The meeting concluded on this note, and I suggested a division of tasks to prepare for the next meeting. Rizzi would try to study the validity of his idea; Jedermann would explain his budgetary constraints to us in detail; as for Isenbeck, I directed him, with Weinrowski’s consent (he himself obviously didn’t want to move around much), to conduct a quick inspection of four camps: the KLs Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, and Auschwitz, with the aim of collecting all their ration lists, the menus that were actually prepared for the main categories of inmates in the past month, and especially samples of the rations that we would have analyzed: I wanted to be able to compare the theoretical menus with the food actually served.
At this last remark, Rizzi had thrown me a curious glance; after the meeting was adjourned, I brought him into my office. “Do you have reasons to believe that the Häftlinge don’t receive what they are supposed to?” he asked in his dry, abrupt manner. He seemed to me an intelligent man, and his query led me to imagine that our ideas and objectives should be able to intersect: I decided to make him my ally; in any case, I didn’t see any risk in opening up to him. “Yes, I do,” I said. “Corruption is a major problem in the camps. A large part of the food bought by the D-Four is diverted. It’s hard to estimate, but the Häftlinge at the end of the chain—I’m not talking about the kapos or the Prominenten—must be deprived of twenty to thirty percent of their ration. Since it’s inadequate to begin with, only the inmates who manage to obtain extra, legally or illegally, have any chance of staying alive more than a few months.”—“I see.” He thought, rubbing the bridge of his nose under his glasses. “We should try to calculate life expectancy precisely and adjust it according to the degree of specialization.” He paused again and concluded: “Very well, I’ll see.”