The-Ave.US

This secret detachment had as its task the manufacture of V-1’s and V-2s-the “Vergeltungswaffen” (reprisal weapons)-the aerial torpedoes which the Germans launched on England. That is why Dora was a secret detachment. The camp was divided into two parts: one outer part contained one-third of the total number of persons in the camp, and the remaining two-thirds were concentrated in the underground factory. Dora, consequently, was an underground factory for the manufacture of V-1’s; and V-2’s. I arrived at Dora on 10 February 1944, coming from Buchenwald. . . . .

On 10 February 1944, that is at a time when life in the Dora Camp was particularly hard. On 10 February we were loaded, 76 men, onto a large German lorry. We were forced to crouch down, four SS guards occupying the seats at the front of the lorry. As we could not all crouch down, being too many, whenever a man raised his head he got a blow with a rifle butt, so that in the course of our 4-hour journey several of us were injured.

After our arrival at Dora, we spent a whole day and night without food, in the cold, in the snow, waiting for all the formalities of registration in the camp-completing forms, with names and surnames, and so on.

In comparison with Buchenwald, we found a considerable change at Dora, as the general management of the’ Dora Camp was entrusted to a special category of prisoners who were criminals. These criminals were our block leaders, served our soup, and looked after us. In contrast to the political prisoners who wore a red triangular badge, these criminals were distinguished by a green triangular badge on which was a black S. We called them the “S” men (Sicherheitsverband). They were people convicted of crimes by German courts long before the war, but who, instead of being sent home after having served their terms, were kept for life in concentration camps to supervise the other prisoners. Needless to say prisoners of that kind, these criminals with the green triangles, were asocial elements. Sometimes they had been 5, 10, even 20 years in prison, and afterwards, 5 or 10 years in concentration camps. These asocial outcasts no longer had any hope of ever getting out of the concentration camps.

These criminals, however, thanks to the support and co-operation they were offered by the SS management of the camp, now had the chance of a career. This career consisted in stealing from and robbing the other prisoners, and obtaining from them the maximum output demanded by the SS. They beat us from morning till night. We got up at 4 o’clock in the morning and had to be ready within 5 minutes in the underground dormitories where we were crammed, without ventilation in foul air, in blocks about as large as this room, into which 3,000 to 3,500 internees were crowded. There were five tiers of bunks with rotting straw mattresses. Fresh ones were never issued. We were given 5 minutes in which to get up, for we went to bed completely dressed. We were hardly able to get any sleep, for there was a continuous coming and going, and all sorts of thefts took place among the prisoners. Furthermore, it was impossible to sleep because we were covered with lice; the whole Dora Camp swarmed with vermin. It was virtually impossible to get rid of the lice. In 5 minutes we had to be in line in the tunnel and march to a given place.”

Full Transcript: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/01-29-46.asp#balachowsky

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlU6lLnkXjI

Behind The Scenes: “Two French physicians, Victor Dupont and Alfred Balachowsky, described their experiences at Buchenwald, paralleling those of Blaha at Dachau. Balachowsky closed the book on a controversy that had had its inception during the American introduction of the shrunken head and tattooed piece of skin from Buchenwald on December 13. At the time, both Kaltenbrunner’s attorney, Kurt Kauffmann, and Bormann’s attorney, Friedrich Bergold, had complained that the prosecution was not being entirely above board. Bergold protested “the prosecution’s failure to mention a very important point, namely, that the German authorities indicted this inhuman SS leader [the Buchenwald commandant, Karl Koch, and his wife and condemned them to death. It is highly probable that the prosecution knew of this and that these horrible exhibits of perverted human nature, which were presented to us, were found in the files of the German court. If the prosecution had stated that this man was condemned to death, then, in the first place, the evidence against the defendant Kaltenbrunner would not have appeared so weighty, and second, public opinion would on the whole have been left with a different impression.”

On January 14, Thomas Dodd had replied for the American prosecution: “I wish to say that we had no knowledge at all about this man Koch at the time that we offered the proof; didn’t know anything about him except that he had been the commandant. But, subsequently to this objection we had an investigation made, and we have found that he was tried in 1944, indeed, by an SS court, but not for having tanned human skin nor having preserved a human head, but for having embezzled some money, for what—as the judge who tried him tells us—was a charge of general corruption, and for having murdered someone with whom he had some personal difficulties. Indeed, the judge, a Dr. Morgen, tells us that he saw the tattooed human skin and he saw a human head in Commandant Koch’s office, and that he saw a lampshade there made out of human skin. But there were no charges at the time that he was tried for having done these things.”

Koch, in fact, had been so corrupt and paranoid that it had been impossible for the SS administration to ignore his failings. He had extorted hundreds of thousands of marks from wealthy Jews who had been sent to Buchenwald after the Kristallnacht, he had operated a number of rackets in conjunction with the Nazi Party leader of Weimar, and he had had every prisoner who learned too much or might have become an embarrassment to him because of his activities killed. His guilty conscience had caused him to believe that one of the prisoners, a diminutive Jew with marked physical peculiarities, was spying on him not only within the camp but slipping out and following him all over Germany (and then voluntarily returning). To rid himself of this phantom, Koch had had the man murdered.

“Do you know anything about the fate of tattooed men?” Charles Dubost, a deputy French prosecutor, inquired of Dr. Balachowsky on January 29. “Tattooed human skins were stored in Block 2, which was called at Buchenwald the Pathological Block,” Balachowsky replied.

“Did they skin people?”

“They removed the skin and then tanned it.”

“We were told that Koch, who was the head at that time, was sentenced for this practice.”

“I was not a witness of the Koch affair, which happened before I came to the camp.”

“So that even after he left there were still tanned and tattooed skins?”

“Yes, there were constantly tanned and tattooed skins, and when the camp was liberated by the Americans, they found in the camp, in Block 2, tattooed and tanned skins on 11 April 1945.”

From “Justice at Nuremberg”, by Robert Conot.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Justice-at-Nuremberg-Rob…/…/0881840327

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