On the 28th December 1942, a letter from
the head of the SS camp administration office
was sent to concentration camps
including Auschwitz, which carried an order from
Himmler. It reads
"The SS Reichsfuehrer has ordered that the
death rate absolutely must be reduced."
SS-Gruppenführer Richard Glücks, the highest-ranking
Concentration Camp Inspector in Nazi
Germany, reiterated
Himmler's orders when he sent a letter on
January 20th, 1943
to concentration camps including Auschwitz,
instructing:
"every means must be used to lower the death
rate in the camp."
"I hold the Camp Commandant and the Chief of the
Camp Administration personally
responsible for exhausting
of every possibility of maintaining the
physical stength of the prisoners."
On January 25th, 2000 at the Irving vs. Penguin &
Lipstadt trial in London, David Irving &
defence witness German historian Dr. Heinz Peter
Longerich, discuss a October 1943 letter
from SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl,
chief of all concentration camps, to the camps:
IRVING: If you just look at the first page of this document and run your eye over it, is Pohl sending a message to all the concentration camp commandants, 19 of them, saying: "It is time to stop the rough and ready measures with prisoners. We are losing them like flies. We need their manpower. Look after them better"?
LONGERICH: Well, first of all, I have to express my reservations about this document. I do not know the context. I do not know the archive. But on the assumption that this is an authentic document, yes, it is a letter to the 19 heads of the concentration camps, and obviously the document is saying that they have to improve their measures to keep prisoners alive, so which is a kind of reference to what happened in the camps before, I think.
IRVING: Indeed, and paragraph 5 of that first page says: "Not from any false sentimentality but because we need their arms and legs because those are helping the German people to get to a great victory. That is why we have got to start paying attention to the welfare of the prisoners"?
LONGERICH: Yes. That is stated here in this document.
IRVING: Then the next page, page 2, the heading is, "Foodstuffs, food, feeding"?
LONGERICH: I do not have the time to read now.
IRVING: Well, I am just asking you to look at the headings. That all we need, I think. Page 2 he is talking about the feeding. The following page, paragraph 2, is called "Clothing". Then down to the bottom of that page, "Natural Medications" or "Health" ----
LONGERICH: Yes.
IRVING: --- "stuff".
LONGERICH: Well, I cannot, you know, I cannot read so fast but under "Clothing" it is stated here: "I decide that during the winter, as far as far as available, prisoners should wear coats, pullover, socks", so that should give you an idea about the standards which actually existed in the concentration camps before this letter arrived, and it says, it says "as far as available", so it does not actually say, "Give the men, you know, proper clothing". It is saying, you know, "You can give them socks if they are available and nothing more". So I think this gives you a kind of an idea of this.
IRVING: Over the page, paragraph 4 is called "Avoiding unnecessary exertions". For example, these frequent parades were they were held standing for hours while they were counted Zählappelle ----
LONGERICH: Yes.
IRVING: --- are to be kept as short as possible, and so on. In other words, there seems to be a reversal of existing policy because they are losing prisoners like flies to what I would call non-violent causes.
LONGERICH: That is your interpretation, yes.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well, what is yours?
LONGERICH: Well, they started in the concentration camps a programme which they called "extermination through work". So they used hard labour as a tool, as a means to kill prisoners. This was the practice before. Now, at October '43, it is not really surprising they are a bit cautious here and they are trying to improve as far as they can, trying to improve in some sense the general conditions of the prisoners. But, of course, this is a document, I mean, this document is, of course, sent to the head of the concentration camps -- nothing to do with the extermination camps, for instance.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I was going to ask you about that.
LONGERICH: Yes. So, as far as Auschwitz is concerned, it concerns the slave labours within the camp. It does not say anything about the people who were deported to the camp and selected in front of the camp. If one, you know, if I have to -- if I were in the position to give you a kind of expert's opinion on the condition in the concentration camps at the end of 1943, I would not completely rely on this document. It would be completely unprofessional to rely on this one document. One has to look, of course, at all kind of circumstances. One has to look at the death rates. They had statistics on the death rates and I had to look at those, and so on. You know, the problem with this kind of document is that if you have not seen the file, in the file in the next bit you could find a document which says, "Well, I recall my order from last week". If you do not have the context, it is difficult to make, you know, a general statement as an historian about the condition in this camp, and whether they really, you know, in the way gave up this idea of extermination through work in the end of 1943 and how far they still carried on with this policy.
