I went back to the Haus muddy, wet, and tired. Kraus was there, having a drink with some of his colleagues from the SD. He came and sat down with me: “How are things?” he asked.—“Not so good. There are going to be needless losses. Bär could have done a lot more.”—“Bär couldn’t care less. You know he has been named Kommandant at Mittelbau?” I raised my eyebrows: “No, I didn’t know. Who will supervise the closing of the camp?”—“Me. I’ve already received the order to set up an office, after the evacuation, to manage the administrative dissolution.”—“Congratulations,” I said.—“Oh,” he replied, “don’t think I’m happy about it. Frankly, I’d have preferred something else.”—“And your immediate tasks?”—“We’re waiting for the camps to be emptied. Afterward, we’ll start.”—“What will you do with the inmates who are left?” He shrugged and gave an ironic little smile: “What do you think? The Obergruppenführer gave the order to liquidate them. No one must fall alive into the hands of the Bolsheviks.”—“I see.” I finished my drink. “Well, good luck. I don’t envy you.”

Things got gradually worse. The next morning, the columns kept on leaving the camps through the main gates, the guards were still manning the line of watchtowers, order reigned; but a few kilometers farther on, the columns began to grow longer and unravel as the weaker inmates slowed down. More and more corpses could be seen. It was snowing heavily, but it wasn’t too cold, for me in any case, I had seen much worse in Russia, but I was warmly dressed, I was traveling in a heated car, and the guards who had to walk had pullovers, good coats, and boots; as for the Häftlinge, they must have felt pierced through to the bone. The guards were getting more and more frightened, they shouted at the inmates and beat them. I saw one guard beating an inmate who had stopped to defecate; I reprimanded him, then asked the Untersturmführer who was in command of the column to place him under arrest; he replied that he didn’t have enough men to do that. In the villages, the Polish peasants, who were waiting for the Russians, watched the inmates pass by in silence, or shouted something at them in their language; the guards treated harshly those who tried to hand out bread or food; they were nervous, the villages were swarming with partisans, as everyone knew, they were afraid of being attacked. But at night, at the stopping points I visited, there still was no soup or bread, and many inmates had already finished their ration. I figured that at this rate half or two-thirds of the columns would drop off before reaching their destination. I ordered Piontek to drive me to Breslau. Because of the bad weather and the columns of refugees, I didn’t arrive until after midnight. Schmauser was already asleep and Boesenberg, they told me at HQ, had gone to Kattowitz, near the front. A poorly shaven officer showed me an operations map: the Russian positions, he explained, were mostly theoretical, since they were advancing so quickly they couldn’t keep the markings up to date; as for our divisions still shown on the map, some no longer existed at all, while others, according to fragmentary information, must have been moving as roving Kessels behind the Russian lines, trying to meet up with our retreating forces. Tarnowitz and Cracow had fallen in the afternoon. The Soviets were also entering eastern Prussia in force, and there was talk of worse atrocities than in Hungary. It was a catastrophe. But Schmauser, when he received me in midmorning, seemed calm and sure of himself. I described the situation to him and set out my demands: rations and wood for fires at the stopover points, and carts to transport the inmates who were too exhausted, so they could be cared for and put back to work instead of liquidated: “I’m not talking about people sick with typhus or tuberculosis, Obergruppenführer, but just the ones who aren’t up to the cold and hunger.”—“Our soldiers too are cold and hungry,” he retorted sharply. “The civilians too are cold and hungry. You don’t seem to realize the situation, Obersturmbannführer. We have a million and a half refugees on the roads. That’s much more important than your inmates.”—“Obergruppenführer, these inmates, as a labor force, are a vital resource for the Reich. We cannot allow ourselves, in the present situation, to lose twenty or thirty thousand of them.”—“I have no resources to allocate to you.”—“Then at least give me an order so I will be obeyed by the column leaders.” I typed out an order, in several copies for Elias and Darius, and Schmauser signed them in the afternoon; I left again immediately. The roads were horribly congested, endless columns of refugees on foot or in wagons, isolated trucks from the Wehrmacht, lost soldiers. In the villages, mobile canteens from the NSV distributed soup. I reached Auschwitz late; my colleagues had returned earlier and were already asleep. Bär, I was told, had left the camp, probably for good. I went to see Kraus and found him with Schurz, the head of the PA. I had brought along Drescher’s Armagnac, and we drank some together. Kraus explained that he had had Kremas I and II dynamited that morning, leaving IV till the last minute; he had also begun the liquidations that had been ordered, shooting two hundred Jewesses who had stayed in the Frauenlager in Birkenau; but Springorum, the President of the Kattowitz province, had taken away his Sonderkommando for urgent tasks and he didn’t have enough men to continue. All the fit inmates had left the camps, but there remained, according to him, within the entire complex, more than eight thousand inmates who were sick or too weak to walk. Massacring these people seemed to me, in the present state of things, perfectly idiotic and pointless, but Kraus had his orders, and it didn’t fall within my jurisdiction; and I had enough problems as it was with the columns of evacuees.

I spent the next four days running after the columns. I felt as if I were struggling against a mudslide: I spent hours advancing, and when I finally found an officer in charge and showed him my orders, he would apply my instructions as grudgingly as possible. Here and there I managed to organize distributions of rations (elsewhere, too, they were being distributed without my intervention); I had the blankets of the dead collected to give to the living; I was able to confiscate carts from Polish peasants and pile exhausted inmates on them. But the next day, when I found these same columns again, the officers had had shot all those who could no longer get up, and the carts were almost empty. I hardly looked at the Häftlinge, it wasn’t their individual fate that concerned me, but their collective fate, and in any case they all looked alike, they were a gray, dirty mass, stinking despite the cold, undifferentiated, you could only grasp isolated details, the colored badges, a bare head or bare feet, a jacket different from the others; men and women could be distinguished only with difficulty. Sometimes I glimpsed their eyes, under the folds of the blanket, but they never returned a gaze, they were empty, completely eaten away by the need to walk and keep moving forward. The farther away we got from the Vistula, the colder it was and the more inmates we lost. Sometimes, to make room for the Wehrmacht, columns had to wait for hours by the side of the road, or else cut across frozen fields, struggle to cross the innumerable canals and embankments, before finding the road again. As soon as a column paused, the inmates, dying of thirst, fell to their knees to lick the snow. Each column, even the ones where I had put carts, was followed be a team of guards who, with a bullet or a blow from a rifle butt, finished off the inmates who had fallen or simply stopped; the officers left up to the municipalities the job of burying the bodies. As always in this kind of situation, the natural brutality of some was aroused, and their murderous zeal went beyond orders; their young officers, as frightened as they, controlled them with difficulty. It wasn’t just the simple soldiers who were losing all sense of limits. On the third or fourth day, I went to find Elias and Darius on the roads; they were inspecting a column from Laurahütte whose itinerary had changed because of the swiftness of the advance of the Russians, who were coming not just from the east but also from the north, almost reaching Gross Strehlitz, according to my information, a little before Blechhammer. Elias was with the column’s commander, a young, very nervous and agitated Oberscharführer; when I asked him where Darius was, he told me he had gone to the rear and was looking after the sick. I joined him to see what he was doing and found him in the process of finishing off inmates with gunshots. “What the hell are you doing?” He saluted me and replied without losing countenance: “I’m following your orders, Obersturmbannführer. I carefully picked out the sick or weak Häftlinge and had the ones who can still get better loaded onto carts. We’ve just liquidated the ones who are completely unfit.”—“Untersturmführer,” I spat out in an icy voice, “liquidations are not your job. Your orders are to limit them as much as possible, and certainly not to participate in them. Understood?” I also reprimanded Elias; Darius, after all, was under his responsibility.