I visited the KL. It was spread out along a rolling hill just outside the city, west of the road to Zamosc. It was an immense establishment, with rows of long wooden barracks stretching all the way back inside barbed-wire fences, surrounded by watchtowers. The Kommandantur was outside the camp near the road, at the foot of the hill. I was received there by Florstedt, the Kommandant, a Sturmbannführer with an abnormally narrow, elongated face, who looked through my mission orders with obvious mistrust: “It is not stated that you have access to the camp.”—“My orders give me access to all structures controlled by the WVHA. If you don’t believe me, get in touch with the Gruppenführer, he’ll confirm it for you.” He went on leafing through the papers. “What do you want to see?”—“Everything,” I said with a friendly smile. Finally, he handed me over to an Untersturmführer. It was the first time I had visited a concentration camp, and I had everything shown to me. Among the inmates, or Häftlinge, there were all kinds of nationalities: Russians, Poles of course, as well as Jews, but also German political prisoners and criminals, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, and who knows what else. The barracks, long field stables of the Wehrmacht modified by SS architects, were dark, stinking, crowded; the inmates, most of them in rags, were piled up, three or four to a bunk, on several levels. I discussed the sanitary and hygienic problems with the head doctor: it was he, still with the Untersturmführer trailing behind, who showed me the Bath and Disinfection barrack, where on one side newcomers were given a shower, and on the other those unfit for work were gassed. “Up until spring,” the Untersturmführer said, “it was only dusting out. But since the Einsatz transferred some of its load to us, we’ve been overflowing.” The camp didn’t know what to do with the corpses and had ordered a crematorium, equipped with five single-muffle furnaces designed by Kori, a specialized company in Berlin. “They’re competing for the business with Topf und Söhne, of Erfurt,” he added. “In Auschwitz, they work only with Topf, but we thought Kori’s conditions were more competitive.” The gassing, curiously, was not carried out with carbon monoxide, as in the vans we used in Russia or, according to what I had read, in the fixed installations of the Einsatz Reinhard; here, they used hydrocyanic acid, in the form of tablets that released the gas when in contact with air. “It’s much more effective than carbon monoxide,” the head doctor assured me. “It’s quick, the patients suffer less, there are never any failures.”—“Where does the product come from?”—“It’s actually an industrial disinfectant, which they use for fumigation, against lice and other vermin. Apparently it was Auschwitz that had the idea to test it for the ‘special treatment.’ It works very well.” I also inspected the kitchen and the supply warehouses; despite the assurances of the SS-Führers and even of the prisoner employees who distributed the soup, the rations looked insufficient to me, an impression that was confirmed for me in veiled terms by the head doctor. I came back several days running to study the files of the Arbeitseinsatz; each Häftling had his individual index card, filed with what was called the Arbeitstatistik, and was assigned, if he wasn’t sick, to a work Kommando, some inside the camp, for maintenance, others outside; prisoners in the largest Kommandos lived at their worksite, like that of the DAW, the German Armament Works, in Lipowa. On paper, the system seemed solid; but the losses in manpower remained considerable; and Horn’s criticisms helped me see that most of the prisoners employed—poorly fed, dirty, regularly beaten—were incapable of any consistent, productive work.
