Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account (9 page)

I HAD MANAGED TO LAY MY HANDS ON a copy of the French dictionary,
Petit Larousse.
With the help of the maps it contained I tried to situate the names of the various localities mentioned in the newspaper reports. Alone in my room, I studied the military situation along the southern and eastern fronts. Heavy footsteps resounded in the hallway. I quickly flipped the pages and looked impatiently towards the door. The crematorium commander came in to inform me that an important commission was arriving at 2:00 P.M. and that I should have the dissecting room ready to receive them.

Before the commission arrived a hearse pulled up, completely closed and draped with black. Inside lay the body of an SS captain. I had it placed on the dissecting table, still dressed, just as it had been delivered to me.

The commission, consisting of high-ranking, impeccably dressed officers, arrived punctually: an SS Medical Corps Colonel, a judge advocate, two Gestapo officers and a court-martial recorder. A few minutes later Dr. Mengele appeared. I offered them seats. They proceeded to hold a short conference, during which the Gestapo officers related in some detail the circumstances of their colleague’s death.

His wounds, caused by a firearm, pointed to either murder or assassination. Suicide was ruled out: the captain’s revolver had still been in his holster at the time his body had been discovered. As for the hypothesis that he had been murdered, the crime, they believed, might well have been committed by a fellow officer, or perhaps some subordinate who had had a grievance against him. But assassination seemed even more likely: it was a fairly common occurrence in the Polish city of Gleiwitz and the surrounding area, where groups of partisans were active.

The purpose of the autopsy was to determine whether the shot had been fired from in front or behind, what the caliber and characteristics of the murder weapon were, and from what approximate distance the crime had been committed. At that time there was no doctor at Gleiwitz qualified as a coroner; that was why the body had been brought to Auschwitz for an autopsy, for Gleiwitz was only 40 kilometers away, and Auschwitz was consequently the nearest spot where an autopsy could be performed under satisfactory conditions.

In my role of observer, I stood at a respectful distance from the group while this discussion was taking place, and waited, with the mute patience expected from all KZ prisoners, for Dr. Mengele’s instructions.

I had never thought that I, a Jewish prisoner of the KZ, would be allowed to sully—by my contact—the body of an SS officer. As for my performing the autopsy, I would never even have dreamed of it, especially since, even when I had been a so-called “free citizen,” racial laws had invariably kept me from giving medical attention to Christians, or, more exactly, to Aryans. So I was quite surprised when Dr. Mengele turned to me and asked me to get on with the dissection.

The first job, far from a simple one, was to undress the body. Two men would be needed to remove his boots alone. I therefore requested permission to call in a couple of assistants. While the body was being undressed, the members of the commission became involved in a heated discussion and paid hardly any attention to me and my helpers.

As I made the initial incision I found myself fighting off an attack of stage fright and a feeling of inferiority. I cut the skin of the skull and, with a quick, precise movement, turned half the skin down over the face and the other half over the back of the neck. The following step was more difficult: it consisted of sawing the skull and removing the brainpan. Almost mechanically I followed, in due order, the prescribed steps.

It was now time to examine the two wounds caused by the bullet. If it had gone all the way through the body there would of course be two holes, one at the point of entrance, the other at the point of exit. In the majority of cases the physician has no trouble telling which is which: the place where the bullet enters the body is always smaller than the point where it emerges. But in the present case there were two holes, exactly the same size, one below the left nipple and the other close to the upper edge of the shoulder blade.

The matter was far from clear, and therefore all the more interesting. What could have caused the uniformity of the two wounds? Dr. Mengele was of the opinion that there might well have been two bullets fired, one from in front and the other from behind. This could easily have been the case if the officer had fallen after the first shot and been hit by the second while he was lying on the ground. Neither bullet went all the way through the body, thus explaining the two identical wounds. This theory sounded plausible enough, but remained to be verified. To do this I had to study the path of the bullet, or bullets. In doing so, I found that the bullet which entered the body below the left nipple pierced the heart, then grazed the left extremity of the spinal column and continued upward at an angle of 35° till it reached the upper edge of the shoulder blade, a tiny portion of which it had crushed before leaving the body. There could be no doubt about it; only one bullet had been fired, and that from in front of the victim, for the path of the bullet moved upward and from front to back at the aforementioned angle of 35°. The reason the two holes were the same size was that the bullet had grazed the spinal column and chipped off a section of the shoulder blade; considerably slowed by these obstacles, it had left the body after most of its energy had been expended. Besides, it is doubtful that anyone would aim downward at an angle of 35° when shooting. To do so would require the murderer to raise his arm well above his head. So it seemed obvious to me that the bullet had been fired from in front, that the weapon had been pointed upward from the horizontal at the time of firing, that the shot had been made at close quarters and that, in all probability, the killer had been prevented by some intervening obstacle from raising his gun any higher. But this was a matter for the inquest to decide.

I saw that my remarks satisfied the members of the commission, for they announced that in the future all cases requiring an autopsy would be sent here. They found this a very satisfactory arrangement. Thus I became, with this one autopsy, the coroner for the KZ in charge of all matters pertaining to forensic medicine in the Gleiwitz district.

EARLY ONE MORNING I RECEIVED A phone call ordering me to report immediately to the “pyre” for the purpose of bringing back to number one crematorium all the medicines and eyeglasses that had been collected there. After being sorted and classified they would be shipped to various parts of Germany.

The pyre was located about five or six hundred yards from number four crematorium, directly behind the little birch forest of Birkenau, in a clearing surrounded by pines. It lay outside the KZ’s electric barbed wire fence, between the first and second lines of guards. Since I was not authorized to venture so far from the actual confines of the camp, I requested some sort of written permission from the office. They issued me a safe conduct good for three persons, for I planned on taking two men with me to help carry the material back to the crematorium.

We set off in the direction of the thick twisting spiral of smoke. All those unfortunate enough to be brought here saw this column of smoke, which was visible from any point in the KZ, from the moment they first descended from the box cars and lined up for selection. It was visible at every hour of the day and night. By day it covered the sky above Birkenau with a thick cloud; by night it lighted the area with a hellish glow.

Our path took us past the crematoriums. After showing the SS guards our safe conduct, we passed through an opening cut in the barbed wire and reached an open road. The surrounding countryside—a patchwork of bright green, grassy clearing—seemed peaceful. But soon my watchful eyes discerned, about a hundred yards away, the guards of the second line, either lounging on the grass or sitting beside their machine guns and police dogs.

We crossed a clearing and came to a small pine forest. Once again we found our way blocked by a fence and gate strung with barbed wire. A large sign, similar to those on the crematorium gates, was posted here:

In spite of this sign, we entered without the guards even asking us for our pass. The reason was simple: the SS guards on duty here were from the crematoriums, and the 60 Sonderkommando men who worked at the pyre were also crematorium personnel from number two. At present the day shift was on. They worked from seven in the morning till seven in the evening, when they were replaced by the night watch, which also consisted of 60 men, taken from number four.

Passing through the gate, we reached an open place which resembled a courtyard, in the middle of which stood a thatched-roof house whose plaster was peeling off. Its style was that of a typical German country house, and its small windows were covered with planks. As a matter of fact, it no doubt had been a country house for at least 150 years, to judge by its thatched roof, which had long since turned black, and its often replastered, flaking walls.

The German State had expropriated the entire village of Birkenau near Auschwitz, in order to establish the KZ there. All the houses, with the exception of this one, had been demolished, and the population evacuated.

What, in fact, must this house have been used for? Had it been meant to be lived in? In that case partitions must have divided the interior into rooms. Or had it originally been one large room, without partitions, meant to be used as a hangar or storeroom? I asked myself these questions, but was unable to supply the answers. In any case, it was now used as an undressing room for those on their way to the pyre. It was here that they deposited their shabby clothes, their glasses, and their shoes.

It was here that the “surplus” from the “Jewish ramp” was sent, that is, those for whom there was no room in the four crematoriums. The worst kind of death awaited them. Here there were no faucets to slake the thirst of several days’ voyage, no fallacious signs to allay their misgivings, no gas chamber which they could pretend was a disinfecting room. Merely a peasant house, once painted yellow and covered with thatch, whose windows had been replaced by planks.

Behind the house enormous columns of smoke rose skyward, diffusing the odor of broiled flesh and burning hair. In the courtyard a terrified crowd of about 5,000 souls; on all sides thick cordons of SS, holding leashed police dogs. The prisoners were led, three or four hundred at a time, into the undressing room. There, hustled by a rain of truncheon blows, they spread out their clothes and left by the door at the opposite side of the house, yielding their places to those who were to follow. Once out the door, they had no time even to glance around them or to realize the horror of their situation. A Sonderkommando immediately seized their arms and steered them between the double row of SS who lined the twisting path, which, flanked on either side by woods, ran for 50 yards to the pyre, which till now had been hidden by the trees.

The pyre was a ditch 50 yards long, six yards wide and three yards deep, a welter of burning bodies. SS soldiers, stationed at five-yard intervals along the pathway side of the ditch, awaited their victims. They were holding small caliber arms—six millimeters—used in the KZ for administering a bullet in the back of the neck. At the end of the pathway two Sonderkommando men seized the victims by the arms and dragged them for 15 or 20 yards into position before the SS. Their cries of terror covered the sound of the shots. A shot, then, immediately afterwards, even before he was dead, the victim was hurled into the flames. Fifty yards farther on a scene similar in all respects was being enacted. Oberschaarführer Molle was in charge of these butchers. As a doctor, and as an eye-witness, I swear that he was the Third Reich’s most abject, diabolic and hardened assassin. Even Dr. Mengele showed from time to time that he was human. During the selections at the unloading ramp, when he noticed a healthy young woman who above all wanted to join her mother in the left-hand column, he snarled at her coarsely, but ordered her to regain the right-hand group. Even the ace shot of the number one crematorium, Oberschaarführer Mussfeld, fired a second shot into anyone whom the first shot had not killed outright. Oberschaarführer Molle wasted no time over such trifles. Here the majority of the men were thrown alive into the flames. Woe to any Sonderkommando by whose action the living chain, which extended from cloakroom to pyre, was broken, with the result that one of the members of the firing squad was forced to wait for a few seconds before receiving his new victim.

Molle was everywhere at once. He made his way tirelessly from one pyre to the next, to the cloakroom and back again. Most of the time the deportees allowed themselves to be led without resistance. So paralyzed were they with fright and terror that they no longer realized what was about to happen to them. The majority of the elderly and the children reacted in this way. There were, however, a goodly number of adolescents among those brought here, who instinctively tried to resist, with a strength born of despair. If Molle happened to witness such a scene, he took his gun from his holster. A shot, a bullet often fired from a distance of 40 to 50 yards, and the struggling person fell dead in the arms of the Sonderkommando who was dragging him towards the pyre. Molle was an ace shot. His bullets often pierced the arms of the Sonderkommando men from one side to the other when he was dissatisfied with their work. In such cases he inevitably aimed for the arms, without otherwise manifesting his dissatisfaction, but also without giving any previous warning.

When the two pyres were operating simultaneously, the output varied from five to six thousand dead a day. Slightly better than the crematoriums, but here death was a thousand times more terrible, for here one died twice, first by a bullet in the back of the neck, then by fire.

After death by gas, by chloroform injections, and a bullet in the back of the neck, I had now made my acquaintance with this fourth “combined” method.

I gathered up the medicines and glasses left behind by the victims. Dazed, my knees still trembling with emotion, I started for home, that is, for number one crematorium, which, to quote Dr. Mengele himself, “was no sanatorium, but a place where one could live in a pretty decent way.” After having seen the pyres, I was inclined to agree with him.

Once home, I entered the room, but instead of arranging the medicines and spectacles, I took a sedative and went to bed. Today’s dose was 30 centigrams, sufficient, I hoped, to counteract the effects of funeral pyre sickness.