Why should one doubt that in the vast German workshop which employed a score of millions, here and there some foreign workers were not abused but in the long run fared well? It would need to be someone wearing spectacles of pitch and groping in a Cimmerian night of prejudice and pique to assert that the German people are incapable of hospitality and generosity. The very fact that there were concentration camps in the land attests to the fact that not everybody accepted Hitler’s and Himmler’s crackpot master race ideology. However, even accepting Albin Schirmer’s affidavit at face value, it is but one little flower in a jungle of evidence establishing that only a very few foreign workers were so fortunate as to be showered with the care and comforts and allowed to revel and luxuriate in the liberties vouchsafed those who were so lucky as to be employed in the Hercules Works, Limited, at Nuernberg.
As against this idyllic picture of happiness in a powder plant or strength-through-joy in Nuernberg, there is recalled the image of the last witness at this trial. He also was a German, Joseph Krysiak, and he too worked in a war factory. In December 1940, he remarked in a conversation to some friends that if America entered the European conflict, Germany could not win. The ubiquitous Gestapo learned of his observation and he was committed to a concentration camp, from which he went daily to work at the Me [ssersmitt] 109 plant at Gusen I. His living conditions were a trifle less felicitous than those described by Schirmer. Krysiak worked twelve hours a day, he had coffee for breakfast, watery soup for lunch, and at night seven men shared a loaf of bread. If he did not reach the quota of work assigned him for the day, he was beaten. Later he was sent to another factory, and of working conditions there he said—
“We were working at Saint George, Gusen II, for twelve hours. Also, the transport to and from work and back to this camp occupied two to three hours as well, so that these people altogether had only four to five hours sleep under the worst imaginable conditions. Four people had to sleep in one bed.
“Q. Did you work seven days a week?
“A. Yes, and the day and night shift, and Sundays, too.” (T-2366.)
When asked what effect these conditions had on the health of the workers, he replied—
“The most dreadful effect, the majority died in Mauthausen and Gusen II. It was a rule no one was released, but transports which were filled were where detainees would die.”
And as to his own particular condition, he stated—
“All I can say now is that I suffer from TB and I am medically being treated, and this is what those five years did to me.
“Q. What was your condition before going to the concentration camp?