1943, this was prisoner no. 1 Bruno Brodniewicz, a German common criminal, very well-built, who had already served 10 years. A smith by trade, he was a merciless, fanatical killer who worked hand in hand with the camp administrator and the security department. He always wore elegant clothes and you would never see him without a large, massive leather whip. Everybody had to doff a cap to him, and whoever failed to do this was always punished because the SS were kept in the know about even the most innocuous misdemeanors.
At this point I feel it my obligation to stigmatize Dr. Dering, the Warsaw obstetrician who was appointed main surgeon, and who conducted all of the experimental surgical procedures on women, and the castrations of men. Very frequently, he himself decided who would be sent to die. In recognition of his service, he was allowed to work for the Germans as a volunteer and was then released. Later, he worked at prof. Clauberg’s clinic – he was the chief doctor conducting experiments on women at Auschwitz. He changed his nationality from Polish to German.
While describing the camp, I need to make a mention of the infamous block 11, which was located in the right corner of the camp. It was different from other blocks in that typically there was empty space between them, while block 11 was separated from block 10 by a high brick wall. Coal cars and transporters could access it from the road through the gate. Opposite the gate there was a large, black, discus-shaped plank fixed to the wall, and always scattered in front of it was fresh, yellow sand. Situated in the left corner were gallows, and one, the so-called tree, was located to the right. In the basement of block 11 were bunkers (prison cells) of various shapes and dimensions. The penal company was housed in the basement and on the first floor, and then there was the quarantine ward. There were large day-lit cells there, dark cells with no light, and small cells with low ceilings. Doors were opened and closed only when an SS-man sounded the bell – he was there the whole day and held the title of Bunkermeister (bunker supervisor). Initially, the prison warden, a strong man picked specifically for the job, was Kurt Pennewitz from Leipzig, a butcher by trade, whom I later got to know very well. In 1943, he was replaced by Jacob, a Latvian Jew, a really strong man, who used to be Max Schmeling’s boxing partner.
The yellow sand scattered in front of the black plank was the execution site of thousands of prisoners, men and women, and hundreds of civilians. I was ordered to go there a few times, once for the mass execution of 480 people.
Many prisoners were executed there – for once being part of the anti-Nazi movement, for delivering alcohol to the camp, for selling their own gold teeth, or for keeping some valuable ring as a reminder of home. The committee which normally presided over death sentencing comprised the administrator of the camp, a representative of the Political Division, and an SS doctor and a non-commissioned officer, who were responsible for elaborating a report (the latter would also serve as the executioner). If a female inmate who was to be executed, she was allowed to wear a shirt, while men had to be naked. The chief prison warden would take prisoners two at a time and stand them facing the black wall. The executioner used a 6-mm, 10-round fowling piece, which he pressed against the back of the prisoner’s head, at the spot where the spine begins, and after he pulled the trigger it was quickly over. Small-caliber weapons are silent. The victim immediately sprawled forward, like a frog – this is the infamous Nazi German gunshot shot to the nape of the neck that killed many thousands of people.
We were already waiting with stretchers to immediately remove the corpses and load them on a coal car. Things happened very fast and 480 people were exterminated in around half an hour. Fresh yellow sand was poured on top of the red, bloody wall. Nobody ever tried to resist.
Facing death, most of the victims had a composed demeanor, sometimes laughing and cursing the Germans, foretelling that they would be severely punished for their actions and wishing them an eternity in hell.
Block 11 was where floggings was administered, between 25 and 100 lashes for minor offences. Blows were dealt at regular intervals, under the supervision of the camp administrator and an SS doctor. There was a specially designed table there, upon which the victim was placed and beaten with a rubber hose with a wire fitted inside. Sometimes, flogging was handed out by two people, hitting the victim from either side. Very often, victims were beaten outside the block, with the whole camp watching. Typically, it was the main prisoners – well-fed and strong – rather than SS men who would be ordered to perform floggings.
A mother of two, probably of a three- and a seven-year-old, was hiding somewhere in Poland to avoid arrest and deportation to the camp. Both children were placed in block 11. They did not know where their mother was, but the Gestapo thought that the older child did know, and also that it wanted to find her. They took this innocent, tawny-haired child, tore off her clothes, and a huge, strong SS-man, four feet and three inches (190.5 cm) tall, dealt her 50 blows with a heavy rubber baton, beating her with all is might. We could not stand this and our hearts bled when we heard the child scream. Naturally, the poor thing died half an hour later.
The small cells at block 11 measured 40 square inches, and were some five feet, two inches tall. They were used for a special kind of minor punishment, the so-called standing detention, which lasted overnight. I officially received this punishment because administrator Stiewitz had filed a report against me for lighting a cigarette stub during working hours. We had been delousing a hundred or so prisoners, all literally infested with lice, in the big bathroom, and then, annoyed and appalled by this filth, I had lit the stub. Stiewitz spotted me through a window of the block opposite, where he happened to be carrying out an inspection. He immediately asked me about my prison number. Three weeks later – and throughout this period I was tortured by the thought of what would befall me – I was officially sentenced to five nights of standing detention. This meant that you worked during the day, while at 8:00 p.m. a guard would come round to take all those who were to be punished to block 11. Four or five men were packed into these cells, all crammed tightly together, and it was impossible to lie down or sit, or even to stand and sleep. Naturally, at 6:30 a.m., everybody was taken back to work. This punishment was administered for 5, 10, or 20 nights. I would be overjoyed if I managed to grab even a sliver of rest during the day. 10 nights of such punishment took a terrible toll on some of my comrades, in every way imaginable.
The so-called tree was used for hanging prisoners by the hands, which were tied behind their backs. They were hung in such a way that their feet were 10 inches above the ground, and then they were interrogated. This was indeed a terrible torture – many people broke their wrists, and were then summarily refused hospital treatment. This punishment was abolished in 1943.
In summer 1942, they conducted the first experiment with potassium cyanide, which until that time had only been used to fumigate concrete buildings in order to rid them of bugs and lice. The victims were eight high-ranking Russian officers at block 11. The deadly outcome was reported to Berlin by SS-Hauptsturmführer Fritzsch, and the method was adopted for the quick mass executions of thousands.
In 1943, block 10, which was a long block at first, was adapted to serve as a site where women were experimented upon, in accordance with Prof. Clauberg’s and Hauptsturmführer (SS major) Dr. Wirths’s instructions. One day, they summoned all the hospital staff and
| gave them buckets, brooms, and brushes. All | the doctors, orderlies, and cleaners were |
| ordered to clean block 10 to get it | ready. Some were ordered to bring water from far away. |
| Altogether, there was around a | hundred of us working, and at 10 p.m. everything was done. |
The next day, new blankets were brought there, and fixed to the door was a sign which read, “Krankenhaus” [hospital]. Two days later, five nurses from the Birkenau camp came, together with Prof. Clauberg and a small man resembling a monkey, who wore high boots and a feathered hat, and who would then repeatedly come in his cart. The next day, we were told to get the big bathroom ready for delousing some new prisoners. 150 women arrived on a big transport and marched into the camp, and then to the bathhouse. The group included young girls, between 17 and 18, women between 20 and 30 years of age, older women between 50 and 60, some of them pregnant, all of them neat and well-dressed. They were accompanied by a few horrible-looking female SS guards with guns, whips, and dogs, and also by a few young SS-men and the director of camp 2, Hauptsturmführer (SS captain) Schwaatel, a fat Bavarian resembling Göring. He had worked as a stable boy before Hitler came to power. The five nurses had scissors and blades, and the women were told to undress. They were spurred by the guards, who shouted and kicked them. The nurses began to shave the hair on their heads and everywhere else. We were waiting behind the furnace so we had to witness this horrible scene.
The young SS-men were having fun, pointing at the poor naked women and prodding them with their fingers. When the women were completely shaved, the nurses were ordered to delouse them. Commandant Schwaatl, not happy with the way they went about it, sent them off and told the men, ourselves included, to get it done. It was an outrage. The poor women covered their faces with their hands in utter shame. We were told to rub kerosene all over their bodies – I do not believe I need to convince you how deeply humiliated I feel – and I only did this because I was forced to. After bathing, they were issued with the disinfected old Russian military uniforms and handkerchief-sized, colored scarves so they could cover their shaved heads. All hair had to be collected and on no condition was it allowed to be burned. I suspect it was later used to manufacture mattresses or similar items for the German state.
Next, these poor, maltreated women marched into block 10, where they were to become human guinea pigs. The research in the name of which they had been arrested consisted in exposing them to X-rays, and to that end, huge X-ray machines had been installed there and a gynecological operating theater had been set up, where female prisoners underwent artificial insemination, had cancerous cells implanted in their uteruses, had their genitals exposed to airstream, had ovaries transplanted, and were also sterilized with X-rays.
SS doctors used them as subjects to practice gynecological operations. Sometimes, the poor creatures were used to satisfy the sensual lust of the men after experimental procedures of testicular sterilization with X-rays or after complete or partial castration. Prof. Clauberg was the commandant of this ward, and Dr. Dering and long-serving prisoner Prof. Salomon were the ones who conducted the highest number of such operations. There was a lot of talk of scientific discoveries but I know for a fact that absolutely nothing new was discovered during these experiments. This block was later completely filled and housed 500 women altogether.
Another very common form of punishment for minor offences, such as turning up late for a roll-call or getting out of the barracks too slowly, or for improper marching, was the so-called sport. A few men, or all the Kapos, or the whole working unit, and sometimes an entire barrack, were ordered to step out, and then, on the orders of one or more SS-men, it all started. “Run, on the ground, up, run, march, march, on the ground, run, on the ground, march”, etc., for around half an hour. Then, they ordered us to roll on the ground, so during bad weather each of us was soaked and covered in mud. SS-men waded among the prisoners and kicked them in the face or in the stomach if they thought that the prisoners had not put in their full effort. In such cases, they used leather whips if they so pleased. Then, when all the prisoners were completely exhausted, the SS-men unleashed their dogs on them so that the prisoners were very often nastily bitten in their legs and arms. After two hours of such a drill, each of us was more dead than alive from exhaustion.
I remember that shortly after my arrival at the camp, non-commissioned SS officer Klehr put five of us through such a drill because one Pole, who did not know German well, had turned right when ordered to turn left. I was standing next to him so myself and four others standing closest were given the “sport” punishment. This lasted over 2 hours. A Dutch doctor died an hour later, a Polish doctor, who was over 50, spent the next three weeks in the hospital, and the other three of us were completely exhausted. I remember that for two weeks I found it difficult to get on and off my bunk because every bone in my body hurt as if it was broken.
The first mass transports from Slovakia started to arrive at Auschwitz in April 1942. They were mostly young men and women. When they entered the camp, they were greeted by the noisy camp band made up of 160 musicians. At that time, there were no gas chambers, but the poor people were dropping like flies from typhus, or they were beaten to death with batons. Out of our group of 18,000 young men – mostly strong and able-bodied workers – only 210 were still alive after a year.
The first of the female Slovakian transports numbered around 800 young women, aged between 15 and 21. The following happened in 1942 and I was told about it by the young fiancée of one of my fellow doctors, Ms. Jakabovit: all these girls had to undress in front of a large number of SS-men. Dr. Entress examined each of them personally to determine if she was still a virgin. Each girl who was not a virgin had to step aside, but those who were were handed over to the waiting SS-men for immediate defloration. These poor, pretty, young girls! After half an hour, the examination was halted by camp director captain Aumeier, for whom that was too much, although he had earned a reputation for being a ruthless killer.
Until 1942, all the corpses were buried in a mass grave on the grounds of the smaller Birkenau camp. Toward the beginning of 1942, crematorium I was camouflaged as a large anti-aircraft shelter for people working in the field, and people working in the field only knew it for its tall chimney. It was set up a few yards away from the main entrance to the camp, just opposite the SS hospital. In September 1942, on the orders from Berlin, gas chambers were introduced after a successful experiment involving the eight Russian officers in block 11. The first chamber was located in a small wooden barrack situated around three quarters of a mile from the Birkenau camp. Soon afterward, orders came to set up three fully operative, state-of-the-art crematoria with large gas chambers. That way, they became the world’s biggest slaughterhouses that ever existed outside the Birkenau camp. The furnace installation was built by a special factory and could be fired with oil and coke.
Starting in September 1942, transports arrived around the clock from all European countries, sometimes as many as five or six transports inside 24 hours. This typically happened three weeks after the German army claimed a new territory. They were called the Rosenberg selection. When all the Jews were put in the ghettos, the elder of a ghetto – mostly the chief rabbi or some other important persona – very often received an order to select one thousand healthy men for labor in factories in Germany or Poland. They were to be allowed to take their families, parents and grandparents, and – if they so desired –all their personal belongings. They were told that they would have to work but would also be allowed to live with their families. Women and elderly people were to be assigned to lighter work and very old individuals and children were to be provided various facilitations. The people naturally believed it.
They were taken on transports, on a train made up of cattle wagons, usually fitted with very primitive sanitation amenities. They put between 50 and 60 people in a wagon, and the train comprised between 30 and 40 wagons, so each transport numbered between 1,300 and 3,500 people. They were also advised to take food supplies for a few days, the explanation being that they needed to have something to eat after they arrived because initially there might be certain organizational issues resulting in food shortages. The wagons were sealed and guarded by the SS. The trains arrived at a special temporary railway siding built between Auschwitz and one of the main camps. Always present on these occasions were one or two doctors and a high number of guards, and also a team of worker-prisoners.
When everybody got out of the wagons, they were ordered to leave their heavy baggage and stand aside. This is when uncertainty and insecurity crept in for the first time. But the SS officer on duty explained to them that they would receive their baggage later, in the main camp, where everything would be taken in vans, so they should clearly mark their luggage with their names. Next, all the men were told to move to the left and all women and children to the right. Heartbreaking scenes ensued as women and children started to scream. Naturally, they did not want to abandon one another and had to be separated by force. Then, shouting and beating began. The abrasive and cold SS-men were not impressed and they brought the situation under control very quickly.
A so-called medical inspection began. Very strong men aged between 20 and 35 were separated from the rest, and sometimes a skilled worker or a merchant was set aside as well. Next, all the women were examined and the young ones, aged between 18 and 25, were picked. But young women with children had to stay, and then the selected men and women were taken to their respective camps. In a single transport, there were, give or take, 8 to 10 percent of men, 5 or 6 percent of women, and the remaining 85 percent were elderly people and little children, who had to wait longer before the vans picked them up.
The emotions that overcame us were truly unbearable and indescribable. We had to control ourselves to endure all this. There were nice little children as well as older ones, all well-raised and beautifully dressed, beautiful women, poor old people, crippled and sick individuals, and thousands of people in the prime of their lives, often at the peak of their professional careers. I cannot forget the look of these poor little children, but they – thank God – did not know what would happen to them and still hoped that everything would be fine. Many people, especially the women whose husbands had been taken, appeared to sense something ominous. The SS-men lazily attended to the baggage, and we saw them stuff their pockets with something. Large coal cars started to arrive and people were rushed with kicks and punches to get on them.
When the cars were full, they proceeded to disinfection. Little children were screaming in the process, shoved in this fierce crowd and pushed onto the cars. Next, they were forced off and into a large building with signs in almost every language, which read, “Disinfection and bathhouse”. Everybody had to undress and everybody got a towel and soap. Men were directed to the left and women to the right. There was a hall and a large room which could be accessed through a heavy door with the sing which read “Bathhouse”. Inside, there was something that looked like showers. The windows were small and there was electrical lighting. The doors and windows were tightly sealed. When the whole crowd was inside the SS-man standing outside put on a gas mask. Prisoners brought in two big, yellow, one- gallon cylinders. They looked like big marmalade cans. They bore a sign which read, “Zyklon” (Potassium cyanide). Inside, there were azure bits, about one inch long and half an inch wide. They gave off a deadly gas in contact with warm air. The SS-man quickly opened two or three cans with a special tool and through a small opening, which had to be tightly sealed from the outside, threw the Zyklon bits into the bathroom and then sealed the opening. You could hear the final scream – long and sorrowful – of a thousand people. The voices of women and children were easily discernible. And then, it was stony silence. Inside two to five minutes, everyone was dead.
The so-called Sonderkommando, made up of 500 strong prisoners selected from new transports, and who were replaced every three months, got down to work then. (The others working there were executed). A few people in gas masks opened the door and windows. Fans cleared the air. When the air was clear, a few skilled workers with pliers opened the jaws of the corpses and pulled out gold dental crowns and teeth, took their glasses, and searched the bodies of the dead, even the women’s vaginas, where sometimes gold and jewelry were hidden. All this was done under the supervision of the SS command. Other prisoners loaded the bodies, still warm, onto small rail cars, between three and eight bodies on each. These cars went straight to the crematorium. Crematoria II, III, and IV at Birkenau, and crematorium I at Auschwitz, operating at full capacity, could incinerate between 15 and 20 thousand bodies inside 24 hours. At night, you could see huge tongues of fire belching from the chimneys, and the smell of burned organic matter, similar to the smell of a slaughterhouse, lingered in the air constantly. Those at the Birkenau camp could see all the vehicles passing by, and very often they could spot an SS ambulance with the sign which read “International Red Cross” go in carrying wooden boxes which contained cans with the Zyklon gas.
Work came thick and fast for those who were not directly assigned to camp jobs from the early morning. SS construction works, ploughing the fields when ordered, working at the DAW (Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke) workshops, which were an auxiliary plant for the German arms industry – these ancillary sites operated at every camp. The labor was very hard and the workers were beaten with leather whips and rubber batons, or shot for misbehavior, or simply left to die from exhaustion. Later, the German government used prisoners for labor in mines, cement works and brickworks, where they did the hardest jobs. They were also used as a labor force in arms factories.
Buna, the camp’s branch, was set up three miles outside Auschwitz, where the IG Farben Trust built a huge factory producing synthetic rubber from coal, synthetic alcohol, and carbide. Working there were thousands of civilian forced laborers, Poles, Ukrainians, French, Italians, Russians, and then 500 British POWs. At first, 2,500 prisoners came to the factory every day, and then returned at night. Then, another camp was set up, named Arbeitslager Monowitz after a nearby town. It could accommodate 11,000 prisoners. The workers of that factory died in the thousands. Next, a cement works was commissioned in Goleszów near Bielsko, where 500 prisoners worked, while 1,200 were sent to a coal mine in Jabisowice [Jabiszowice].
Toward the beginning of 1943, a high-ranking SS commandant decided to send more prisoners to the satellite camps so that they would contribute to the German war effort. They ended up in mines, cement works, and heavy and light arms factories. It was decided that one batch of workers would be sent to EintrechtsHütte [Eintrachthütte], located some 4.3 miles west of the Polish city of Katowice. For me, it was a depressing event and the memories of the last five years came flooding back when I ended up at the train station in this city once more. This is where my first journey to freedom began when I fled Czechoslovakia after the occupation in April 1939. We were guarded by 60 SS-men and loaded into cattle wagons, 50 men per wagon. After a 4-hour journey, we arrived at the yard of the OSMAG machines factory, which was built by German entrepreneurs after Poland had been taken. It was expected that we, the prisoners, would contribute to an increased production of 8.8 cm heavy ack-ack guns. The director was Hauptscharführer Josef Remmele, a guard at various concentration camps since 1933, trained and tested at the well-known Dachau camp. His deputy was Oberscharführer Herman Kleemann, member of the Standarte Germania regiment, who for the past two years had been the chief warden at the terror-inspiring block 11 at Auschwitz.
We kept on marching until we finally reached a small camp which consisted of three very dirty barracks surrounded by a regular barbed wire fence. SS officers Aumeier and Schwarz shouted at us and gave us orders all the time.
We were given two rooms to serve as the hospital, and of course they had no equipment, let alone medications. The first group of newly-arrived prisoners had to rebuild the camp, so working units were formed at once and heavy toil began. Remmele and Kleeman were in their element, because, having been given free rein, they could give vent to their sadistic instincts in full. The majority of the 550 prisoners who had arrived with us formed a working unit and were forced to dismantle old utility buildings. It was a hard job and beating was part of the daily routine, and was perpetrated even in the presence of the civilians hired at the factory. In charge of this batch of workers was a German common criminal, who deserted the army when he was a non-commissioned officer. Also, a small working unit was set up, which was made up of metalworkers and was sent to the machine workshops. Attempts were made to increase the number of skilled workers who could be hired at the factory to between 1,200 and 1,500.
First of all, the Germans wanted to create a “clean-looking” camp, and naturally, as in every concentration camp, high-voltage wires were supposed to be installed. The wooden barracks
| stored components. The | prisoners built cement posts to support electric wires. After |
| two weeks, an SS | hospital worker took charge of the “hospital” and medical equipment. |
| He was a | Romanian from Bessarabia and had the truly German name of Godwinski. He |
spoke very little German, but despite this he had volunteered to join the SS Totenkopf division. He was one of few SS-men I came across during my internment who was a kind- hearted person – and for that reason he was not very popular with the SS, the true Nazis.
They looked down on him and did everything possible to cause him trouble and throw him off balance. True, there were some really perplexing occurrences, for example when Godwinski had just returned from Berlin after a three-week first-aid training course and tried to lecture or instruct us, the doctors. He even examined the lungs and heart of every sick prisoner who came to the hospital. He visited the hospital three times a day and was very surprised that a man down with pleurisy, who had had the temperature of 103 degrees Fahrenheit when ordered to lie in bed in the morning, did not yet have a “normal” temperature after three or four hours.
A man was specifically appointed as a liaison between the command and the arms factory. He examined the newcomers and selected the most talented of the skilled workers and those who were fit for hard labor in the field. He was 56 and was a typical younker of the old Prussian type. His name was Herr Frenzel and he had been an officer during World War One. He came across as an intelligent and well-mannered man. He came to the hospital almost daily so that I could dress his wound. He always came with the camp director or his deputy. He was very concerned about the well-being of the prisoners and every day, during the inspection, asked about various personal matters in a humane fashion. One day, he came to the camp without an SS guard and started to question me about the conditions in concentration camps. Reluctantly, I told him about everything I had ever seen. He was outraged and said that he knew some of the top brass in the German army, whom he must tell it all to. Three days later, under different circumstances, in the presence of an SS guard, he told me that he had discussed our conversation with his friends in the military. I heard no more of it for another couple of weeks, and then, around three weeks later, Frenzel brought two young civilian German workers from the factory to the camp and, to our utter amazement, started to bully them, administering the so-called sport, shouting at them, and kicking them, to the great joy of the SS-men. Naturally, he could have only learned these methods watching how SS-men treated us and the prisoners. I would like to add that this is a typical example of German mentality. Germans are bloodthirsty sadists, through and through. When a German finds himself in favorable circumstances, he lets his most primitive instincts get the best of him. This is very characteristic of them. I have met many nations but I have known no other nation that is as ferocious as the Teutons.
At that time, German propaganda was dealing with the so-called Katyń issue – the extermination of 12,000 Polish officers by the “Russians”. We had the opportunity to read the German official gazettes, which provided more detailed information that any papers. It is a truly astounding experience: to be in the worst German extermination camp and to read about appalling crimes perpetrated by other nations, knowing that the Germans had claimed Katyń in late summer 1941. At the end of the day, it was a really silly story that only the fanatical German people, who have very short memory, could have believed. Naturally, we know who perpetrated these murders as we saw executions with shots in the back of the head performed by such specialists like Herr Schwarz, Grabner, Aumeier, Pawicz [Palitzsch], and Stiblitz [Stiewitz], who went about their business, sometimes a few times a week, at block 11.
Typhus was raging at the camp. Doctors Entress, Kitt, and Rohde, as well as Fischer, examined the sick every day, and all they suspected of carrying typhus, as well as all those who were very feeble, were sent to a special room. After the lunch break, those selected individuals were taken to block 20, where they were seen by Oberscharführer Klehr. Those poor people, who were told they would be given typhus vaccinations, were laid on an operating table and injected with 5-6 cubic centimeters of pure phenol (carbolic acid), straight into the heart. Klehr had long working hours and according to our estimations he killed around 30,000 people that way, that is on average between 50 and 100 people daily. If he was indisposed, another enthusiast stepped in, a prisoner aide, a Pole by the name of Panczik, prisoner number 31 000. My friend Weiss from Bratislava had to assist in the proceedings, holding down the poor victims during this massacre.
During working hours, camp director Remmele and his deputy amused themselves by torturing the workers tasked with hard ground works in the local fields. They unleashed wolfdogs on them. They would throw a worker a spade and order him to run and pick it up, and when he did, they unleashed a dog. This was a source of great joy to them. Sometimes, they picked some old and tired individuals, took him to the bathhouse, and told him to undress, and then they got him to step from under a hot shower to a cold shower, until he died. Usually, this took around 2 hours. Naturally, they beat and kicked such a prisoner in the process, which expedited his death.
There was a special satellite camp, Kobier, located some 12 miles from the main Auschwitz camp, where prisoners worked cutting trees in the local forests. This unit was made up of around 150 prisoners and was an Eldorado for SS sharpshooters. They would climb the trees and use the poor workers as human targets. On average, five or six prisoners were killed daily, and many others were wounded. The poor doctor-prisoner had to write a report in which it was stated that the casualties were a result of attempted escape.
The hospital was expanded by adding one room. We had around 50 new patients every day, and we were only allowed to treat 30 at a time. Camp director Remmele, who inspected the hospital every day, did not like sick prisoners because he only accepted two types of prisoners: working and dead. He questioned me about every single case and I had to give him a detailed account of each. During this briefing, I always dreaded the moment when he would kick or punch me. He specialized in dealing boot kicks. I performed five or six septic procedures almost daily because each minor cut resulted in an infection. There must have been millions of bacteria in a single room, and this is where I had to bandage uninfected wounds and perform operations. I was happy because all abdominal surgeries I had conducted, on a regular table and with makeshift instruments, without sterile gauze or bandages, were followed by the process of healing without any septic complications. Whenever a major operation was to be carried out, Remmele showed up to have a look, and also took the head of the SS kitchen with him, because such occasions were a particular source of fun and amusement for them.
A new manifestation of German “culture” could be discerned in the concentration camps. A high-ranking SS commandant, in order to make things more pleasurable for the prisoners, many of whom worked long hours for the German arms industry, ordered that brothels be set up in all the major camps in Germany. To that end, the second floor of block 24 in the main Auschwitz camp was vacated. Half of the space was redeveloped and was now taken up by small rooms conveniently fitted with hot and cold water installations. The other half became the living quarters for girls. Women were selected from the female camp at Birkenau. Most of them were professional prostitutes arrested for soliciting. But many of them were selected specifically for this job, even young, 18- or 19-year-old girls. There were also quite a few who volunteered. It was ordered that all of them be given good clothes from a huge storage building (“Canada”) located next to the crematorium, which was supervised by non-commissioned SS officers. Their work started outside the regular working hours. Each prisoner had to pay 2 Reichsmarks, of which 40 pfennigs were given to the girl, and the rest was used for the brothel’s maintenance. Before he could enter, each man was examined by a doctor. Each room had its number, and once the prisoner paid the entrance fee, he received a sheet of paper with the room number. The way it was arranged meant that the prisoner did not know which woman he was seeing. The prisoner was given 20 minutes, after which a bell rang. The place was always guarded by a lot of non-commissioned SS officers, who peeked inside the rooms through small windows in the doors. This seemed to have satisfied the perverse fantasies of commandant Schwarz and the SS-men. After leaving the room, the prisoner was examined again.
One day, toward the beginning of July, camp director Remmele was transferred to another camp near Auschwitz, where he was supervised more closely. His superiors had filed reports against him for his wanton conduct. He was replaced by Hauptscharführer Gehring, another from the old guard of concentration camp specialists, a Westphalian who was originally trained at Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg and then worked as a block leader and warden at the block of horror, that is block 11. He was your typical Prussian, stout and heavy, with a square head and a special voice for giving orders. He already knew Bruno from the old days at Sachsenhausen 12 years before, and Bruno was very happy to see him again because he knew that the camp would be under even stricter supervision now.
A week after Bruno left, we heard that he had completely lost his mind.
Three weeks later, the two of us doctors, and all the others who were with us in the standing bunker, were sent to another camp on the orders of commandant Schwarz, and not even the intervention of the SS doctors could change it. We feared that we would be sent to the worst camp that there was.
We arrived at Buna, a camp which numbered around 11,000 prisoners and was located 3 miles east of Auschwitz. We thought that we had received a very warm welcome from the senior doctor of the camp hospital. He knew about our problems with Bruno, whom he knew quite well – well enough to believe in the stunts he had pulled. There were 50 wooden barracks there and all the prisoners worked in a large establishment owned by the IG Farben factory, which had been built a few years before. Thousands of prisoners had given their sweat and their lives back then. The factory produced synthetic gasoline and had departments where synthetic rubber and carbide were manufactured. It employed 70,000 people. Most of them were slave laborers from various countries. There were even 450 British POWs working there. There were very few Germans at that factory, and naturally they held the key posts.
News came that the Russians had broken the German front, taken Czechoslovakia and were now to the north-east of our location. Finally, a semi-official order came that we be transferred to another camp within the hour. Each of us was supposed to prepare a small bundle and put on whatever clothes he had. We were also allowed to take one blanket each, which was very important for me due to the cold wind. At 5 p.m., an order was issued to form a column. 10,000 prisoners were divided into ten groups, the person in charge was camp director Obersturmführer Schettel [Schöttl], and I was in the last hospital group, in the rear of the column, 15 prostitutes from the camp brothel the only ones marching behind me. Those who were sick, weak, wounded, and old and could not walk were left behind at the camp, and this is when one of the most difficult moments in my life came, as I was to say goodbye to my friends, who on top of that were also my patients. There were a few who were weak following surgeries, and one who had spent almost six years in prison as a political prisoner and had broken his leg during an air strike. We all told them that they need not worry, that they would be fine, and we tried to reassure them, but each of us knew what was really going to happen to them. One Polish doctor, 46, who had been at Auschwitz for over three years, was sent back by Dr. König, who carried out the inspection, because he had arthritis in a knee. In front of us we could see the most famous non-commissioned officer from Auschwitz, Hauptscharführera Moll, a Bavarian, a butcher by trade, which was also reflected in his deeds. He was to purge the camp of those who were left behind. The fate of these prisoners was sealed as soon as they saw Moll. He had been in charge of the gas chambers and the penal company for almost two years. He had been directly or indirectly involved in killing more than 1.5 million people. We knew that our sick comrades would not have much time to think of what would become of them.
We marched in 10 groups, moving rather fast, down the roads covered with snow some 15 inches thick. SS guards, who walked at 10-step intervals, rushed us and shouted at us as if we were a stray bunch of cattle. Shortly afterward, we heard shots. It turned out that some prisoner wanted to escape and he was shot. At 1 a.m., many of us were exhausted and others had to help them. Wheeled stretchers which we managed to take from the camp had to be left behind due to thick snow. We dumped them in a ditch. We were joined by women from another camp. Although I felt very weak, I tried to keep up with the rest and march at a moderate pace. My friend, a doctor, with whom I had spent the last two years, was getting weaker and I tried to help him trudge on with two wooden sticks. Prisoners were dropping on both sides of the road. Some died from cold and exhaustion, others from headshots, taken down by Moll, who was riding behind the column on a motorcycle, having finished the “job” at Buna, which only took him a few hours. The next day, at 7 a.m., extremely exhausted, we arrived at a small town called Nickolai, having walked some 26 miles in thick snow. There were some opportunities to escape but we were all too tired and hungry to summon the energy that the task required. Even the well-fed SS guards sat down, tired. Some high-ranking SS-men were fresh and in top shape because they had been riding in cars or on motorcycles. Our group was ordered to enter a small stable. We lay on the straw next to each other and immediately fell asleep. At 2 p.m., new guards ordered us to hit the road again. They thoroughly searched each stable and those who were too weak to get up or tried to hide in the straw were simply executed almost at once. As we kept on marching, it was looking worse and worse. I will never forget this horrible scene. Prisoners in thin, cotton summer clothes in ugly blue and white stripes, without socks, wearing clogs, who were wiping their tired feet, were dropping on both sides of the road. And in the rear, a man fell down every 50 steps, awaiting his death in the snow or at the hands of Moll, who was still riding behind us.
I went for it again and I wanted to escape with a Polish friend to the forest through which we were passing, because it had already started to go dark and we were close to the German border. We decided to escape there. A guard saw us and called us back. For some reason, he showed us mercy.
After two days of marching and nine days on a train, only around 2,000 of us from the original 4,500 were still alive. It was still freezing cold and it was snowing heavily. People were dying from hunger and cold. After we arrived at the camp, we were disinfected before we could enter. They admitted 45 people at a time and the rest had to wait outdoors. I felt I could handle it for a while still, but strength was deserting me fast and I realized that only the strongest would survive the next few months after so many days of hunger, cold, fatigue, and general despondency.
We waited there in the snow from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. At that point, when it was impossible to go into disinfection, we were taken to a small block called the quarantine camp. What a sight it was that confronted us. This block was made up of makeshift, temporary wooden barracks designed to accommodate 300 people. Our group of 1,800 was forced inside. There were no windows there, only a few holes knocked in a wall and the ceiling. The crowd of prisoners soon got hot in this closeness and our clothes began to steam because they were wet from the snow which had been falling on us for so long. Many people dropped dead or were about to die. There were individuals among us who had dysentery and other nasty diseases. The stink was indescribable. At least 10 prisoners tried to get on each of the few bunks in order to grab some rest, being tired and hungry. One thing cheered me up, namely, we got some hot coffee.
Buchenwald
Buchenwald was known to us as concentration camp number 1. It was built during peacetime and prisoners saw it as one of the best camps. Previously, whenever a prisoner was transferred to Auschwitz, he was glad to be moving because of better conditions, but presently, the situation was different. At that time, there were 130,000 prisoners at Buchenwald and typically only a fraction of them remained at the main camp because most were scattered across the 80 satellite camps, working for the German war industry in central and western Germany. Prisoners had to work in aircraft factories, heavy and light arms factories, tanks factories, coal and salt mines, and most of the satellite camps, especially in Thuryca, were built in such a way that would enable prisoners to work in underground tunnels and mines, or inside mountains, developing the so-called German secret weapon. Some poor workers were sent to underground factories and they never saw the light of day again because they were not allowed to get out alive so they would not give away the secrets. Every three or four weeks, very weak prisoners from the satellite camps who were still alive were selected and sent to Buchenwald, being replaced by stronger individuals. The weak ones were treated like newcomers and kept at a small camp, where they were supposed to regain body mass and strength, or at least this is what they were told. Maybe they were not gassed, but they were left on their own so that they died a slow death, from natural causes.
The large camp was occupied by prisoners working in various administrative offices, such as clothes storerooms or the camp’s main office, or assisting the mechanics who worked at the famous Buchenwald camps. Of course, many worked as cleaners, cooks, and servants for the SS. There were also an optical products factory and forest departments, which supplied firewood. There was one crematorium, for the usual purpose, as well as a hygiene institution and one isolated “experimental block”, where poor human guinea pigs were experimented upon with serum, kerosene, and other chemical and bacteriological preparations. Outside the camp, there was a large dressage arena, which had been turned into a space for anti-Hitlerite officers and other Germans who used to hold important posts. They were executed with shots in the neck during ostensible medical examinations. I was told that it happened in the following way. Each of them was told to undress, and after he was weighed, he was ordered to stand by the wall, apparently to have his height measured, at which point he was shot through a small opening in the wall.
The head of the patients’ ward was a Volksdeutsch from Gdańsk, formerly a non-commissioned officer in the Polish army. He volunteered for the SS once the German occupation of Poland began. There were over 1,800 prisoners there, who worked building an underground factory inside a nearby mountain. The factory was supposed to produce synthetic gasoline. With the use of machines and dynamite, 15 tunnels were built. The airflow was very poor. The prisoners loaded dirt and stones which were to be removed from the tunnels onto small carts that took all this outside. It was a very hard labor, especially for the prisoners who only received 250 grams of bread, that is, around three slices, daily. Additionally, they received half a liter of watery soup from Swedish turnip, and on this diet they had to work for 17 hours a day. Naturally, they were rushed and beaten to “encourage” them to work faster.
The whole camp was completely infested with lice. It was impossible to clean yourself and there had been no gassing installation for months so the lice had proliferated to such an extent that there were literally millions of them. Luckily, a typhus epidemic did not break out. The Führungsstab (the SS senior management) insisted that the factory be built fast, and the SS officer in charge, an old-school brutal Nazi named Hack, had recourse to radical measures to finish the job, seeing as in the whole of Germany there were only three other main factories producing synthetic gasoline, and two of them had already been captured by the Russians. And so, there was plenty of work there, and there were myriad materials and tools. Each day, at least 11 prisoners died, and a healthy man did not normally last more than 3 to 5 week there.
This was the first time that I had seen POWs being kept in the same conditions as the prisoners of concentration camps. There was one working unit made up of 350 American POWs who had been captured a few weeks earlier during the Rundstedt offensive on Christmas Day. They received the same food as we did, which was prepared in the kitchen of the concentration camp. Since they were “fresh” prisoners, they did not yet receive parcels from the Red Cross, and after a month 40 of them died from malnutrition and dysentery. All of them were covered in lice.
The hospital – if you can even call it that – was in terrible condition. There was only one room, which was divided into 25 spaces. There were practically no medical instruments or medications. We had to ask a local pharmacy for medications. Thank God I was there for three weeks only because nobody could imagine a doctor practicing his trade in such circumstances. There was only so much I could do for my patients, and my only job seemed to be signing death certificates. There were a few Hungarian doctors there, who had no concentration camp experience and who felt completely useless and had lost hope.
I could replace a Polish doctor who had fallen very sick. I could say that even with the best intentions possible and the greatest willingness, I would not have been able to improve these conditions. There were not enough materials and I was facing every possible obstacle. Between 400 and 500 patients reported to the hospital every day, and I was only allowed to exempt 80 of them from work.
This is an extended KS1 extract consisting of eight pages and concerning the testimony of Dr. Karel Sperber, Rf. Nr. M.D./JAG/FS/22/667/2G/, interviewed under an oath by me, on 16 May 1946.
(Following is a signature and a few illegible lines in English, handwritten).
As a sworn court interpreter, I confirm that this translation [into Polish] is consistent with the document in English which was presented to me.
Kraków, 20 December 1946
Karol Bobrzyński