Free The Theory and Practice of Hell by Eugen Kogon Page A

received honey and jam, the monkeys mashed potatoes with milk, oat flakes, zwieback and white bread. The whole installation had to be carefully maintained by trained gardeners. The permanent falconry detail consisted of six to ten men. Goring, Reich Huntsman in Chief, never even set eyes on this park. But the SS had special pamphlets printed, advertising the attraction in Weimar and vicinity, and extracted an admission price of one mark a head. The riding hall for Frau Koch was about 120 by 300 feet in size and at least 60 feet high. It held a tanbark ring and the walls were surfaced with mirrors. Construction took place at such a mad pace that some thirty prisoners died of accidents or exhaustion. Construction costs ran to about 250,000 marks. When the hall had been finished, Frau Koch used it several times a week for morning rides, each time for a quarter or half hour, the SS band being required to furnish music from a special platform. After the trial of her husband,
    Frau Koch was admitted to the police jail in Weimar and the riding hall was used as storage depot.
    In the area outside the prisoner compound there were, at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, special barracks or small plain houses in which certain prominent personages were in terned. These prisoners were kept from all contact with the others. The SS seems to have been anxious to counter rumors that these well-known figures were in concentration camps. In Sachsenhausen several years were spent in this fashion by the former Austrian Chancellor, Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, and his second wife who voluntarily shared his detention, as well as by several German general officers who had fallen into disfavor with Hitler.
    In Buchenwald the isolation barracks for celebrities were hidden deep in the woods, opposite the SS officers’ resi dences. It was protected by a solid ten-foot stockade and by a crew of twelve SS guards. In the final stage, just before the residents were evacuated to Bavaria on orders from Himmler, they numbered fifty-four, including the former leader of the German Social Democratic party, Rudolf Breitscheid, and his wife; the Italian Princess Mafalda of Hesse with her servant; Maria Ruhnar, a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect;
     

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    Fritz Thyssen, German industrialist and one of the chief financiers of the Nazi party in the early days—he had already been in custody for four and a half years, according to his own statement, first in a mental institution, then in Sachsenhausen; Rochling, another industrialist; six members of the family of Count von Stauffenberg1; General von Falkenhausen; five cabinet members of the Hungarian provisional government; the wife of the German ambassador von Hassel; Frau Goerdeler2 with her children; the wife of General Lindemann, executed after July 20, 1944; at one time the former French Premier, Lfcon Blum; and the wives of several German labor leaders with their children.
    Besides this building there was at Buchenwald the so-called Pine Grove, a group of several wooden barracks where 140 to 200 Rumanians of the Iron Guard were sheltered. Originally they had lived in an isolation block of the compound proper. In the Pine Grove they were kept busy as precision mechanics. After a number of them had been killed in the air raid on Buchenwald, they were transferred to Hohenlychen on orders from Himmler.
    The SS residential settlements were generally placed around the outskirts of the headquarters area, two or three miles away, at most pleasant locations. They were, of course, con structed by prisoner labor. These handsome one-and two-family houses, each with its own garden, were occupied by lower ranking SS officers, not deemed important enough to live in the headquarters area, and by the permanently assigned SS noncoms.
    At Buchenwald the south slope of the Ettersberg was
    somewhat less exposed to the weather than was the rest of the camp. There the prisoners had to build an asphalt road named