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15. Priorities
- State University of New York Press
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15 PRIORITIES Our new quarters are in the home of a former SS officer on SS Strasse, where, after a quiet supper of C rations and coffee -nobody complains tonight-Rosenbloom, Howcroft, and I get down to business. They have had a busy day too. In addition to their inspections, they have been talking with 7th Army, Military Government, and civilian affairs officers, as well as certain knowledgeable inmates who are members of an organization , the International Prisoners' Committee (lPC). If this group is effective, says Rosenbloom, then we have the nucleus for an internal administrative structure. Very interesting men, he says; he promises to tell us about them later. We learn from him that there had been many "honorary" prisoners in the camp: Leon Blum, the former French premier, and his wife; Kurt von Schuschnigg, the former Austrian chancellor , and his wife and child; Stalin's son, Jacob, supposedly captured in 1941; many others. They are not in the camp now. G-5 is very anxious to know what happened to them. Some of the inmates say they are probably dead-that they were evacuated from the camp several days before liberation. A death march, the same day that 6,000 ordinary prisoners were removed , for the same purpose. If we hear anything about these notables, we are to let Rosenbloom know at once. For the moment, he continues, we are to concentrate on the census figures supplied by the IPC; he has three mimeographed sets of these papers. I hope they are more accurate than the ones we studied in Schwabach. My copy is on cheap, flimsy white paper; the edges are beginning to fray. The first page lists the number of prisoners in each 96 I block, and in the prison hospital, a total of 32,600, of whom 376 are women. (We have heard that most of the women are political prisoners; some are alleged to be prostitutes.) The bottom of the page carries the red stamp of the camp secretary, and his indecipherable signature. The same stamp is on the bottom of page two of the census report, which provides us with nationality information. Poles predominate in the camp-about 9,200. There are 4,200 Russians, 4,000 French, 2,900 Yugoslavs, 2,200 Italians, 1,600 Czechs, 1,200 Germans, 900 Belgians, and about 600 each of Dutch and Hungarians. I am surprised to learn that there are also about 200 Spaniards in the camp. There are the same number of Greeks and Austrians , and about 100 each of Croats, Luxembourgers, Norwegians, and Albanians. A handful of others from the Balkans are also here, people who identify themselves as Serbs and Slovaks. Every country in Europe is represented except Monaco. There are small numbers of people from Denmark, Great Britain , Estonia, Bulgaria, Portugal, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Malta, Armenia, Switzerland, and Finland. There are a few who say they are from Alsace-Lorraine, and others who label themselves as Annex-Germans or Sudetens. Other countries represented are Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. There are supposed to be two Chinese in nearby satellite camps. Rosenbloom explains: he has found out that many or most concentration camps had subsidiary units filled with prisoners used as slave laborers in regional factories. Dachau, for example, had satellite units as far away as Augsberg-30 miles distant. One of the inmates had told Rosenbloom that there were 70,000 prisoners in the Dachau camp system at the time of liberation. According to the census report, there are six Americans in the camp. I do not meet them. I hear that most of them were men who had lived in Germany for many years. One, however, was a POW, a Major Rene J. Guiraud from Cicero, Illinois. Captured about eight months earlier, he was brought to Dachau where he lost fifty pounds. He was quoted as saying that he worked in the hospital, helping treat prisoners who had been clawed by the savage dogs of the SS troopers-some had been brought to the hospital in a state of unconsciousness. For excitement, said Priorities I 97 the major, a guard would set his dog on a prisoner, "just for a little sport." 1 The figures show only 2,700 Jews in the camps. They are not listed as members of a separate group, but included in the national figures. We are surprised by the small number. Several explanations are given. One is that, by this time, most of the European Jews...