Krueger's Men Read online

  With Teutonic precision, the SS performed gruesome calculations on their slave laborers, reckoning that the average worker lasted nine months. With a daily attrition rate of about 1 percent, each prisoner would yield profits of 1,631 reichsmarks, on top of which the SS could also count on “the proceeds from the rational utilization of cadavers: gold from teeth, clothing, valuables, and cash… plus proceeds from utilization of bones and ashes.” The camp administration meticulously deducted the cost of incineration at two reichsmarks per corpse. The principal profit, of course, came not from rendering the dead bodies but from renting out the live ones to the great industrial combines; those donations by Himmler’s “Friends” were in fact thinly disguised kickbacks. At Dora-Mittelbau near Nordhausen, thousands of prisoners dug tunnels in the rock in 1943 to prepare underground storage facilities for the V-2 missiles that would rain down on London a year later. They lived and slept in the choking dust without water or ventilation. During the first six months, almost 3,000 of 17,000 prisoners died. “Never mind the human victims,” said SS Brigadefuehrer Hans Kammler, the commander of the operation. “The work must proceed and be finished in the shortest possible time.”

  At Sachsenhausen it was more difficult to turn human beings into machines because they were assigned to more exacting tasks, such as repairing shoes and watches and recycling captured equipment into raw materials. There were more than 3,000 in this Kommando Speer, the largest single unit among the camp’s 10,000 to 15,000 prisoners. It was named after the technocrat Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief of war production, who had complained that mere extermination wasted economic resources. As in all SS operations, corruption was endemic; in 1941 the commandant of landlocked Sachsenhausen had the prisoners build him a yacht, an offense for which he was transferred to Norway. His successor, a more practical man, used the prisoners to conduct grueling tests on experimental shoe soles. Around a track with separate lanes covered in gravel, cinders, sand, concrete, and the like, about 150 prisoners circled daily for a run of about 25 miles to determine the durability of different materials, their backs sometimes weighed down by 33-pound packs of sand or their feet pinched by shoes that were two sizes too small. Such consumer research was relatively harmless compared to the experiments in noise measurements conducted on pistol silencers by Arthur Nebe’s criminal police, which reputedly included shots into the skulls of prisoners.

  Although Sachsenhausen was not an extermination camp as such, there was virtually no check on violence. Eighteen thousand Russian prisoners were executed there in 1941 with bullets in the back of the neck. A thousand prisoners were whipped for infractions as minor as a blink of an eye at roll call, every victim ordered to count out each stroke of the lash in his own voice as it flayed open the skin on his back. Others were hung from poles by wire wound around their wrists to be punished or to simply expire. Tens of thousands would die of exhaustion, illness, or execution, especially in the panic of the Nazi defeat.

  Outside the camp’s main wall stood small individual stone huts for prisoners held as possible bargaining chips, including the two British intelligence officers captured by Walter Schellenberg at the Dutch border. The inner camp was laid out in a semicircular grid of 56 barracks inside a triangle enclosing 18 acres of the camp’s total of 44. This triangle was delineated by a wall rising almost 9 feet and studded by nine watchtowers armed with machine guns. The barracks measured 200 by 40 feet. With slightly peaked roofs, these blocks — or so they were called, like prison blocks — hugged the ground and were separated by wide spaces to enhance visibility from the principal control tower at the base of the triangle. Just beneath it, in the form of an inner semicircle with a radius of about 350 feet, was the Appellplatz, ringed by the notorious running track. On the other side of the triangle’s base, surrounded by a wall of its own, was the camp headquarters. To the right stood a tight rectangle of half a dozen rows of wooden blocks, known as the Small Camp. These were built in 1938 to house Jews rounded up after the Kristallnacht pogrom.

  In mid-1942, the barred windows of Block No. 19 were painted over, and the building itself, the last one in the first row closest to headquarters, was enmeshed in a barbed-wire netting to await its troop of specialists and their machines. Of course, the camp was also enclosed by the standard barbed-wire fence electrified to 1,000 volts, a standing invitation to suicide for those nimble enough to reach it ahead of the main guard force, who would either be racing to catch them or shooting at them so they could torture them to death instead.

  Before Krueger could recruit his Jewish workforce, suitable guards for Block 19 had to be assigned by the SS command. Many guards were wounded veterans, some missing an arm or leg. Krueger had been promoted to Sturmbannfuehrer — major — and his first choice to run the four-man guard room was a ramrod-tall SS-Hauptscharfuehrer, Sergeant Major Kurt Werner, whom Krueger knew as conscientious and incorruptible. Unfortunately, Werner could not be spared, and Krueger had to settle, at least temporarily, for two Oberscharfuehrer — quartermaster sergeants — named Herbert Marock and Heinz Weber. Both had blemished records as cutups, and Krueger shrewdly deemed them unreliable lightweights. The SS general in charge of personnel obviously felt the way to keep Marock and Weber on their toes was to shout at them as they stood apprehensively at attention. He warned them that they must measure up to their challenging but as yet undefined new assignment, or “you will only need to change your jackets.” Whether he meant jackets worn by frontline troops or prisoners was not clear, but either way, he meant to instill fear. This was virtually the only tool in the SS disciplinary arsenal, but it was not Krueger’s chosen incentive.

  Next Krueger summoned August Petrich, the master printer for Operation Andreas. Having no idea what Krueger wanted, Petrich had closed his print shop for the day. At first he thought that reviving the mad counterfeiting scheme was a joke. Krueger admitted he had almost thought so, too: “Imagine, graphic artists, engravers, repro-photographers, and so on from Jewish inmates. I find it a unique story. Almost like an April Fool’s joke. Are there really artisans among Jews? I thought they were traders, brokers, capable stock market and business men, experienced doctors and lawyers, and here and there also a police chief.” Krueger informed the equally skeptical printer that it would be his job to train the Jews to use the machinery. In short, at Himmler’s orders he was to teach printing and engraving within six months instead of the usual German craftsman’s three-year apprenticeship. Petrich replied: “Let’s not kid ourselves. It is a very difficult task we have to undertake, and it will cost us a good many gray hairs. It may yet turn out all right, it may not. The prisoners are the principal players.”

  And so they journeyed to Sachsenhausen. Krueger paused to consider the inherent contradiction of the Nazis’ universal camp motto wrought in iron letters over the stone gate: Arbeit Macht Frei — Work Brings Freedom. He knew this was a lie, indeed that life would turn out precisely the opposite for those he would choose from the eighty candidates the camp commandant put on display for him at a roll call in Block 19.

  As Krueger approached, he heard the command “Hats off!” and saw eighty pairs of hands being held stiffly against the trouser seams of the blue-and-white-striped uniforms. He had never before come so close to the wretched truth of Nazi rule. The tension and fear were evident in the prisoners’ faces as he inspected the men slowly, Petrich at his side.

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixty years.”

  “Your profession?”

  “Paper expert.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Eichenberg in Bohemia.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I am a Jew.”

  “Step forward.”

  And so Krueger began the methodical work of selecting the men on whom the future of Operation Bernhard depended. They had no idea what they were being selected for at this roll call, but they immediately noticed something different: Krueger addressed them by the formal and polite German Sie, instead of the
familiar and demeaning du reserved for children, servants, Jews under the Nazis, and indeed all other concentration camp inmates except recalcitrant German pastors and prominent politicians from occupied countries held hostage there.

  Down the line he walked, selecting a professional engraver in precious metals, a banker, a paper salesman, even a Polish doctor to help maintain his workforce. Contrary to Krueger’s expectations, he found four men from the building trades — two carpenters, an electrician, and a mason — several specialists in the graphic arts, and four printers.

  “Where did you work?” Krueger asked one printer.

  “At various Berlin firms.”

  “Do you want to join the others?”

  “Yes, sir, Herr Sturmbannfuehrer.”

  “Join the others.”

  He finally picked thirty-nine inmates instead of his planned thirty, mainly middle-aged men, about half from various graphic trades, including a well-known Berlin fashion photographer, Norbert Levi. There was even a tall, slightly grotesque drifter, a half-Jewish Mischling who looked like a clown and agreed to Krueger’s suggestion that he was a joker by nature; such a person would help keep up morale. When Krueger reported the results, the commandant said: “Four printers! Excellent! I hope they can print what you want.” Still, no one in the camp, not even the commandant, had the least idea what was happening, and neither Krueger nor Petrich told them. Petrich doubted he could succeed with printers who had no experience working with high-quality inks and who had probably ground out “cheap lottery tickets, store advertisements, calendars, business stationery, calling cards for teenagers.” Krueger reproached him: “Think, be patient, do your duty and have a strong will.” The optimistic SS engineer said he knew Jews from civilian life who had fought bravely for Germany in World War I, so why couldn’t these Jews become good printers? Moreover, he continued, “The prisoners are most likely not dissatisfied with the opportunity of landing in a secret printing plant and will work doubly hard to remain in it. Operation Andreas was easier. They just drafted the required experts out of their positions without asking the owners of their companies whether they liked it or not.” He did not need to remind Petrich of the fiasco that followed.

  The SS guard Marock insisted from the start that Krueger was too soft on his charges, especially since they were Jews. “Prisoners should be handled firmly. They are used to it,” the SS quartermaster sergeant told Krueger. What none of the others seemed to realize was that the usual Nazi ways would not work here. Krueger was not just looking for craftsmen and specialists, but individuals of intelligence and dexterity whom he could train and organize for the various interlocking tasks of engraving, printing, sorting, and counting that were essential to the success of the operation bearing his name. Hairdressers, for example, were not chosen for their skills or ancestry, but for their nimble fingers.

  The prisoners’ recollections of Krueger’s selections later at Auschwitz match the tenor and some of the details of his own account. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Moritz Nachtstern, an anarchist stereotyper who had worked in the print shop of Dagbladet, Oslo’s largest newspaper, was told one evening late in 1942 that he and six other printers had been picked out on the basis of the occupations listed on their prisoners’ cards. Presumably the cards were part of the Hollerith classification system the Germans had adapted from a joint venture with the International Business Machines Corporation of the United States. As with all products of that great company, however, the information disclosed by the system was only as good as what had been disclosed to it, a condition later known in the information industry as GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. Nachtstern had been listed as a printer rather than a stereotyper because the clerk had found the name of his occupation too difficult to spell. “Printer” is a generic term often used loosely. Used precisely, it refers to a worker who runs a printing press. A stereotyper is a specialist who makes an impression from the original type and casts the metal plates that are used on the press. The distinction matters mainly inside the print shop or in union negotiations, but in this case Nachtstern correctly sensed it might be a matter of life and death.

  When Nachtstern and his comrades arrived a couple of weeks later at Block 19, they found that “not even a cat could have gotten through that barbed-wire netting unscathed.” Krueger, wearing civilian clothes, met them in the small exercise yard outside the barracks.

  “Good day, gentlemen. I think you’ll like it here. What’s your trade?”

  That first question was addressed to Fritz Schnapper, a German who had arrived with Nachtstern.

  “Printer,” he replied, confounded by Krueger’s polite demeanor and formal usage.

  “Excellent, sir,” Krueger replied, turning to Nachtstern, who announced his trade truthfully but not without apprehension.

  “Ah, stereotyper. Splendid, sir,” mused the Nazi official. “I shall have good use for you.”

  Krueger patted a relieved Nachtstern on the shoulder and walked off with a friendly nod.

  Around the same time, Avraham Krakowski found himself before Krueger in a line of a hundred prisoners placed in rows of five abreast. He watched Krueger pick Mordka Tuchmajer, a printer from Poland, who asked for his brother to go along so they could stay together, even though his brother was a furniture varnisher. The brother was named David Marjanka, also a Pole, and may or may not have been related to Tuchmajer, who was seven years younger. Nevertheless, Krueger amiably replied, “All right, put his number down, too.” As the line shortened, and men from printing and allied trades were selected, Krakowski reckoned he had been called by mistake. After twenty-five men were picked, Krueger ordered: “Enough!” But then he impulsively decided he needed a few more, and for some unknown reason, which Krakowski attributed to no less than divine intervention, Krueger spotted him.

  “You over there, come on up here. I’d like to talk to you.”

  Krakowski stood before him.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “I’m an accountant.”

  “Let me see your hands.”

  Although roughened by forced labor, they remained soft enough to convince Krueger.

  “Take down his number, too.”

  Krakowski became the thirty-first and last choice; of those thirty-one, nineteen had been selected earlier that morning for the gas chamber.

  Adolf Burger, a Slovak, was deeply suspicious when all photographers, retouchers, chemists, and typographers like him were ordered to report. He knew that whenever a call went out for specialists, they ended up with the hardest jobs. But once his number was read out at roll call, he had no choice. Hesitantly he entered the camp director’s office, where an SS officer scanned his personnel card.

  “Prisoner Burger?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Trade, typographer?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The raw voice turned friendly and, wonder of wonders, the officer put out his hand.

  “You are going to Berlin, Herr Burger.” Suddenly he had been transformed back into a human being. “We need specialists such as yourself. You will work under excellent conditions, and things will go well for you. I cannot give you any further information; you will be told everything else upon your arrival. I wish you good luck.”

  Max Groen and his boyhood friend Dries Bosboom had been picked up in their native Amsterdam for breaking curfew and were shipped to Auschwitz, where they were among only 38 of their transport of 1,150 souls to survive. One day Dries was asked a curious question by an SS corporal. Had he worked in the graphics industry? Yes, he was a lithographer by trade. At that precise moment the gong sounded for a selection, but before it could begin the corporal stuck his head in the barracks and asked if anyone else had worked in graphics. “Jawohl, ich!” shouted Max. He was a newsreel cameraman, but what difference did that make? Dries whispered to Max that he must say he was a litho-photographer, because he could handle a camera, and not a pho
to-lithographer, because that skill took years to learn.

  In the office the two Dutch Jews were called before an authoritative SS major whom they found suspiciously well mannered. The major did not give his name and asked a number of questions as if he were interviewing them for a job. When he reached Groen, he asked about his skills in photo retouching. Groen had absolutely no idea what to say. At that moment, he recalled a trashy romance novel on his mother’s kitchen table with two words referring to some obscure reproduction process about which he knew nothing.

  “American retouching,” Groen blurted out.

  The officer nodded knowledgeably. “Ah, you mean positive retouching.”

  In the blink of an eye, Groen’s life had been spared by Krueger, for of course it was he. Max and Dries were put on a train to Berlin with sixty others in a third-class carriage with windows and wooden seats. The mere fact that it was not a boxcar made the ride a luxury.

  Not until they reached Sachsenhausen did any of the prisoners know why they were there. Groen, quick and wily, needed little time to discover the purpose of the secret print shop through the classic prison “jungle tom-tom” whose beats he could read so well. He also learned of the fatal sword of Damocles that hung over all their heads. Moritz Nachtstern discovered the purpose of the place from Marock shortly after his interview with Krueger. The boastful sergeant picked up a counterfeit five-pound note in Block 19 and preened before the new prisoners: “We have beaten England in the military field. Now, with the notes, we shall also ruin their economy. They have dropped counterfeit bread-ration coupons over Germany from the air. We shall reply with these notes, until inflation is over them like a storm.”