Piontek didn’t wake me, and I slept until eight o’clock. The kitchen was still working and I had an omelette with sausage. Then I went out. At the Stammlager and in Birkenau, the columns were pouring out of the camp. The Häftlinge, their feet wrapped in whatever they’d been able to find, were walking slowly, at a shuffling pace, surrounded by SS guards and led by well-fed, warmly dressed kapos. All those who had one had taken their blanket, which they generally wore draped over their heads, a little like Bedouins; but that was all. When I asked, I was told they had received a piece of sausage and bread for three days; no one had received any orders about clothes.
The first day, though, despite the ice and the wet snow, it still seemed to be going all right. I studied the columns leaving the camp, talked with Kraus, walked up the roads to observe a little farther on. Everywhere, I noticed abuses: the guards had prisoners pushing carts loaded with their things, or else forced them to carry their suitcases. Here and there by the side of the road I noticed a corpse lying in the snow, the head frequently bloody; the guards were applying Bär’s stern orders. Yet the columns were advancing without confusion and without any attempt at revolt. At midday I managed to make contact with Schmauser to discuss the problem of the clothes. He listened to me briefly and then swept aside my objections: “We can’t give them civilian clothing, they could escape.”—“Then shoes at least.” He hesitated. “Arrange things with Bär,” he said finally. He must have had other preoccupations, I could tell, but I would still have preferred a clear order. I went to find Bär at the Stammlager: “Obergruppenführer Schmauser has given the order to have shoes distributed to the inmates who don’t have any.” Bär shrugged: “Here, I don’t have any more, everything has already been loaded for shipment. Just see about it in Birkenau with Schwarzhuber.” I spent two hours finding this officer, the Lagerführer of Birkenau, who had left to inspect one of the columns. “Very well, I’ll take care of it,” he promised me when I gave him the order. Around nightfall, I found Elias and Darius, whom I had sent to inspect the evacuation of Monowitz and several Nebenlager. Everything was happening in a more or less orderly way, but already, by late afternoon, more and more inmates, exhausted, were stopping and letting themselves be shot by the guards. I left again with Piontek to inspect the nighttime stopover points. Despite Schmauser’s formal orders—there was a fear that inmates would take advantage of the darkness to escape—some columns were still advancing. I criticized the officers, but they replied that they hadn’t yet reached their designated stopping point, and that they couldn’t let their columns sleep outside, in the snow or on the ice. The points I visited turned out to be insufficient in any case: a barn or a school, for two thousand inmates, sometimes; many of them slept outside, huddled next to each other. I asked that fires be lit, but there was no wood, the trees were too damp and no one had tools to cut them down; where boards or old crates could be found, they made little campfires, but these didn’t last till dawn. No soup had been planned, the inmates were supposed to survive on what had been distributed in the camp; farther on, they assured me, there would be rations. Most of the columns hadn’t gone five kilometers; many were still in the almost deserted camp zone; at this pace, the marches would last ten to twelve days.
I went back to the Haus muddy, wet, and tired. Kraus was there, having a drink with some of his colleagues from the SD. He came and sat down with me: “How are things?” he asked.—“Not so good. There are going to be needless losses. Bär could have done a lot more.”—“Bär couldn’t care less. You know he has been named Kommandant at Mittelbau?” I raised my eyebrows: “No, I didn’t know. Who will supervise the closing of the camp?”—“Me. I’ve already received the order to set up an office, after the evacuation, to manage the administrative dissolution.”—“Congratulations,” I said.—“Oh,” he replied, “don’t think I’m happy about it. Frankly, I’d have preferred something else.”—“And your immediate tasks?”—“We’re waiting for the camps to be emptied. Afterward, we’ll start.”—“What will you do with the inmates who are left?” He shrugged and gave an ironic little smile: “What do you think? The Obergruppenführer gave the order to liquidate them. No one must fall alive into the hands of the Bolsheviks.”—“I see.” I finished my drink. “Well, good luck. I don’t envy you.”
Things got gradually worse. The next morning, the columns kept on leaving the camps through the main gates, the guards were still manning the line of watchtowers, order reigned; but a few kilometers farther on, the columns began to grow longer and unravel as the weaker inmates slowed down. More and more corpses could be seen. It was snowing heavily, but it wasn’t too cold, for me in any case, I had seen much worse in Russia, but I was warmly dressed, I was traveling in a heated car, and the guards who had to walk had pullovers, good coats, and boots; as for the Häftlinge, they must have felt pierced through to the bone. The guards were getting more and more frightened, they shouted at the inmates and beat them. I saw one guard beating an inmate who had stopped to defecate; I reprimanded him, then asked the Untersturmführer who was in command of the column to place him under arrest; he replied that he didn’t have enough men to do that. In the villages, the Polish peasants, who were waiting for the Russians, watched the inmates pass by in silence, or shouted something at them in their language; the guards treated harshly those who tried to hand out bread or food; they were nervous, the villages were swarming with partisans, as everyone knew, they were afraid of being attacked. But at night, at the stopping points I visited, there still was no soup or bread, and many inmates had already finished their ration. I figured that at this rate half or two-thirds of the columns would drop off before reaching their destination. I ordered Piontek to drive me to Breslau. Because of the bad weather and the columns of refugees, I didn’t arrive until after midnight. Schmauser was already asleep and Boesenberg, they told me at HQ, had gone to Kattowitz, near the front. A poorly shaven officer showed me an operations map: the Russian positions, he explained, were mostly theoretical, since they were advancing so quickly they couldn’t keep the markings up to date; as for our divisions still shown on the map, some no longer existed at all, while others, according to fragmentary information, must have been moving as roving Kessels behind the Russian lines, trying to meet up with our retreating forces. Tarnowitz and Cracow had fallen in the afternoon. The Soviets were also entering eastern Prussia in force, and there was talk of worse atrocities than in Hungary. It was a catastrophe. But Schmauser, when he received me in midmorning, seemed calm and sure of himself. I described the situation to him and set out my demands: rations and wood for fires at the stopover points, and carts to transport the inmates who were too exhausted, so they could be cared for and put back to work instead of liquidated: “I’m not talking about people sick with typhus or tuberculosis, Obergruppenführer, but just the ones who aren’t up to the cold and hunger.”—“Our soldiers too are cold and hungry,” he retorted sharply. “The civilians too are cold and hungry. You don’t seem to realize the situation, Obersturmbannführer. We have a million and a half refugees on the roads. That’s much more important than your inmates.”—“Obergruppenführer, these inmates, as a labor force, are a vital resource for the Reich. We cannot allow ourselves, in the present situation, to lose twenty or thirty thousand of them.”—“I have no resources to allocate to you.”—“Then at least give me an order so I will be obeyed by the column leaders.” I typed out an order, in several copies for Elias and Darius, and Schmauser signed them in the afternoon; I left again immediately. The roads were horribly congested, endless columns of refugees on foot or in wagons, isolated trucks from the Wehrmacht, lost soldiers. In the villages, mobile canteens from the NSV distributed soup. I reached Auschwitz late; my colleagues had returned earlier and were already asleep. Bär, I was told, had left the camp, probably for good. I went to see Kraus and found him with Schurz, the head of the PA. I had brought along Drescher’s Armagnac, and we drank some together. Kraus explained that he had had Kremas I and II dynamited that morning, leaving IV till the last minute; he had also begun the liquidations that had been ordered, shooting two hundred Jewesses who had stayed in the Frauenlager in Birkenau; but Springorum, the President of the Kattowitz province, had taken away his Sonderkommando for urgent tasks and he didn’t have enough men to continue. All the fit inmates had left the camps, but there remained, according to him, within the entire complex, more than eight thousand inmates who were sick or too weak to walk. Massacring these people seemed to me, in the present state of things, perfectly idiotic and pointless, but Kraus had his orders, and it didn’t fall within my jurisdiction; and I had enough problems as it was with the columns of evacuees.