Commandant of Auschwitz

APPENDIX 9 Glücks

Glücks originally came from Dusseldorf and had spent several years before the First World War in Argentina. When war broke out he got through the British control by smuggling himself on board a Norwegian ship and eventually reported for military service. He served throughout the war as an artillery officer. After the war he was appointed a liaison officer with the armistice commission, and later on joined a Freikorps in the Ruhr district. Up to the time when Hitler assumed power, he was engaged in business activities.

Glücks was one of the early members of the Party and the SS. In the SS he at first spent some years as a staff officer in the Senior Sector West, after which he commanded a regiment of the general SS in Schneidemühl. In 1936 he joined Eicke as a staff officer on the Concentration Camp Inspectorate.

Glucks’s attitude of mind was that of the typical office-worker who has no knowledge of practical matters. He imagined that he could direct everything from his office desk. Under Eicke, he scarcely made his presence felt in connection with the camps, and the occasional visits which he paid to individual concentration camps, in Eicke’s company, had no practical effect on him, for he saw nothing and learned nothing.

Nor had he any influence with Eicke in this connection in his capacity as staff officer, for Eicke handled these matters himself, mostly through personal contact with the commandants during his inspections of the camps.

But Eicke held him in great esteem and Glucks’s opinions on questions dealing with personnel were practically decisive, to the disadvantage of the commandant’s staff. Various commandants had repeatedly tried to cold-shoulder Glücks, but his status with Eicke remained unassailable.

On the outbreak of war, as I have already stated, the active service guards were transferred for military duties and their places were taken by reservists from the General SS.

In addition, new formations of the Death’s Head units were built up from the younger age groups, which were intended at first to be used for strengthening the police and as occuontion troops. Eicke became “General Inspector of the Death’s Head Formations and of the Concentration Camps,” with Glücks as his chief of staff. When Eicke was given the job of building up the Death’s Head Division, the general inspectorate of the Death’s Head formations was taken over by the administrative office of the Waffen SS under Jüttner, and Glücks became Inspector of Concentration Camps and also subordinate to the administrative office (later the headquarters office) of the Waffen SS. In 1941 the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps became incorporated in the Economic Administration Head Office as Department D.

The Reichsführer SS never had any particular confidence in Glücks and had often considered employing him in a different capacity. But Eicke and Pohl always warmly supported him, and so he retained his position as Inspector.

The appointment of Glücks as Inspector made no difference to the camps. Glücks always felt that Eicke’s arrangements and his orders and instructions should not be disturbed, even when they had obviously become out of date. Moreover he believed that his position as Inspector was only a temporary one. He did not consider himself justified in making the smallest alteration in the existing organization of the camp without the permission of the Reichsführer SS. Any changes suggested by the commandants were either turned down or shelved. During the whole time he held office he had an almost unbelievable fear of the Reichsführer SS. A telephone call from Himmler would throw him into the utmost confusion. If he had to pay a personal visit to Himmler, he would be useless for anything for several days beforehand. His otherwise imperturbable calm would completely forsake him when Himmler requested him to forward reports or comments.

He therefore avoided everything that might lead to a discussion with Himmler, or even to a refusal, or, worse still, a reprimand.

He was never seriously perturbed over incidents that occurred in the camps, so long as they did not have to be reported to Himmler.

Escapes had to be reported, and when one of these occurred, he was given no rest. The first question he asked when work started in the morning was always: “How many have got away?” Auschwitz gave him more trouble than any of the other camps.

His persistent fear of Himmler determined, quite naturally, his whole attitude toward the concentration camps, which, roughly speaking was: do what you like, so long as it doesn’t get to the Reichsführer SS.

When he was subordinated to Pohl, he breathed again. Someone stronger than him was now able to deflect the blows. But he never lost his fear of the Reichsführer SS, since the latter would still ask him for reports or summon him to his presence, although Pohl helped him out of many of his difficulties.

He only inspected the camps when there was some very important reason for doing so, or at the request of the Reichsführer SS or of Pohl.

As he often said, he observed nothing during his inspections and he was always glad if the commandant did not spend too long in dragging him around the camp. “It is the same in every camp. I am never shown what they don’t want me to see and the rest I have seen so often that I no longer find it interesting.” He far preferred to sit in the officers’ mess and talk about every possible subject except those which were troubling the commandants.

Glücks possessed an unquenchable Rhenish humor and he saw the funny side of everything. He made the most serious matters sound comic, and he laughed over them and forgot them and made no decisions about them. It was impossible to be angry with him, for it was the way he was made.

He never took me seriously. He regarded my perpetual worries and complaints about Auschwitz as grossly exaggerated and he was astonished if he heard from Pohl or Kammler confirmation of my views. He never gave me any kind of help, although he could have, for example, by transferring the officers and junior officers who had become intolerable in Auschwitz. But he wanted to spare the other commandants. He would do anything to avoid trouble. And Auschwitz brought nothing but trouble to disturb the holy peace of the Inspector of Concentration Camps.

Glücks’s inspections of Auschwitz were worthless in practice, and never achieved any results. He had no liking for the place. He found it too straggling and too badly arranged, and it caused him too much unpleasantness. Also the commandant always had so many complaints and requests to make. On two occasions Glücks wanted to get rid of me, or to put a higher ranking officer over me, but he was afraid to do so because of the Reichsführer SS. This was on account of the large number of escapes, which exceeded anything so far experienced in concentration camps, and which were causing him so much trouble with the Reichsführer SS. Auschwitz was a perpetual thorn in Glücks’s flesh because it was troublesome and because Himmler took too much interest in it.

He did not want to have anything to do with the extermination actions against the Jews, nor did he like hearing about them. The fact that the catastrophic conditions, which later arose, were directly connected with these actions, was something he could not understand, and he adopted the same helpless attitude toward them as he did toward all the difficulties in all the camps and mostly left them to the commandants to settle as best they could. “Don’t ask me so much” was the reply so often heard at his conferences with the commandants, “You know much better than I do.” He often asked Liebehenschel just before one of his conferences, “What on earth shall I say to the commandants? I know nothing.” That was the Inspector of Concentration Camps, the camp commandants’ superior officer, who v/as supposed to give directions and advice on any difficulties which might arise and for which the war alone was responsible! Later on the commandants turned to Pohl for assistance. Glücks very often resented this.

Glücks was too weak, and he did not like to offend his subordinates. In particular he was too indulgent toward the older commandants and officers, who were his favorites. Officers who should have been brought before the SS tribunal, or at least removed from concentration camp service, were retained by him out of sheer good nature.

It was good nature, too, which made him forgive many failures on the part of his staff.

When, after Liebehenschel’s departure to Auschwitz, Maurer became Glücks’s deputy and at the same time I became head of Department DI, Maurer and I rid headquarters of most of the officers and men of the staff, who up to then had been considered, indispensable. There was a certain amount of argument with Glücks over this, but Maurer finally threatened to go to Pohl, and Glücks gave way with a heavy heart.

Gradually he handed over the reins, which he had never held very tightly, to Maurer. Apart from Maurer, whom he had to check when he considered his actions too severe, his only worry then was the Reichsführer SS.

Glücks was the opposite to Eicke in every respect. Both held extreme views and both were responsible for developing the concentration camps in a way that inevitably ended in tragedy.