I saw Morgen again. He was on the verge of indicting Koch and his wife, as well as several other officers and noncoms in Buchenwald and Lublin; under seal of secrecy, he told me that Florstedt too would be charged. He showed me in detail the tricks used by these corrupt men to hide their embezzlements, and the means he used to catch them in the act. He compared the records of the Abteilungen of the camp: even when the culprits forged something, they didn’t go to the trouble of reconciling their forgeries with the documents and reports from other departments. Thus, in Buchenwald, he had gathered his first serious evidence of the murders committed by Koch when he had noticed that the same inmate was registered at the same time in two different places: at a given date, the prison register of the Politische Abteilung bore, next to the name of the inmate, the comment “Released, noon,” while the register of the Revier indicated: “Patient deceased at 9:15.” The inmate had in fact been killed at the Gestapo prison, but his killers had tried to make it look as if he had died of illness. Similarly, Morgen explained to me how one could compare the different administration or Revier records with those of the blocks to try to find evidence of diversions of food, medicine, or property. He was quite interested in the fact that I planned on going to Auschwitz: several leads he was following up on seemed to lead to that camp. “It’s probably the richest Lager, because that’s where most of the special transports of the RSHA go now. Just like here, with the Einsatz, they have immense warehouses to sort and package all the confiscated goods. I suspect that must give rise to colossal misappropriations and thefts. We were alerted by a package sent from the KL by military post: because of its unusual weight, it was opened; inside, they found three chunks of dental gold, big as fists, sent by a camp nurse to his wife. I calculated that such a quantity of gold represents more than a hundred thousand dead.” I let out an exclamation. “And imagine!” he went on. “That’s what a single man could divert. When we’ve finished here, I’ll go set up a commission in Auschwitz.”
I myself had almost finished with Lublin. I made a brief round to say goodbye. I went to settle with Horn, for the portfolio, and found him just as depressed and agitated, struggling with his management difficulties, his financial losses, his contradictory instructions. Globocnik received me much more calmly than the first time: we had a brief but serious discussion about the work camps, which Globocnik wanted to develop further: it was just a matter, he explained to me, of liquidating the last ghettos, so that not a single Jew would remain in the Generalgouvernement outside of the camps under SS control; that, he asserted, was the Reichsführer’s inflexible desire. In all of the GG, 130,000 Jews remained, mostly in Lublin, Radom, and Galicia, with Warsaw and Cracow being entirely judenrein, apart from a handful of clandestines. That was still a lot. But the problems would be solved with determination.
I had thought of going to Galicia to inspect a work camp, such as the one run by the unfortunate Lexi; but my time was limited, I had to make choices, and I knew that aside from minor differences due to local conditions or personalities, the problems would be the same. I wanted to concentrate now on the camps in Upper Silesia, the “Ruhr of the East”: the KL Auschwitz and its many annexes. From Lublin, the quickest way was to drive through Kielce and then the industrial region of Kattowitz, a flat, gloomy landscape dotted with pine or birch copses, and disfigured by the tall chimneys of factories and blast furnaces that, standing out against the sky, vomited bitter, sinister smoke. Thirty kilometers before Auschwitz, already, SS checkpoints carefully verified our papers. Then we reached the Vistula, broad and murky. In the distance we could see the white line of the Beskids, pale, shimmering in the summer mist, less spectacular than the Caucasus, but wreathed in a gentle beauty. Chimneys were smoking here too, on the plain, at the foot of the mountains: there was no wind and the smoke rose straight up before bending under its own weight, scarcely disturbing the sky. The road ended at the train station and the Haus der Waffen-SS, where we waited for our quarters. The lobby was almost empty; they showed me to a simple, clean room; I put away my things, washed, and changed my uniform, then went out to present myself at the Kommandantur. The road to the camp ran along the Sola, a tributary of the Vistula; half hidden by dense trees, greener than the broad river into which it ran, it flowed in peaceful twists and meanderings, at the foot of a steep, grassy bank; on the water, pretty ducks with green heads let themselves be carried along by the current, then took off with a tension of their whole bodies, necks stretched out, feet folded in, their wings projecting this mass upward, before lazily dropping down again a little farther on, near the shore. A checkpoint barred the entrance to the Kasernestrasse; beyond, behind a wooden watchtower, stood the long gray cement wall of the camp, topped with barbed wire, behind which the red roofs of the barracks were silhouetted. The Kommandantur occupied the first of three buildings between the street and the wall, a squat stucco building with an entrance reached by a flight of steps, flanked by wrought iron lamps. I was taken immediately to the camp’s Kommandant, Obersturmbannführer Höss. This officer, after the war, acquired a certain notoriety because of the colossal number of people put to death under his command and also because of the frank, lucid memoirs he wrote in prison, during his trial. Yet he was an absolutely typical officer of the IKL, hardworking, stubborn, and of limited abilities, without any whims or imagination, but with just, in his movements and conversation, a little of the virility, already diluted by time, left by a youth rich in Freikorps brawls and cavalry charges. He welcomed me with a German salute and then shook my hand; he didn’t smile, but didn’t seem unhappy to see me. He wore leather riding breeches, which, on him, didn’t seem an officer’s affectation: he kept a stable in the camp and rode often; he could be found, they said in Oranienburg, much more often on horseback than behind his desk. While he spoke, he kept his surprisingly pale, vague eyes—I found them disconcerting, as if he were constantly on the point of grasping something that had just evaded him—fixed on my face. He had gotten a telex about me from the WVHA: “The camp is at your disposal.” The camps, rather, for Höss managed an entire network of KLs: the Stammlager, the main camp behind the Kommandantur, but also Auschwitz II, a camp for war prisoners transformed into a concentration camp and situated a few kilometers past the station in the plain, near the old Polish village of Birkenau; a large work camp beyond the Sola and the town, created to serve the synthetic rubber factory of IG Farben in Dwory; and about a dozen scattered auxiliary camps, or Nebenlager, set up for agricultural projects or for mining or metallurgical enterprises. Höss, as he spoke, showed me all this on a large map pinned to his office walclass="underline" and with his finger he traced the camp’s zone of interest, which covered the entire region between the Vistula and the Sola, more than a dozen kilometers to the south, except for some plots of land around the train station, which were controlled by the municipality. “About that,” he explained, “we had a disagreement, last year. The town wanted to build a new neighborhood there, to house the railway workers, whereas we wanted to acquire part of that land in order to create a village for our married SS officers and their families. Finally nothing came of it. But the camp is constantly expanding.”