Punishments in Auschwitz

The transcription of the podcast

In today’s conversation, I would like to ask about the punishments imposed on men and women prisoners at Auschwitz. Among the accounts of survivors, there are numerous references to the fact that one could be punished for virtually anything — even the smallest offense. Whether it was a missing button from the striped uniform or a momentary pause in work, seen by a kapo as shirking duties. Did Auschwitz have a formal system of punishing prisoners, or were punishments simply administered arbitrarily by SS men or functionary prisoners?

The answer is both. In every concentration camp in Germany, there were regulations that outlined punishments for offenses committed by prisoners. These regulations were, to some extent, modelled on the early regulations of Dachau from 1933, created by Theodor Eicke, a rulebook that included many paragraphs and tried to account for many possible situations, although in reality, many of them never occurred in the later practice of concentration camps.
For example, Eicke considered what punishment should await prisoners who, during contacts with clergy, passed information about the concentration camp, and so on. It was a document very casuistically listing every possible offense that Eicke could think of. However, in later years, these regulations were significantly simplified and changed.

Unfortunately, the regulations of the Auschwitz concentration camp have not survived, and we cannot say with certainty what punishments they included. However, in his postwar testimony, the commandant Rudolf Höss tried to reconstruct from memory at least the catalogue of punishments. We also possess a document known as the disciplinary directive, which lists types of punishments. In the case of serious offenses, a prisoner could be punished with flogging, and in such cases, the role of the camp commandant was limited to describing the offense and submitting a request to the Concentration Camp Inspectorate for approval. On the application form for such a request, punishments available to the commandant were also listed.

However, theory was one thing, and practice was another. In reality, any of those punishments could be applied at will or supplemented with others depending on the initiative of the SS men or kapos. Since in camp practice, a kapo had the unofficial right to kill a prisoner, and brutality, beatings, and murders were tolerated, there was effectively no need to adhere strictly to regulations, which would have required following certain administrative procedures, submitting reports, and forwarding requests. It was much simpler that when an SS man or functionary noticed some irregular behavior from a prisoner, they would punish him on the spot rather than burden themselves with bureaucracy.

You mentioned that some documentation related to punishments survived. What kind of documentation was it?

Generally, only documents relating to SS men filing formal punishment reports have survived. Other punishments listed in the regulations left no trace in the camp’s documentation. For example, if the regulations prescribed a reprimand, naturally, there would be no trace of this in the camp records. Beyond reprimands, a prisoner could be punished with compulsory labor during free time — essentially on Sundays. In the surviving disciplinary reports, we find notes that a given prisoner was sentenced to five or ten days of work during free time. This usually meant a numer of consecutive Sundays during which the prisoner had to work under SS supervision. A group of prisoners punished this way would typically be assembled into a penal commando and sent to perform some heavy labor. In addition, a prisoner could be punished by being assigned to a penal company, and this was a much more serious punishment. The penal company was initially located at Auschwitz, and later at Birkenau, in the men's camps BIb and BIId. There was also a women’s penal company, first at the Budy subcamp and later at the women's camp in Birkenau.

Sentences to the penal company could last two, three, six, or twelve months. In the penal company’s register — a document that has survived — we often find entries reading "until further notice," meaning a prisoner could remain in the penal company for an indefinite period, although it usually lasted a few months.
After completing a sentence in the penal company, the prisoner would either return to the camp, unless it was decided that his offense was more serious, in which case he might be transferred to another concentration camp — typically to Flossenbürg or, more often, to Mauthausen. Given the extremely harsh labor conditions at the Mauthausen quarries, that camp was often seen as an extension of the punishment for prisoners who had served time in the Auschwitz penal company.

There was also a punishment involving the suspension of the right to send and receive correspondence. We know about this from survivor testimonies, but it is not mentioned in the surviving disciplinary reports, probably because the punishment was relatively mild. Another punishment was the withdrawal of meals — specifically in mid-day — even while the prisoner was still expected to work full shifts. This punishment would last a few days. There was also the punishment of being placed in a cell with what was called a "hard bed," meaning a plank without a straw mattress, for several consecutive nights.

This punishment was formally listed in the camp’s disciplinary regulations but appears to have been rarely — or perhaps never — applied in practice. Much harsher was the punishment of imprisonment in the camp jail. There were several levels of this punishment: the so-called first degree, or moderate arrest, meant three days' confinement in the camp jail; the second degree, or severe arrest, meant 42 days in a dark cell; and the third degree, the most severe, involved confinement in a windowless cell without the possibility of sitting or lying down — meaning standing cells. Generally, in such cases, the prisoner would receive only bread and water, with full meals only every four days. It was also specified that the third degree punishment could be applied in addition to the second degree. That was the theory. In practice, as we know from documents, prisoners were sometimes kept in standing cells for the full 42 days, not just three. This was the maximum punishment I have found in camp records. Punishments were carried out in the camp jail located in the basement of Block 11 at Auschwitz I. Standing cells could be found either in the basement of Block 11 — there were four of them — or in Block 3 in sector BI.

There was also a standing cell in the Monowitz camp, located between Blocks 9 and 10 in a former washhouse barrack, part of which was partitioned to create both an arrest cell and a standing cell. The punishment of confinement in a standing cell was perceived by prisoners as especially brutal. Such a cell measured less than one square meter — about 90 centimeters by 90 centimeters. Inside was a very small ventilation opening. Typically, four prisoners would be crammed into the space. Due to the lack of room, they could not sit and could barely move. And because ventilation was minimal, the prisoners would slowly suffocate overnight. In the morning, they were still required to go to work, and after evening roll call, they would return for another night in the standing cell.

The most frequently administered punishment was a stay in a standing cell for ten days, but there were also cases where prisoners had to endure longer periods in these cells. According to the regulations, the most severe punishment was flogging. Here, the procedure was significantly more complicated: after the submission of a disciplinary report and the proposed punishment determined by the Lagerführer (the camp manager), the documentation with the appropriate request was sent to Berlin, where it was supposed to be approved — at least in theory — by the inspector of concentration camps, Richard Glücks. In practice, of course, it was not him personally, but rather an officer designated as his deputy who handled these approvals.

The punishment was to be carried out with between 5 and 25 lashes, and there was a detailed procedure intended to ensure that the punishment would not be excessively harmful to the prisoner. First, before administering the punishment, the prisoner had to be examined by a doctor. The regulation stipulated that the prisoner was to be laid freely on a bench without being strapped down. The flogging had to be carried out with a leather whip, and blows were only to land on the buttocks and thighs. Stripping the prisoner and exposing certain body parts — presumably the buttocks — was prohibited, although in 1942 Himmler issued an order that the punishment should indeed be carried out by whipping the buttocks. During the flogging, the prisoner was required to count the strokes aloud, which can either be interpreted as a form of humiliation or, perhaps, as a means of ensuring that the prisoner did not lose consciousness during the punishment.

Before administering the corporal punishment, the SS doctor had to sign a protocol stating that the prisoner was healthy enough to withstand it and officially certifying that there were no medical objections to administering corporal punishment. Alternatively, the doctor could express doubts about the prisoner's ability to endure the punishment by filling in a designated field — although, in all the surviving disciplinary orders held in our archives, that field was always crossed out. The SS doctor always confirmed that the prisoner was fit for the punishment.

After this, everything still had to be approved by the Lagerführer. There was also space in the documents to list the names of the SS men who were supposed to administer the flogging, but fairly soon it became practice to have prisoner functionaries carry out the punishments instead. These were primarily Polish prisoners, a few German kapos, and also Jakub Kozielczyk, the orderly of the jail in Block 11. In Birkenau, very few disciplinary orders have survived, but we know that in Monowitz, corporal punishments were mostly administered by German functionary prisoners — different ones.

There were no permanently assigned prisoners for carrying out the floggings. In the subcamps, the practice varied considerably. Most often, they were Germans, although, for example, in the Blechhammer subcamp, a Jewish prisoner — in fact, usually the same one — most often carried out the punishment. Thus, this was the system for regulation-based punishments, whose implementation was theoretically under the authority of the commandant. However, as I mentioned, in practice there were other punishments as well, ones not formally part of the official disciplinary catalog.

Before we move on to those non-regulation punishments, I would like to go back to the penal company. What was the experience of a prisoner — a men or a woman — in such a special company?

The penal company was composed of prisoners who had either been formally sentenced to it according to the camp regulations, or, especially in the early period of the camp, until around 1942, it became the rule that every Jewish prisoner arriving at the camp was immediately, after registration, sent to the penal company. Naturally, the conditions of stay and work in such a unit were significantly worse than in any other commando. These prisoners were initially held in Block 11 and were placed under the supervision of probably the most brutal and cruel kapos in the camp’s history. An iconic figure in this regard was Ernst Krankemann, known for beating prisoners with extreme brutality or killing them outright, without any consequences. Prisoners in the penal company were assigned the hardest kinds of labor, primarily gravel excavation.

There were several gravel pits near the camp. Work consisted of some prisoners pushing wheelbarrows loaded with gravel up out of deep pits, while others shoveled the gravel. In principle, prisoners in the penal company were expected to work at a running pace — “im Laufschritt” — and were constantly driven and beaten by the functionaries. If a prisoner no longer had the strength to work efficiently, or, for instance, accidentally overturned a wheelbarrow and spilled its contents, dozens of kapos or foremen would immediately rush over and beat him without mercy.

The conditions in the penal company can be illustrated by the fact that, according to surviving documents, Jewish prisoners assigned there in the summer of 1941 had an average survival time of about fifteen days. This was partly true for other prisoners as well, mostly Poles, who were sent to the penal company as punishment for specific offenses. However, Jews were sent there solely because they were Jewish. In 1940, Catholic priests were also initially sent to the penal company, although following interventions — presumably aimed at saving their lives — most of them were transferred to Dachau in December 1940.

Thus, work in the penal company was the hardest, and prisoners were forced to work even on days off when needed. For instance, if prisoners could not work because of severe frost, the penal company was still sent out to clear the snow. Another iconic form of labor assigned to the penal company was pulling heavy road rollers to level the camp roads. Many prisoners vividly remembered the scenes of those from the penal company being constantly beaten while pulling or pushing the massive roller, with Krankemann running around them, mercilessly striking them with his club.

Mortality in the penal company was indeed very high during the camp’s early period. However, later the situation seems to have changed. Looking at the penal company register, which has survived at least partially from May 1942 onwards, more than two thousand prisoners are recorded, and the majority of them survived their time in the penal company. There are notations of deaths — small crosses next to names — but most prisoners survived their punishment and were later reassigned to other work details or transferred to other camps.

Besides the punishments officially included in camp regulations, which you have just described, there was also a whole range of non-regulation punishments, about which we know from survivor accounts. These non-regulation punishments were ad hoc and usually administered by prisoner functionaries, with the approval of the SS staff. Would it be fair to say that, in the case of non-regulation punishments, a prisoner could be punished for practically anything — for example, reporting late or working too slowly?

Yes, there were no limits whatsoever in this regard. This resulted from the fact that punishments applied by either functionary prisoners or SS men became increasingly severe over time and met with no reaction from the camp’s supervising officers, which, naturally, led to lawlessness and complete impunity for the functionaries and SS men who beat and killed prisoners. This was clearly approved by the Auschwitz commandant's office and the camp commandant himself, given the complete lack of any practical interventions. Although the commandant — Rudolf Höss — claimed in his postwar testimony that he tried to limit the more extreme cases of prisoner abuse or killings, and allegedly some SS men were punished for such behavior, there is no surviving documentation, either from Auschwitz or from German archives, confirming that any SS man from Auschwitz was ever punished for brutality towards prisoners.

There are only complaints recorded about civilian workers — foremen from companies employed by the SS on construction projects within the camp, or civilian supervisors at the subcamps where prisoners worked in factories and mines — who, at times, took it upon themselves to punish prisoners. This did elicit some reaction, for instance, if a foreman beat a prisoner and broke his glasses, rendering the prisoner unfit for further work, a formal report was filed about the incident. There were also opposite situations: some civilian engineers or foremen demanded that the SS initiate disciplinary proceedings against prisoners if they noticed infractions. In some cases, this might be understandable — for example, if prisoners smoked in prohibited areas, like mines or chemical factories where flammable substances and gases were present.

However, often these civilian supervisors demanded punishment for prisoners for petty offenses that posed no real threat. And they knew perfectly well that such denunciations could have deadly consequences for the prisoners. It was very often just such behavior regarding some petty theft. For example, in the Monowitz factory, theft of machine oil was common — the oil was used in the camp to grease prisoners' shoes to maintain a proper appearance, as enforced by the kapos or block elders. Prisoners with access to the storage areas were in some way „ordered” by the functionaries to steal the oil.
It was again an act against the interests of the company, although these actions, these thefts, in reality had little significant impact on the functioning of the given factory, and such an engineer or foreman could have turned a blind eye, but most often did not. This impunity gradually led to a tightening of discipline. Besides, some of the SS men present in Auschwitz or the functionary prisoners, especially the German kapos, had not come directly from training centers or prisons.

They were people who had previously served in the staff of other concentration camps, or those German functionary prisoners had arrived at Auschwitz from other camps. Therefore, in Auschwitz, they simply applied the same practices they had learned elsewhere in Germany. It is hard to say whether their behavior was significantly more brutal than that of kapos at Dachau, for example.

That impression can be drawn, although there is no formal confirmation of such an observation in the German documentation. Nevertheless, generally speaking, these punishments left no trace in the surviving German records. For example, in death records, it is rare to find entries stating that the death of a prisoner resulted from beating. However, one can find causes of death listed as, for instance, a fractured skull base or other injuries, such as broken bones in the upper or lower limbs, which most likely resulted from beatings, although this was not explicitly recorded. Besides that, of course, many cases of beatings led to the death of prisoners, but not immediately.

In situations where a prisoner was severely beaten but not killed at the worksite, he would be carried back to the camp at the end of the workday and then die either in the block or the hospital. Even minor injuries often led to the formation of so-called phlegmons, especially when prisoners suffered from malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, so even relatively small wounds could cause swelling and bacterial infections, often leading to death. Therefore, we should believe all the accounts from prisoners who claim that, especially in the worst work units, constant beating, battering, and driving prisoners was a common practice, especially by the functionaries, because beating a human being is, after all, quite exhausting over time.

Thus, SS men most often delegated this duty to the kapos — that is, when they noticed that a prisoner was working less efficiently, they would call over a kapo with a gesture and point out the prisoner who was to be punished. These punishments were meted out to prisoners who worked too slowly or lazily, as can be read in prisoners' memoirs or seen in disciplinary reports. These reports often mention that a certain prisoner did not want to work, that despite repeated warnings from the kapo, he continued to work slowly or loitered all day. Thus, slow work tempo was the main reason for corporal punishments by both functionaries and SS men, for which they never faced any reprimand from the camp authorities.

Before we return to the reasons for punishing prisoners, I would like to ask whether there were other types of non-regulation punishments besides beatings?

Indeed, there were quite a few such punishments, and aside from ordinary beating and striking with a stick or whip, much depended on the ingenuity of either the SS men or the functionary prisoners. There was a form of punishment quite commonly used in the camp called the "post punishment," which involved tying the prisoner's hands behind his back, tying them to a rope or chain, and then suspending the prisoner from a post, pole or beam. This was done, for example, in the yard of Block 11, or more often — because it was simpler — by tossing the rope over a structural element of the roof in the attics of the blocks and hoisting the prisoner so that he hung, his arms raised behind his head, and his feet not touching the ground. This caused tremendous pain and often led to dislocated joints.

This punishment was formally listed in the disciplinary regulations of the early Dachau camp. However, it is not mentioned as a regulation punishment in Auschwitz disciplinary orders, but it is reasonable to assume that SS men who had learned about this method elsewhere in Germany also used it at Auschwitz without worrying whether it was officially approved. Another common form of punishment was flogging, administered without any formal disciplinary procedure — that is, the prisoner would simply be ordered by a kapo or an SS man to lie down on a box or stool and was beaten with a stick, usually on the buttocks or back. Other punishments resulted from the SS men's creativity, especially during interrogations conducted by the camp's Political Department. Tortures included inserting needles or splinters under prisoners’ fingernails.

Another widely known punishment in Auschwitz was the so-called "swing." Here, the prisoner's hands were handcuffed, he was ordered to sit on the floor, pull his knees to his chest, and clasp his knees with his arms. A rod was then inserted between his knees and arms, and the prisoner was suspended upside down, with the rod resting on two stools. Then, he was beaten on the buttocks, and because of the suspended position, the blows caused a pendulum-like swinging motion, hence the name "swing." Allegedly, skilled SS men could strike the prisoner so that he made a full rotation in the air. There were many such punishments, but all revolved around the same practices — beating, battering, and murdering prisoners in various ways. For example, after being struck and knocked down, prisoners were often kicked and beaten while lying unconscious.

Sometimes, a kapo would lay a stick or shovel handle across the prisoner's neck and then step on either end, crushing the prisoner's larynx and causing death. There were countless such methods. Prisoners recalled being ordered into swamps where they would slowly sink and drown — depending entirely on the kapo's whim. When such prisoners died, their corpses were carried back to the camp, and their cause of death was falsely recorded as various fabricated illnesses.

Were there punishments in which the general intention was the death of prisoners?

Of course, yes. These were punishments that can be described as executions. They were carried out in several different ways. The most common method of carrying out the death penalty in the camp was execution by shooting. This concerned people who, in the bureaucratic practice of the camp, were not formally prisoners. That is, they were most often Poles, brought to the camp solely for the purpose of executing the death sentence. They were shot either by a firing squad in the gravel pits near the camp, or later, essentially until 1942, at the Death Wall — as prisoners called it — or the "black wall" in the courtyard between Blocks 11 and 10. There, the death penalty was usually carried out by a designated SS man.

This was most often Rapportführer Gerhard Palitzsch, who had at his disposal a small-caliber rifle. The execution was carried out in such a way that the prisoners, stripped naked still in the washroom of , were led out in pairs to the courtyard, positioned under the wall, and the SS man would shoot them directly in the back of the head. These executions probably claimed the highest number of victims, including both people brought from outside the camp and prisoners already interned in the camp. Now, a prisoner of the camp could also be sentenced to death in various ways and for various reasons.

There was a sort of intermediate category — people who, from a formal point of view, were not actual prisoners of the camp. These were persons housed on the ground floor of Block 11. They were most often brought to Auschwitz from the jurisdiction of the SS summary court in Katowice, for example, from the police prison in Mysłowice, and from time to time transported to Auschwitz.

They stayed in the camp and received numbers according to an informal numbering series — that is, they were neither tattooed nor issued camp uniforms, nor did they have numbers sewn onto their jackets, but they received small slips of paper with their numbers. Their stay in Block 11 served only to isolate them until the SS summary court judges and Gestapo officials from Katowice would arrive and conduct the trial. These trials were extremely simplified and lasted just a few minutes.

The interrogation was limited to asking the defendant a few questions, and in the vast majority of cases, the decision of the summary court was that the prisoners were to be executed, and these sentences were carried out without delay. Meanwhile, death sentences carried out against prisoners who were actual Auschwitz inmates — meaning those who had numbers and had spent a certain period in the camp — were also implemented on the basis of rulings from German courts in the districts of the General Government, generally from areas under their jurisdiction.

It happened that a prisoner who arrived at Auschwitz, for instance, in the spring of a given year and who had spent quite a long time in the camp, formally registered, wearing the striped uniform and marked with a triangle and camp number, could suddenly, even after many months, be summoned by the Political Department, taken to the courtyard of Block 11, and executed there. Often, this involved groups of prisoners summoned together from the same transport that had arrived several months earlier.

Thus, it is likely that these executions resulted from the conclusion of legal proceedings by the courts in a given region of occupied Poland and the issuance of formal death sentences. Then such prisoners were almost collectively led to Block 11 and killed there. A controversial issue here were the death sentences — or pseudo-sentences — issued by the head of the Political Department, Maximilian Grabner. These death sentences most likely stemmed simply from a reluctance to follow regulations or engage in bureaucratic paperwork. They involved persons under the Political Department’s jurisdiction because, for example, they had participated in an escape — prisoners who were captured and later brought back to the camp — or because the Political Department deemed that a prisoner isolated in the basement of Block 11 knew about another inmate’s escape plan but had not reported it to the SS, or even had helped organize it. It also concerned individuals involved with the resistance movement.

To avoid bureaucratic hassle, as it seems, Maximilian Grabner would occasionally conduct inspections of the basement cells of Block 11 and personally select prisoners for execution. This was referred to in camp slang as the "cleaning of the bunker." These prisoners were then simply led out to the Death Wall and executed without any formal procedures. Did Commandant Hoess know about this? Probably yes. It is hard for me to imagine a situation where such often rather large executions took place without the camp commandant’s knowledge. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why Hoess was removed from Auschwitz in November 1943 — through a promotion. He was transferred to Berlin because, at that time, a special SS commission headed by investigating judge Konrad Morgen arrived at Auschwitz. This commission was primarily supposed to focus on cases of corruption. Morgen was a young and very ambitious prosecutor who had already succeeded in bringing several high-ranking SS officers to court in other concentration camps. And here probably someone decided to spare Hoess from such a fate and simply transferred him elsewhere, to Berlin, in order to prevent an investigation against him. Meanwhile, the person who remained within Morgen’s reach was precisely Maximilian Grabner. And here, he was formally charged with a procedural violation and with sentencing prisoners to death in an unauthorized manner, as it was stated.

Grabner was indeed removed from Auschwitz, arrested, and spent many months in prison. However, ultimately, he was not put on trial, as he also had his protectors. The SS men likely could not really understand what the problem was, because if an ordinary kapo could beat a prisoner to death at the workplace without facing any consequences, why suddenly a prosecutor would come and press charges for carrying out executions in an unauthorized way. These executions took place, as we know from, for example, entries in the bunker book. There, next to the names of those sentenced to death — and mostly shot — red crosses were placed.

Also, by looking at entries in death records, one can determine how many such executions took place at Auschwitz and on what days and almost even at what times of the day, because in 1941, it was directly recorded in the death certificates that the cause of death was execution by shooting or execution for resisting state authority. These were two formulas initially used for such executions in 1941. Later, someone likely realized that these formulations needed to be replaced because death certificates — at least their copies — were sent outside the concentration camp to civil registry offices in Germany for purposes such as inheritance. They served simply as death confirmations. And in such a situation, if it turned out that many such death certificates carried information that numerous prisoners were executed, it could raise concerns among the public or relevant officials. Thus, instead of noting “execution by shooting,” they began to use the formula “Plötzlicher Herztod” — sudden cardiac arrest, although there were cases where the cause of death for murdered prisoners was also recorded as some common illnesses.

However, in the overwhelming majority of these executions, the entry “Plötzlicher Herztod” indicated that prisoners had been murdered, most often by shooting. We have entire sequences of death records where dozens or even over a hundred prisoners have "sudden cardiac arrest" recorded as the cause of death, in time intervals of a few minutes. If, in the individual volumes of death records, you find successive death certificates stating time of death at 15:00, 15:02, 15:04, and so on, it undoubtedly indicates an execution. Generally, most often by shooting, although the same formula was used to cover executions by hanging. Here, death by hanging was most often applied to prisoners accused of preparing an escape or participating in an escape attempt. Especially fugitives caught after some time outside the camp, after a series of tortures and interrogations aimed at clarifying the circumstances of the escape — who organized it, who else helped — were hanged after being held in the basements of Block 11. They were then hanged at the roll-call square as a warning to others. The point was for prisoners to see what awaited those who attempted escape.

This took place during roll-call, and prisoners were ordered to look straight ahead so they would see the gallows and witness the hanging. These executions were either individual — with prisoners hanged on a portable gallows, available in Auschwitz, Birkenau, Monowitz, and some other larger subcamps — or they were collective executions. The most famous hanging execution at Auschwitz was the execution of 12 Poles from the surveyors' commando.
The largest hanging execution was the hanging of 19 prisoners accused of attempting to escape from the Neu-Dachs subcamp in Jaworzno. Different methods were used. At Monowitz, there were two portable gallows. One time, when there was a need to hang three prisoners, they set up the two gallows next to each other, added a horizontal wooden beam between them, and tied another noose to it, so they could hang three prisoners at once. Sometimes, people from outside the camp were also hanged. This also concerned escape cases — if the fugitive was not caught, their relatives would be brought to the camp and hanged in the same way at roll-call.

Additionally, killing prisoners by lethal injection was practiced — this mainly concerned prisoners in the camp hospital. When orders came that certain prisoners were to be killed, often for reasons of convenience and to save time, they were simply killed by injecting phenol directly into the heart. There were also cases when groups of people, brought from outside specifically for execution, were added to groups of Jews selected on the railway ramp and sent to the gas chambers. So when several hundred Jews were gassed, a group of Polish prisoners was sometimes added to them to die together in the gas chamber. Thus, there were many ways of killing prisoners, applied simultaneously and in many places.

Only exceptionally, and only for a short time, starvation punishment was used at Auschwitz I. This execution mainly affected prisoners who became victims of selections after escape attempts from their work unit or block. It was used as a reprisal — during roll-call, the commandant or his deputy would announce that some prisoners from the unit or block from which the escapee came would be chosen and imprisoned in the basement of Block 11 until the fugitive voluntarily returned. Of course, such returns never happened. In practice, the selected prisoners ended up in Block 11 and there gradually died of starvation.

You mentioned that a prisoner could be punished for participating in an escape, for assisting an escape, for suspected contacts with the resistance movement, or for avoiding work. What were other reasons for which a prisoner could be punished?

The reasons were very diverse, and we know about them both from the testimonies of survivors and from those penalty reports, which concerned not only more serious matters but sometimes also completely trivial incidents. And one could really wonder why, in such cases, these penalty reports were even filled out and why the whole formal procedure was initiated. I don’t have a good answer for that. I have the impression that it was simply because the regulations required it. And in a situation where an inspection might occur, and someone asked the camp commandant how discipline was maintained at Auschwitz, they could always go to the filing cabinet and pull out a stack of these penalty reports and show: here you go, we have these penalty reports, proving that we are following all required procedures. And thus, in these reports — a considerable number of which have survived — we have described situations that reflect the realities of camp life and the offenses that, under normal circumstances in present-day penitentiary systems, would never lead to any formal disciplinary action. But at Auschwitz, they did. And again, you can see the total arbitrariness in issuing sentences and punishments, because for the same type of offense, a prisoner could receive very different punishments, perceived either as quite mild or very severe. There are countless examples of this. There are sometimes quite astonishing cases where, for example, a prisoner was punished for attempting suicide.

He slit his throat with some kind of knife or sharpened object but did it so clumsily that he was noticed, rescued, and thus was charged with an attempted suicide. Such a penalty report was filed, and the camp authorities proposed punishment by flogging, although after some time, the Auschwitz III commandant, Heinrich Schwarz, perhaps realizing how absurd the situation was, managed to ensure that the punishment was ultimately not administered. However, the vast majority of such cases concerned minor offenses, such as theft — theft of property from workplaces, smuggling items from the so-called Canada warehouses, like tobacco, gold items, or money.

These were situations where such items, such valuables, were simply found on prisoners — either when they were crossing the camp gate or during inspections in the barracks. So, if a prisoner was found in possession of a gold item, it was obvious that since he couldn't have hidden it during admission to the camp — because prisoners undergoing registration had their clothes taken away, were stripped naked, and had to go through showers — he must have stolen it. That gold should have belonged to the camp. Another frequent offense was the attempt to smuggle letters beyond the reach of censorship. This most often occurred at construction sites or in factories, where prisoners had somewhat easier access to civilian workers. Letters were sometimes found on prisoners attempting to leave a subcamp or the main camp. Interestingly, prisoners rarely revealed the identities of the civilians who helped them smuggle letters.
Various situations occurred. For example, a civilian worker, asked to send such a letter to one of the prisoner’s relatives, did so, but the recipient’s address turned out to be outdated, so the letter was returned by the postal service. This provided evidence that a letter had been sent from the camp, which led to an investigation and the identification of the prisoner who authored it.

There were also very frequent cases of finding objects or food, especially food, in prisoners’ possession, which clearly could not have come from formal rations. For example, if a prisoner had white bread, it was clear that he must have somehow "organized" it, as was said in the camp. White bread was usually obtained from civilians — workers who either worked within the camp or at the factories where prisoners also labored.

It is worth noting that in such situations, prisoners consistently claimed that they had stolen the bread from the civilians. Only once did a prisoner admit that the larger quantity of bread found with him had been given by a civilian, who told him to distribute it among his fellow prisoners, especially the younger ones. But just like in other cases, the prisoner insisted that he did not know the civilian’s name, did not know how to find him, or recognize him. This speaks well of the prisoners, who tried to protect their benefactors.

There are also many cases where prisoners were punished for damaging camp property. Such property included, for example, striped camp uniforms. If a prisoner lost his cap, for instance, it could end badly for him because he always had to have it — at roll-call, he had to remove and replace it on command. Therefore, to recover a lost cap — whether lost or stolen — some prisoners who had access to extra fabric would sew caps. If a prisoner was caught sewing or possessing such a handmade cap, he was punished for damaging camp property, meaning the official textile materials. Another case involved a prisoner who made slippers from fabric scraps and sold them to functionary prisoners. This too was treated as damaging camp property. There were many such cases.

There were also events that seem somewhat humorous now — although probably not for the prisoners involved — such as when prisoners from the Neue Wäscherei commando were punished for telling jokes, clowning around, and dancing with each other. This too was considered a serious offense. Among these documents, one can also find stories that evoke deep emotion. Especially when these events were not described merely in the form of short notes on penalty report forms, but when interrogation protocols were also attached to those reports. One such story concerns a certain prisoner who was in the Blechhammer subcamp. In Blechhammer, prisoners, to the surprise of the SS men who took over the subcamp in 1944 — it had previously been a labor camp belonging to the so-called Schmelt Organization — still had some valuables at their disposal. These were items they had brought from home, from the places from which they had been deported. They included keepsakes, but also, for example, gold coins, which many Jews — Blechhammer was almost exclusively filled with Jewish prisoners — still possessed, even in 1944. These items had most often been brought from occupied France, Belgium, or the Netherlands, because transports to Blechhammer arrived via the Koźle railway station.

For some time, with the consent of the SS authorities, the leadership of these Schmelt labor camps could select Jews capable of work and send them not yet to concentration camps, but precisely to these labor camps. In Blechhammer, there was a Jewish prisoner who was found to possess a gold ring, which triggered an investigation and the writing of a protocol. This Jew was accused of possessing gold, which he supposedly intended to exchange for bread, which he could obtain from workers laboring alongside the prisoners on the chemical factory construction site. The Jew explained that this gold ring was the last keepsake from his wife, whom he had seen for the last time at the railway station in Koźle, after which all trace of her was lost. We know — and probably the prisoners in Blechhammer later learned as well — that their relatives were sent further to Auschwitz. It is possible that his wife had already perished by then.
Thus, the prisoner claimed he had kept the ring through all these years — that is, through two years — and even though he had often suffered from hunger, he had never decided to trade it for bread, because it was the only object that reminded him of his wife, and he begged the SS men not to take it from him. Naturally, this did not meet with any positive response.

These penalty reports also testify to many extraordinary situations, which illustrate the conditions in which the prisoners lived — the hunger that prevailed in the camp. Very many of the valuable items — whether cigarettes, gold items, or scraps of cloth — were subject to trade with civilian workers. When the prisoners had nothing left to offer, one of them came up with the idea that a fellow prisoner had a gold tooth. So, perhaps they could extract it and exchange the gold for bread. These two prisoners carried it out by one hitting the other with a stone to knock the tooth out. The prisoner was caught with the tooth, and it was treated as an offense because the tooth, in the event of the prisoner's death, would have been extracted and would have become the property of the SS. Thus, these Jews were deemed to have diminished the SS’s assets. There were many such different events. Similar incidents concerned prisoners leaving their work units to search for food, breaking into storerooms where pig feed was kept, or roaming around the camp kitchens looking through old peelings or bones to find something edible. This is well described in those reports. It also often happened that prisoners, for example in Monowitz, circled around British prisoners of war. British POWs received Red Cross food parcels and, often having an abundance of these packages, refrained from eating the camp soup. So there was a chance that a Brit might offer his soup to a prisoner. Of course, this was forbidden. It often happened when a prisoner would inform his kapo that he needed to step away briefly for a personal need and would quickly return. If the kapo supervised a large group of prisoners working over a wide area, he was not able to control all of them. If a prisoner did not return quickly, the kapo sent his Vorarbeiter to search for him. If they did not find him, it was a serious problem. There was a concern that the prisoner might have attempted to escape.

Thus, first, the prisoner’s identity had to be established. The kapo had to gather all his prisoners, suspend the work, and conduct a roll call, using a list held either by a kommando scribe or the kapo himself, to determine who was missing. Kapos usually hoped the situation would resolve itself — that the prisoner would return or the Vorarbeiter would eventually find him. If not, by the end of the workday, the kapo had no choice but to inform the Kommandoführer that a prisoner was missing. The Kommandoführer, too, preferred that no prisoner escaped from his kommando, and so he would first conduct his own search. Only if unsuccessful would he announce an alarm and inform his superiors. However, if the prisoner was caught and had not actually intended to escape but had gone searching for food, he would be punished — firstly, for unauthorized departure from the work site, and secondly, for reducing the unit working hours, because during the roll call and search the work had to be suspended. This was a reason for severe punishment. Attempts at correspondence and sending information between prisoners from different parts of the camp were also punished. Prisoners who exchanged letters were punished — they were often family members or prisoners who developed romantic relationships under camp conditions, and exchanged love notes. This was forbidden and led to punishments.
Generally, any contact with prisoners from other work units — especially with women prisoners during work — was forbidden. There is a story of a male prisoner who worked in the Union Kommando, in an office. This was a factory located between Auschwitz and Birkenau. At one point, he noticed through the window that a unit of women prisoners was passing by, and among them was his sister. Seeing her, he ran out of the building and took a few steps toward her. He was stopped by an SS man and was accused of attempting to escape. Initially, it was treated as a major offense, and he was interrogated. Eventually, the charge was reduced — he was not punished for attempted escape, but for unauthorized departure from his unit.

There are many examples of prisoners being punished for completely trivial or alleged offenses. One common example is when the inspection officer, Lieutenant Miller, noticed two women prisoners picking apples. One must remember that in Birkenau, apple trees remained from the Polish farms destroyed during the camp’s expansion. Even today, a few of those apple trees still grow. When a kommando passed by such trees and a women prisoner picked an apple, if she was seen, she would be reported to be punished.