Paulheald wrote:For obvious reasons I have come across very little in the way of description of what it was like to be an SS staff member at Auschwitz. I guess that as there are very few of them left alive now; either they cannot remember or prefer to stay shtum on the subject. Has anybody got any details of what the off duty life was like inside Auschwitz for the camp staff?
Hi Paul,
Last week at the Auschwitz museum I bought a little book published last year, that I thought would cover just this subject. "The Private Lives of the Auschwitz SS," by Piotr Setkiewicz, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (2014), ISBN 978-83-7704-075-1. However, I found that, although the book is interesting, it is just a collection of interviews done in the 1970s, of Polish girls who worked in various SS households around Auschwitz when they were teenagers. It does not have much info at all about the SS men themselves, more about their wives and children. There are some interesting details - such as, the head of the Zentralbauleitung, Karl Bischoff, and his wife did not get along at all, and when Bischoff was away from home (frequently), his wife spent a lot of time drinking and partying at the SS officers club. The Bischoffs had a lot of gold and valuables - presumably looted from the prisoners - that they took with them when they evacuated before the Soviets arrived. Just little things like that in the book.
It seems that I ran across a footnote somewhere of a better book on the subject, but I can't recall where I saw it.
