I saw Morgen again. He was on the verge of indicting Koch and his wife, as well as several other officers and noncoms in Buchenwald and Lublin; under seal of secrecy, he told me that Florstedt too would be charged. He showed me in detail the tricks used by these corrupt men to hide their embezzlements, and the means he used to catch them in the act. He compared the records of the Abteilungen of the camp: even when the culprits forged something, they didn’t go to the trouble of reconciling their forgeries with the documents and reports from other departments. Thus, in Buchenwald, he had gathered his first serious evidence of the murders committed by Koch when he had noticed that the same inmate was registered at the same time in two different places: at a given date, the prison register of the Politische Abteilung bore, next to the name of the inmate, the comment “Released, noon,” while the register of the Revier indicated: “Patient deceased at 9:15.” The inmate had in fact been killed at the Gestapo prison, but his killers had tried to make it look as if he had died of illness. Similarly, Morgen explained to me how one could compare the different administration or Revier records with those of the blocks to try to find evidence of diversions of food, medicine, or property. He was quite interested in the fact that I planned on going to Auschwitz: several leads he was following up on seemed to lead to that camp. “It’s probably the richest Lager, because that’s where most of the special transports of the RSHA go now. Just like here, with the Einsatz, they have immense warehouses to sort and package all the confiscated goods. I suspect that must give rise to colossal misappropriations and thefts. We were alerted by a package sent from the KL by military post: because of its unusual weight, it was opened; inside, they found three chunks of dental gold, big as fists, sent by a camp nurse to his wife. I calculated that such a quantity of gold represents more than a hundred thousand dead.” I let out an exclamation. “And imagine!” he went on. “That’s what a single man could divert. When we’ve finished here, I’ll go set up a commission in Auschwitz.”
I myself had almost finished with Lublin. I made a brief round to say goodbye. I went to settle with Horn, for the portfolio, and found him just as depressed and agitated, struggling with his management difficulties, his financial losses, his contradictory instructions. Globocnik received me much more calmly than the first time: we had a brief but serious discussion about the work camps, which Globocnik wanted to develop further: it was just a matter, he explained to me, of liquidating the last ghettos, so that not a single Jew would remain in the Generalgouvernement outside of the camps under SS control; that, he asserted, was the Reichsführer’s inflexible desire. In all of the GG, 130,000 Jews remained, mostly in Lublin, Radom, and Galicia, with Warsaw and Cracow being entirely judenrein, apart from a handful of clandestines. That was still a lot. But the problems would be solved with determination.
