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  I suddenly believed him. Up to this point, I had had little direct contact with the camps. There had been the odd visit now and again, escorting some foreign delegation or the infernal Red Cross to this or that exemplary KZ to ensure that the degenerates incarcerated there were being treated with kid gloves. But never had I actually witnessed the reality of camp life before this afternoon. It was not that the sights and sounds filled me with abhorrence; rather, I was sickened that a portion of society should necessitate such a system. I feared for the souls of those men running such camps.

  Finally, finishing his harangue, Ziereis had his adjutant, one Lieutenant Bachmayer, come down among the rabble and “look for disagreeable types.” I had no idea what this meant; obviously it was some kind of camp code word, for the workers outside the gate stirred restlessly. The sergeant at my side whispered: “Now you’ll see something.”

  At Bachmayer’s side was his enormous Schäferhund, which he called Lord. Bachmayer walked among the men for a moment, then finally stopped in front of one: a cringing little Red who did not look as though he would have given anyone any trouble. Bachmayer pulled this unresisting man out of the line and pushed him toward my car, toward the entrance. The man stumbled a few unwilling feet and then turned back. On the balustrade, Ziereis took aim with his rifle and shot. The bullet landed at the man’s feet. It was obvious that he was intended to keep going toward the entrance. He hesitated; another shot rang out, this time striking his foot. He cried out in pain, but understood. He began limping toward the giant entrance gate. Lord was on him before he reached it, and there right in front of my eyes, the hound tore him to shreds. No man intervened. No man even blanched at the sight.

  I knew then that I had entered another realm from the outside world.

  “You don’t bring your writings to me anymore.”

  “The way things stand, Miss O’Brien, I think that would be senseless.”

  “How do things stand?”

  “No feigned insouciance, please.”

  “Really. I’m not acting. I want to know where we are. Where I am.”

  “Something broke between us. You must sense that, as well. A certain mutual respect and trust. One cannot simply regain that overnight.”

  “Which means?”

  “For one thing, that I keep to myself. My memoirs are mine.”

  “Why bother writing them, if you don’t want anyone to read them?”

  “There you have it, Miss O’Brien. The apposite pronoun. Anyone. The unknown reader, that is who I write for. Not the known. I am not writing polemics here, but the simple story of one man’s life. To make sure there is a record of the time from our side. I have no wish to hide from the past. I feel no shame in it.”

  “—”

  “You are maddening!”

  “Why? What did I do now?”

  “Even in your silences you criticize and find fault.”

  “Don’t blame me for your own misgivings.”

  “You are like a pestilence that has gotten inside me, always questioning, questioning. Never allowing the spontaneous action.”

  “It’s called being human. And it’s not spontaneity we’re talking about here, but irresponsibility.”

  “And who made you the arbiter of such things, Miss O’Brien? Where are your credentials in life?”

  “But I don’t set out to tell big truths as you do. I have no vocation for the position of savior. Those who do, however, need always to be judged by the strictest standards. You bring it on by the very task you set yourself.”

  “Poppycock.”

  “Strong words, Herr ____.”

  “Don’t mock me.”

  “—”

  “It’s time for your exercise.”

  “I don’t feel like it today.”

  “You need fresh air. Do as I say.”

  It is true: the bond between Miss O’Brien and myself has been well and fully broken. I feel a sort of disgust when I see her now, moping about the dog run outside, picking at a bit of grass to chew on, just like a cow.

  Strange, but I actually long for those early days when we were just getting to know each other, when I cared for her during her sickness, bathing her soiled body and sheets as I would a baby’s. But it seems she has forgotten all that. She only wants to dominate now, like all women I have ever known. Dominate and then betray: It is their formula.

  There she sits now, chewing on her plucked stem of long grass; she looks up at my window and waves. She knows I will be watching. It is as if I have become the prisoner, she the jailer. I feel trapped in my own home.

  Back to the memoirs.

  Such was my introduction to Mauthausen KZ, where I was to spend the rest of the war years; indeed, the rest of my Schutzstaffel career. It was a shocker, I can assure you, especially following so hard upon my reposeful visit to Melk earlier in the day. (A subcamp of Mauthausen later opened within sight of the monastery at Melk—there seemed to be no place removed from the war.) But perhaps the most shocking thing about this introduction and the new life it presaged was how quickly I adapted to it. Already by the second day I had learned to look away from things disagreeable, to occupy my mind with more urgent organizational matters in the face of so much personal misfortune.

  Early on, I also secured myself against the treacherous reefs of sentimentality. After all, these men were in the camp for crimes against society. We were doing society as a whole, and even these individuals, a favor by segregating them from the healthy part of the body politic. They had brought incarceration on themselves. Such had to be my mental stance, otherwise insanity awaited me. Ask any warder and he will respond the same way: Never open the doors to empathy. One must be hard to survive in such a situation.

  And what was the situation? Specifically, the camp was built around a central field, the Appelplatz, or roll-call area. If one faced west, toward the main entrance, the barracks and workshops were to the right, and on the left wing were the laundry, showers, kitchen, bunker, hospital, and crematorium. In back of this wing were some more Staffel barracks, and toward the entrance were the offices of the administration, mine among them. There were also outbuildings: civilian barracks to the northwest and the Russian tent camp to the southwest. The whole was surrounded by immense granite rock walls, giving it the aspect of a medieval fortress.

  Just outside the main gates was the way down to the quarries, either by single-gauge railway, upon which only the stones quarried were lucky enough to ride, or the 186 steps down into them. The entirety covered some four square miles, most of which was taken up by the camp itself, but one-third of which was composed of the quarries that provided the economic basis for the entire enterprise.

  Additionally, housing for the higher Staffel officers such as myself was located outside the camp, along pleasantly wooded slopes overlooking the Danube. One positive aspect to this posting: I was away from the villa in Hohe Warte, away from the loneliness of being with Uschi. I had, by now, grown to hate her cheery voice on the phone as she arranged golf meetings and bridge afternoons.

  Into this physical configuration then, lump the myriad caste of prisoners we had: political, criminal, religious, asocials, homosexuals. As administrative officer, it was my responsibility to see that all ran smoothly: that there was room for the prisoners sent to us, that there was food to feed them, that work details were managed efficiently. The infinite minutiae of my job were quite unbelievable. And such responsibility thrust on me, who only had a captain’s rating at the time!

  Of course the personalities at camp were also part of the situation report. I have shown both Ziereis and his second in command, Bachmayer, in a situation that largely reveals their character. There was, in addition, a whole range of lesser functionaries, from quartermaster to medical doctors, even down to the cooks and crematorium engineers. They all had to be dealt with, arranged, and smoothed when their feathers be
came ruffled for one reason or another. One would have thought we were running an opera company, so temperamental were the egos involved. Stories I have of those days, some grisly, some insane, some merely mediocre. But one thing I want to make clear from the outset: We were running a concentration camp, not a death camp. The alleged death camps—Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, and the like—were far to the east in the former Polish territory. Mauthausen had nothing to do with these, despite propaganda I have read claiming over two hundred thousand died there. I even read, in one supposedly scholarly review of Mauthausen, that Auschwitz used the threat of transfer to the quarries at Mauthausen to keep its prisoners in line. Poppycock!

  Ours was a job of housing, feeding, and clothing hundreds of thousands of men and, later in the war, women who were dangerous to the Reich. Other societies simply eliminate their undesirables; we put ours to work in the quarries. The symbolism is good here, I think. Those who would tear down the Reich were instead forced to dig new building blocks for it out of the earth. From such quarries at camp sites throughout Europe came the granite not only for buildings, but also for cobbled streets and roads, even the dust for bricks. A most constructive occupation for such asocial pariahs. Thus, with the prisoners quite literally working for the Reich, it would hardly have been in our best interests to simply kill them off as has been alleged since the end of the war.

  Of course there was a crematorium at Mauthausen. We were a small city and people died there as they die everywhere, and we had no other means of disposing of the bodies than by cremating them. Also, and despite repeated warnings, there were those who would attempt to escape. It was wartime; escape attempts were dealt with swiftly and harshly. Thus there were also a number of “unnatural deaths.” But we did not just unload incoming prisoners and send them to supposed gassing showers and certain death as the media portrays. Such hogwash will not do. I want to set the record straight on that account.

  During my nearly three years at Mauthausen, I kept copious diaries, which I took with me when I eventually fled Europe in 1947. They are with me still, but I am of two minds whether to include them in this record or not. Actually, they are a book in themselves, recording the turbulent days in a wealth of detail and emotion. Emotion, for they were my one outlet in all those years. I had no real friends as such at the camp. Uschi stopped paying dutiful monthly visits after the first year, and as administrative officer, I posed more of a threat than a promise of friendship to the rest of the staff, who were all busily engaged in making themselves rich off the spoils of the system. There were rake-offs and scams at every level: from kapos or trustees who extorted any and all favors from other prisoners for easy treatment to the quartermaster and doctor who sold part of the camp’s provisions on the black market and even up to the commandant himself, who had a special contract with local builders for cheap laborers.

  I, the newcomer, was suspected by all those with something to hide, until in the fall of 1944 when I, too, succumbed to such rewards. It is my great shame: the contract I signed with one Herr Wenzel to supply laborers for his brick factory. It made me a rich man, enables me even now to live comfortably, but Wenzel turned out to be greedier than even I suspected: His bricks were made so cheaply and shoddily that they would crumble under too great a stress. A Volksschule constructed with his bricks did exactly that in January 1945, killing fifteen children and maiming many more.

  I confess to feeling I was a party to that crime. The ones I stand convicted of at Nuremberg are paltry by comparison. Though ignorant of Wenzel’s shoddy manufacturing standards, I still hold myself as responsible as he was. Whether rational or irrational to do so, I will carry that burden to my grave.

  Otherwise, I performed my duties at Mauthausen with supreme efficiency and dedication. I have nothing to be ashamed of on that score.

  Herewith, a sampling of my diaries to give the flavor of the times:

  6 December 1942—First Advent Sunday. How I do love this season, though I wonder if the joy will be there for me this year. Seems a miserly thing to indulge my individual pleasure in the Yuletide when all about me there is suffering and death. But our valiant soldiers at the front might forgive this one indulgence; otherwise it is work, work. I constructed a tiny wreath for my worktable, gathering pine boughs surreptitiously lest the others here at administration find out what I have been up to. I employed one kapo—a Polish brute who I believe was a child murderer, though he is sweet as treacle to me, happy for his chance to curry favor. At any rate, this man I employed to gather holly from some difficult-to-reach bushes in the quarry—what is an advent wreath without holly? In the event, it was a mistake, for he soon proved his brutishness by forcing a couple of the younger French prisoners to form a human chain, dangling over the edge to reach the plant. Sergeant Mayer, one of the quarry guards, later rather gleefully reported the incident to me, ignorant of the fact that it was I who had commissioned the kapo in the first place. One of the young men fell to his death against the rocks far below. Mayer found this part most amusing, for the French youth still held the sprig of holly tightly in his grip when they reached him. The kapo overseer took it from the dead man’s hands and added it to that already gathered. This, of course, took some joy out of my wreath, but I burned the first Advent candle today nonetheless.

  3 February 1943—In blizzard conditions. The camp functions are at an absolute standstill. With the pipes frozen solid, water is nowhere to be found. Prisoners lick bits of ice they have chipped out of the water beakers. The condition these people are reduced to in such a short time after arrival! Quite shocking. One knows why the Führer wants to segregate them from the rest of the gene pool. Forty-eight died today in the quarry, frozen to death at their work. Had they shown a bit more diligence in their work, their body heat alone would have saved them. But they are malingerers.

  Yesterday, Berlin announced the end of the fighting for Stalingrad. The announcer on the state radio had a quaver in his voice as he reported the “sacrifices of the army, bulwark of a historical European mission, were not in vain.” Three days of official mourning throughout the Reich. They say 150,000 of our boys were killed trying to take the city.

  21 March 1943—Some say it is spring; winter lingers on, however. And this is a winter I will not be sad to see the last of. Five thousand have died in the camp during the last two months, many of them from the cold. A merciful death, perhaps. Yet I continue to do my best for them and the Reich. I have yet to feel a part of things here. Ziereis has his family; he ignores me whenever possible. Bachmayer is a lout and I should never choose to mix with such a person other than professionally. He is also a drunk and a whore chaser, out most every night satisfying his base desires. The camp is buzzing with his inexcusable behavior upon returning this morning after an all-night spree. The men were just leaving the main gate for the quarry and Bachmayer—blurry-eyed and hungover and just getting back from his debauches—unholstered his machine pistol and began shooting indiscriminately into the crowds. Ten killed, thirty-two more wounded before his comrades could take his pistol from him. Yet Ziereis does nothing about it; no disciplinary action at all. I have half a mind to report him to Berlin. With reason, too. Not only is Bachmayer a beast, a sadist who has no business wielding power over human beings, but also his absolutely indiscriminate beatings and killings undermine any real leverage we may have over the prisoners. We Staffel here are outnumbered perhaps twenty to one. We have weapons on our side, certainly, but we depend on the innate belief in authority on the part of the prisoners, as well. They do not step out of line for fear of punishment; the lash is commonly used here. Punishment is thus a deterrent for them. Its threat keeps them in line. Destroy the prisoners’ belief that if they behave properly they will survive, and there will be the devil to pay. We shall have an uprising here. Irresponsible actions such as Bachmayer’s erode the prisoner-warder bond: the unspoken pact that good behavior will be rewarded, bad punished. I must make Ziereis understand this.


  1 June 1943—Uschi stays on in the Hohe Warte villa. She has missed the last two monthly visits. I must confess to relief on that part. I feel well rid of her. Mother writes that her new flat is glorious. She and Maria thank me a thousand times again. So they should. Typhus outbreak in camp and production is down at the quarries. In spite of what I do, I cannot seem to get this place shipshape. Whenever I approach a point of control, we are flooded with new shipments of prisoners. This despite a twelve-hour working day—I am at my desk before the six o’clock shift reaches the quarries. Just let the prisoners grouse and grumble about their ten-hour days in my hearing!

  A rather unsettling occurrence last week: The last of the Viennese Jews were shipped out via our camp, en route to eastern resettlement. I have initiated a little trick that is now also used at Auschwitz to soothe the fears of the new arrivals: I have organized a camp orchestra of three violins, a tuba, and an accordion. These meet incoming trains with sprightly marches. They also provide Sunday afternoon entertainment in the Appelplatz, in the intervals of boxing matches between prisoners. Well, I used the Vienna train to try out my little orchestra on, just to see if it works. The music did, in fact, appear to reduce anxiety, stimulating even a smile here and there from the rabble detraining as a familiar tune was heard. But in the midst of this came the most frightful sight: In one boxcar, guards discovered three bodies. Two men were riddled with bullets—obviously in an attempt to escape. The third body was that of a woman. Well, barely recognizable as that sex, I can tell you. Her head was battered into an unrecognizable pulp; her left breast all but torn from her body. Raped repeatedly and savagely by her own kind, she was then beaten to death with almost cannibalistic fury. Our doctor tells me that the unfortunate woman had apparently recently been a mother and was still lactating. Abominable people!

  8 September 1943—The Italian surrender, which apparently happened several days ago behind closed doors, was made public today. It is perhaps no more than we deserved, this stab in the back, for being so stupid as to go into the business of war with such people in the first place. Radio Berlin tells us that Mussolini is too great a person for a nation like that; I cannot credit his greatness. He prevaricated at the outset of the war, causing no little confusion and setback to our early plans in Poland. This I know firsthand, for I was directly involved in Operation Himmler; I knew what his last-minute cowardice meant for our well-laid plans. The lives it cost.