Programme four -
Corruption
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"If a lot of stuff is piled up together, then you can easily stash
away something for your personal gain. Stealing things for yourself
was absolutely common practice in Auschwitz." Oskar Gröning,
SS garrison, Auschwitz
By 1943, 45 sub-camps are dotted round the Auschwitz region, most providing
slave labour for armaments factories and other industrial concerns.
At the centre of this web is the giant camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau with
another, even more sinister, source of income - clothes and valuables
taken from Jews arriving there to be gassed.
The Nazi leadership naturally intends such wealth to fill the coffers
of the Third Reich in Berlin, but much of it actually stays at the camp,
as the SS at Auschwitz have their fingers well and truly in the till.
And despite it contravening the Nazis' strict racial purity laws, sexual
liaisons in the camp between the SS and prisoners are also occurring.
There are even love affairs.
The corruption is clearly out of control. An SS investigator arrives
to root out the offenders and uncovers clear evidence of misdemeanours
by the SS.
Rather than being disgraced, Höss is promoted to a desk job in Concentration
Camp Administration in Berlin.
Himmler agrees to formalise the role of sex for privileged prisoners
by opening a brothel in the main camp. He believes it will help to motivate
the workforce.
Meanwhile, Mengele uses the inmates at Auschwitz to carry out horrific
pseudo-scientific experiments. He is particularly interested in children,
especially twins, and uses them to research the power of genetic inheritance,
an area of interest to many Nazi scientists.
Those interviewed in Corruption include a woman who
tells how Mengele carried out horrifying experiments on her; a member
of the SS garrison who fondly recalls the friendships he made at the
camp; a prisoner who was one of the few survivors of a daring escape
bid from Sobibor death camp; a Slovak Jewess who still remembers the
SS man who fell in love with her; and a Polish political prisoner who
had personal access to the Auschwitz brothel.
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