The inner circle

Despite everything the SS was capable of doing, the more immediate threat to the inmates' survival fame from the class of prisoners selected by the SS to serve as Kapos. The essential idea of delegating power to prisoners was to destroy all sense of honour and human compassion among KZ inmates. The Kapos were victims and executioners at the same time. As victims, they were not exempt from the roll-calls on the Appellplatz that wore them down no less than others. Being, however, morally weak, and faced with the choice of dying or killing, they were content to murder others in the hope of saving themselves. Some of these myrmidons were murderers already. The first step in building up a Kapo class at Mauthausen had come in the very first week of the Anschluss: every prison and penitentiary in Austria was emptied of its criminals, those with suspended sentences were placed under arrest, and all were sent to Dachau, and from there, later in 1938, to the new camp at Mauthausen. It was these holders of the Green triangle, 'the founding members' as they grotesquely called themselves, who became the first Kapos and enjoyed all the privileges pertaining to club membership: alcohol, tobacco, free access to the 'Puff' (the camp brothel officially known as the Sonderbau), ¹ and the right to steal with impunity the rations and clothing of the inmates. ² The German Green Kapos would even react to one of Hitler's broadcast speeches by joining the SS in the Nazi salute and in singing 'Deutschland uber alles'. ³ The Reichsfuhrer-SS, in a speech he delivered to a group of generals at Sonthofen on 21 June 1944, could not have been more explicit: 'These 40 000 German criminals, I'll have you know, whether they are political or professional, make up - and here I'll ask you not to laugh - my "non-commissioned officer corps" for this entire society ... And from the moment that we are no longer satisfied with him, he ceases to be a Kapo and goes back to sleeping with the rest. He will be beaten to death on the first night, and that he knows only too well.' ⁴