The Theory and Practice of Hell by Eugen Kogon Page A

sheets in some camps. Each prisoner had one or two thin blankets. The day rooms held a number of tables and benches and the so-called lockers, plain wooden boxes divided into sections, where the prisoners kept their gear—mess kit, canteen cup and spoon.
    In this same area were such camp installations as the mess, the laundry, the prisoner hospital consisting of an out patients’ clinic, a dental clinic, a so-called convalescent clinic, as well as regular wards. At Buchenwald a brothel was established in 1943, appropriately located between the prisoner hospital and Experimental Ward 46. It had to be completed in such haste that much more important additions to the hospital were postponed. Within the wired enclosure there was also a crematory. The permanent crematory at Buchenwald was completed in 1941 and consisted of a morgue, a postmortem room, two combustion chambers with an enormous smokestack, and living quarters for the per sonnel. It stood in a spacious court surrounded by a high wall. Certain other concentration camps had far larger plants, some of them with six to twelve furnaces—especially, of course, Auschwitz.
    Though the SS area, naturally, had first-class paved roads and graveled garden paths, the camp streets, wide enough to permit prisoners to march eight abreast to the roll-call area, were almost always completely unimproved. The prisoners themselves would often have liked to pave their roads, but only in exceptional cases was this permitted, always at a very late date.
    The words from Dante’s Inferno might well have been in scribed on the gatehouse: “ Abandon hope, all ye who enter here !” The actual inscription at Dachau read “ Labor Means Liberty!” and at Buchenwald “ Right or Wrong—My Country!” The bitter mockery of these words cannot be con veyed by a dry description of the physical set-up of a finished concentration camp. The actuality of its growth and develop ment must be borne home. Let the story of the initial phase of Buchenwald serve as an example.
    Buchenwald is located on the wooded Ettersberg, five miles from Weimar. On July 19, 1937, there arrived at this spot a so-called advance squad of 149 convict inmates from the
     

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    Sachsenburg concentration camp, under heavy SS guard. The next day another 70 greens, or criminals, arrived. On July 27 came the first political prisoners, including seven Jehovah’s Witnesses. Only three days later 600 prisoners from the Lichtenburg concentration camp were added. By August 6, barely three weeks after the first arrival, when scarcely any shelter was available, some 1,400 prisoners were on hand—greens, reds, purples.
    Here is what they found: the SS had accepted as a gift from an aristocratic estate some 370 acres of hardwood and pine forest. It was an area utterly unsuited to human habitation, with a harsh climate subject to sudden changes. The location itself was symbolic. Weimar has long been regarded as the cultural heart of Germany, the one-time seat of the German classicists whose works lent the highest expression to the Ger man mind. And here was Buchenwald, a piece of wilderness where the new German spirit was to unfold. This contrast and juxtaposition of sentimentally cherished culture and unrestrained brutality was all too characteristic.
    The work of clearing the forest was begun that summer on the fog-shrouded peak of the Ettersberg. It was a trackless region of tumbled trees and jumbled roots. An oak tree known throughout the countryside as the “ Goethe Oak,” af ter the great German poet who had given Weimar its reputation, was respectfully spared by the SS and designated as the center of the camp!
    Wooden barracks were built in rows of five and surrounded with ordinary barbed wire. The last row, outside the wire, was occupied by the SS guard complement headed by three SS of ficers: SS Colonel Koch as camp commandant; SS Major Rodl as First Officer-in-Charge—he