The Monowitz Hospital Book records Mr. Berg’s admission to the Häftlingskrankenbau, or prisoners’ infirmary. The volume submitted into evidence at Nuremberg records 15,706 patient admis-sions between 15 July 1943 and 27 June 1944. Among them, it listed 766 patients as dying in hospital, as indicated by a cross stamped in the margin; and 2,599 selected for murder at the Auschwitz Main Camp or Birkenau, as indicated by the marginal annotations, “To Auschwitz” or “To Birkenau.” Patient entries recorded as returning to the general population were stamped “Entlassen.” Mr. Berg’s entry read: “Entry 21725, [Prisoner Number], Berg, Peter Isr[ael], 31.3.-13.4.44, Released.” Erroneously, it listed him as Jewish, so he was in greater danger than even he realized at the time, because after the fall of 1943 the SS confined hospital selections almost exclusively to Jewish prisoners. It is not clear whether the Angliciza-tion of his name was his idea or inspired in some way by the neighboring British POW camp, which had opened in September 1943. His hospitalization coincided with Primo Levi’s, although Mr. Berg states that the two never knew each other. By January 1944, the Monowitz infirmary comprised seven blocks, so it is not surprising that the two did not meet. Levi was admitted one day earlier than Mr. Berg, 30 March, after injuring his foot while hauling an iron fitting at the job site. He was released seven days later than Mr. Berg, on 20 April.{4}
A minor detail furnishes a telling example of Mr. Berg’s memory. He is the first survivor to describe the raising and lowering of a “red and orange basket” before air attacks at the I.G. plant. Only days after the massive 20 August 1944 raid by the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force, Plant Leader Walther Dürrfeld issued a directive intended to augment the existing air-raid sirens with a visual warning system.
Installed at one building in each quadrant, these baskets were intended to reinforce the alarm system. This small detail does not overshadow the import of Mr. Berg’s testimony—namely, that prisoners scattered helter-skelter around the plant because they were denied access to air-raid shelters. Their concern was more than theoretical, because U.S. and Soviet forces bombed I.G. Auschwitz six times between August 1944 and January 1945.{5}
Like Levi and Paul Steinberg, the real-life “Henri” of Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Mr. Berg met British POWs at I.G. Auschwitz. The POWs were held at a subcamp E715 of Stalag VIII B (Lamsdorf/Teschen). E715’s population rose to approximately 1,200 by December 1943, but declined to 600 in Spring of 1944, when about half were transferred elsewhere. Mr. Berg’s description of the POWs as healthy “strutting roosters” dovetails with accounts by Levi and Steinberg. The British were proud of their strong military bearing, in contrast to the shabby Wehrmacht guards who con-trolled them. As Mr. Berg recalled, the POWs quickly caught the attention of female civilian workers, most notably Poles and Ukrainians. Although Mr. Berg characterized the POWs as “Commonwealth,” they were mostly English with a small number of Canadians, Australians, and South Africans included. Realizing their special status among the plant’s forced laborers, particularly their protection under the Geneva Convention, and gathering significant details about the Nazis’ murderous activities, the British did what they could to aid the far more numerous “stripees” in their midst.{6}
With respect to Dora, Mr. Berg’s account complements Yves Beón’s Planet Dora. As Michael Neufeld observes, French memoirs have dominated the testimonies of this camp, despite the fact that the French were listed as the third most numerous nationality, behind the Soviets and Poles, in a 1 November 1944 SS report. What sets Mr. Berg’s testimony apart is the timing of his arrival, during the winter of 1945, almost one year after the completion of the barracks and more than six months after the underground factory achieved full operational capacity. The barracks relieved the early prisoners, like Beón, of sleeping inside the tunnel. While many French prisoners were transferred to Dora after brief confinement in Buchenwald, Mr. Berg’s Monowitz experience sets “Planet Dora” in a different perspective, as he arrived after the production passed its peak but before the evacuations began. Unlike many French prisoners, Mr. Berg had already experienced the shock of entering a concentration camp, after surviving one year at Auschwitz and a terrifying evacuation.{7}
As a recent immigrant to the United States, Pierre Berg wrote down his memories of wartime captivity in his native French. He started this memoir in 1947 with no immediate thoughts of eventual publication and remained somewhat reluctant, after its rejection in 1954 by the Saturday Evening Post, to publish it fifty years later. In the early 1950s, a University of California, Los Angeles, graduate student translated the French original into English under the title, “The Odyssey of a Pajama,” but Mr. Berg did not believe that the translator did justice to the nuances of his testimony. In preparing this testimony for publication, Mr. Brock combined “Odyssey” with extensive interviews conducted over three years. I have compared both versions and can attest that this memoir is faithful in most respects to the original, except that this version helpfully elicits detail that was glossed over in the original. Regrettably, Mr. Berg misplaced the French original manuscript, but the Saturday Evening Post’s rejection letter of 16 April 1954 helps to date Mr. Berg’s original English account.{8}
Although as literature or history his memoir cannot be compared with Primo Levi’s and Elie Wiesel’s canonical Holocaust texts, Survival in Auschwitz and Night, Mr. Berg’s Auschwitz experience reinforces these famous testimonies. Like Wiesel and Levi, Mr. Berg toiled at I.G. Auschwitz under unspeakable conditions in 1944. Like Wiesel, he was a teenager, but three years older and already well traveled. Like Levi, he drafted his original account shortly after the war, when his memory of events was most vivid.
An atheist like Levi, he therefore did not situate his traumatic experience in terms of theodicy, as did Wiesel. Like Levi’s The Reawakening, Mr. Berg recounts his odyssey back to civilization and his not-altogether-pleasant encounters with Soviet troops. One striking feature of this account absent in Levi’s and Wiesel’s writings is Mr. Berg’s unmistakable cynicism.{9}
In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess one reservation about this account. Mr. Berg insists that he saw Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler at I.G. Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. No known primary source verifies this claim. Himmler’s recorded visits took place on 1 March 1941 and 17 July 1942. Himmler’s first visit concerned the expansion of Auschwitz, in order to meet the labor needs of the I.G. Farben plant, which had yet to break ground. The second combined an inspection of the I.G. construction site with a tour of the Birkenau killing center, then not yet the center of industrial mass murder it was to become in 1943 and 1944. It is likely that in 1944 Mr. Berg saw one of Himmler’s many doppelgängers.{10}
The following comments are intended to set Mr. Berg’s memoirs in the context of the Nazi concentration camp system and the I.G. Farben project at Auschwitz.
When Pierre Berg entered Auschwitz-Monowitz in January 1944, the Nazi concentration camps had been operational for almost eleven years. The history of the concentration camps can be divided into six phases, each tied to the Nazi regime’s changing political or military fortunes. Mr. Berg entered the camps during their fifth phase (1942–1944). In the first (1933–1934), the concentration and “protective custody” (Schutzhaft) camps contributed to the Nazi Seizure of Power, and to the subsequent “synchronization” (Gleichschaltung) of German society. The Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS or Protective Corps) established one of the first concentration camps at Dachau in March 1933 and the Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilungen, or SA) created ad hoc camps in many localities. After 1933 the total camp population declined drastically because of amnesties. It consisted mainly of political prisoners, especially communists and socialists. Career criminals newly released from prison also appeared in the early camps. During the first phase, Dachau became the model camp when its second commandant, Theodor Eicke, established severe regulations for the permanent SS camps. In July 1934, Eicke became the first Inspector of Concentration Camps (IKL), after playing a key role in the purge of leading SA members during the “Night of the Long Knives.” The IKL’s establishment ushered in the camps’ second phase, 1934 to 1936, when most remaining early camps were closed and Eicke practiced what historian Michael Thad Allen terms “the primacy of policing”: camp labor was supposed to be torture that served no rational end.{11}