The 2nd of February 1943, Stalingrad, the Soviet Union. The German 6th army, after 5 months of
fierce fighting and heavy casualties, having exhausted their ammunition and food, finally
capitulates, making it the first of Hitler's field armies to surrender during World War II.
The battle for the city proves a decisive psychological turning point,
ending a string of German victories in the summer of 1942 and beginning the long retreat westward.
The Soviet army remains on the offensive and on the 27th of January 1945 enters Auschwitz,
the largest of the extermination centers, and liberates more than 7,000 remaining prisoners,
who are mostly ill and dying. It is estimated that a minimum 1.3 million
people were deported to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945 and of these, at least 1.1 million were
murdered. One of the main perpetrators of these atrocities is Heinrich Schwarz.
Heinrich Schwarz was born on the 14th of June 1906 in
Munich then part of the German Empire.
He originally worked as a book printer and after completing his training as a photographer,
Schwarz worked sporadically in this profession. Between 1926 and 1931 he was unemployed.
It was Germany’s economic collapse during the Great Depression, beginning in 1929
that most contributed to the Nazi Party’s success. The crisis resulted in widespread
unemployment and poverty and also led to an increase in crime. The resulting anger
and fear left the Germans vulnerable to arguments from both the extreme right and
left. One such German was Heinrich Schwarz who joined both the Nazi Party and the SS in 1931.
After Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power in January 1933,
Nazi propaganda became inescapable in Germany.
Joseph Goebbels, head of the new Propaganda Ministry, created a cult of personality that
glorified Hitler as Germany’s infallible savior. Nazi propaganda dominated the press, film, radio,
and public spaces. Portraits or statues of Hitler appeared everywhere, and every city and
town renamed a street or public space to honor him. In public, ordinary Germans were expected
to praise Hitler and give the so-called German greeting "Heil Hitler!". Propaganda permeated
school curricula as well and children learned odes praising Hitler’s leadership in public schools.
The first concentration camp - Dachau - was established in March 1933, less than 2 months
after Hitler became the chancellor. In the years between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime had brought
radical and daunting social, economic, and communal change to the German Jewish community.
Six years of Nazi-sponsored legislation had marginalized and disenfranchised Germany's
Jewish citizenry and had expelled Jews from the professions and from commercial life.
Following the Kristallnacht which was a series of coordinated violent riots against
the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories which occurred on the
9th – 10th of November 1938, thousands of Jews remained interned in concentration camps and
by early 1939, only about 16 percent of Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of any kind.
While in January 1933, some 522,000 Jews by religious definition lived in Germany,
approximately 304,000 of them emigrated during the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship.
Before 1933 and 1939, Heinrich Schwarz got married and quickly rose through the ranks of the SS.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. The German
invasion of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands started on the 10th of May 1940
and became known as the Battle of France. These countries were conquered within 6
weeks. Schwarz served with the Waffen-SS on the Western Front until October 1940,
when he was transferred to the SS-Concentration Camps Inspectorate which was the central SS
administrative and managerial authority for the concentration camps of the Third Reich.
During 1940-1941, Schwarz was deployed at both the Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen
concentration camps and in September 1941 he was transferred to German-occupied Poland and
posted to the administrative office of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
His initial duties included working as adjutant to the camp's commandant,
Rudolf Höss. Schwarz also served as director of the camp's Work Assignment Department IIIa which
dealt with all matters connected with labor assignments for the prisoners in the camp.
In November 1943, due to difficulties in managing the growing complex and the
increasingly distinct functions of each part of it, the Auschwitz camps were divided as follows:
- Auschwitz I which was the main camp - Auschwitz II-Birkenau which included
all camps, the so-called building sections in Birkenau as well as sub-camps at agricultural
and livestock farms - and Auschwitz III
In December 1943 Heinrich Schwarz was given command of Auschwitz III in which
he established the reign of terror which let to death of thousands of prisoners. The tasks
of the Auschwitz III camp mainly consisted of renting the slave labor of prisoners to German
companies and therefore it included sub-camps established at the nearby industrial enterprises.
More than 40 Auschwitz sub-camps, exploiting the prisoners as slave laborers, were founded,
mainly at various sorts of German industrial plants and farms, between 1942 and 1944.
Auschwitz III also known as Monowitz or Monowitz-Buna was a sub-camp and
from November 1943 a concentration camp to which all the “industrial” sub-camps in the Auschwitz
complex were subordinated. It was established at the site of the Polish village of Monowice,
whose inhabitants were expelled and buildings razed. The SS charged IG Farben, which build its
factories here to produce synthetic rubber, three Reichsmarks (RM) per day for unskilled workers,
four (RM) per hour for skilled workers, and one and one-half (RM) for children.
While in November 1942 there were more than 2,000 prisoners in the camp, it housed almost
11,000 inmates in the late summer of 1944. There were so many prisoners arriving in Monowitz and
space to house them so limited that in the Autumn of 1944, 1,600 men slept in tents.
The prisoners lived in 59 wooden barracks, and one made of concrete panels. Each had
56 three-story wooden bunks for sleeping and a central heating installation. The
camp lacked sufficient latrines, baths, and a disinfection chamber for prisoners clothing.
The toughest work for prisoners was for those employed in the transfer
of construction materials, earthworks, transport of narrow-gauge railway wagons filled with earth
and the laying of power cables. The Kommandos, whose working conditions were less exhausting,
were for those prisoners who worked as carpenters, roofers, painters, electricians.
During working hours, there was only one break, during which prisoners were given
so-called “Buna-Soup”, prepared in a plant soup kitchen, and later brought to the workplace.
At the beginning of 1944, the morning roll calls were abandoned. In May of the same year,
the evening roll calls were also abandoned. The prisoners went out into the square and
then immediately off to work, with the counting only taking place at the gate.
The camp prisoners described Heinrich Schwarz as moody,
unpredictable and one of the worst concentration camp leaders. He was
feared not only by the prisoners but also by the SS men of whom he had 440 at his disposal.
Martin Sztern, a former camp prisoner,
recalled after the war how the SS and kapos had treated the inmates:
“Our camp was closed in by a wire fence, and also by wires under high voltage. While I was
in the camp, eight people were hanged and all the prisoners had to be present and watch the
execution. We were punished in various ways, among others by being forced to stand for up to four
hours in the worst weather. We also were forced to lie on specially constructed appliances, whereupon
we would be beaten with rubber truncheons. At night they would herd people outdoors, into
the cold and the rain, making them bathe and then running them back to the blocks, and this caused
a great many to fall ill. During work prisoners were maltreated, hit in the face and kicked.
Tens of people died in the hospital each day, for they received no food or drugs. People would come
to the hospital because they were exhausted, or had been recently whipped or tortured”.
As a result of hard labor, insufficient food, and in the winter because of insufficient clothing
and the poor state of their shoes, the strength of Monowitz prisoners dropped rapidly and they
fell ill. The weak and sick were sent to the camp hospital, where every two or three weeks
the camp doctor carried out selections and those in worse physical condition were sent
to Auschwitz- Birkenau, where most underwent re-selection and ended up in the gas chambers.
One British prisoner of war who worked with the prisoners from the Monowitz in the I.G.
Farben plant and who witnessed their condition and the brutal treatment they received from the
SS guards and civilian overseers testified after the war saying: “The prisoners were collapsing
from sheer weakness every day. One could hardly walk through the different parts of the factory
without witnessing some inmate dropping to the ground. Those that did were often beaten
and kicked and told to get back to work. It was pitiful to see them struggle to their feet and
try to stand up straight because of the fear that they would be declared unfit for work.”
The basic sentences for various offenses recorded by the SS were:
from 4 to 10 nights in a standing cell in which one could not lie down but only stand,
penal labour for 10 consecutive Sundays or exercises and flogging with sticks.
Some Polish prisoners managed to escape from Monowitz and after they did, harsh reprisals
followed. The standard procedure was that after such an escape every tenth prisoner
was pulled out of line, separated and then transported on trucks to Birkenau to be
gassed or their fellow inmates had to witness the spectacle of public executions by hanging.
The British prisoners of war, held several hundred meters west of the Monowitz-Buna,
could hear and see what was going on in the camp. They could hear shots
at night and see the bodies of men who had been hanged during the day.
In total, 1,670 prisoners were murdered at the building site or died in the sub-camp hospital,
and 11,000 were sent to Auschwitz and Birkenau, where the majority of them
were killed with a lethal injection of phenol or in the gas chambers.
As a camp commandant, Heinrich Schwarz was responsible for brutal treatment
of prisoners and the conditions within the camp.
Schwarz remained in the camp until January 1945 when Soviet forces approached the
Auschwitz concentration camp complex, and the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps.
These forced marches of concentration camp prisoners became known as the death marches.
The prisoners had to march over long distances under guard and in extremely harsh conditions.
The prisoners of Monowitz-Buna were evacuated on foot to Gliwice,
from where they were transported by rail to the Buchenwald and Mauthausen camps.
Heinrich Schwarz was sent to Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp which was the only
concentration camp established by the Germans in the territory of pre-war France,
about 31 miles southwest of Strasbourg. Prisoners worked in nearby granite quarries,
in construction projects, and in the maintenance of the camp.
There were about 50 subcamps in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp system and by the fall
of 1944, there were about 7,000 prisoners in the main camp and more than 20,000 in the subcamps.
In 1944, concentration camp prisoners became increasingly important in German armaments
production. The Germans used prisoners throughout the Natzweiler-Struthof camp
system as forced laborers to produce arms and to construct underground manufacturing facilities
which became necessary due to Allied air raids on German industrial complexes.
With the approach of Allied forces in August–September 1944, the SS authorities
evacuated the main camp at Natzweiler-Struthof and distributed the prisoners among its subcamps.
In April 1945, when Heinrich Schwarz was the commandant of Natzweiler-Struthof,
the Germans disbanded the subcamps and sent most of the prisoners on forced evacuation marches over
long distances and under brutal conditions toward the Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany.
From May 1941 to March 1945, between 19,000 and
20,000 people died in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp system.
After the end of the war, the justice finally caught up with Schwarz.
He was captured and tried by the French military tribunal at Rastatt trial. He
was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with atrocities committed
during his brief tenure as commandant of Natzweiler-Struthof and sentenced to death.
Schwarz was 40 years old when he was shot by a firing squad
near Baden-Baden on the 20th of March 1947. There were no tears shed for Heinrich Schwarz.
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