Otto Ambros was a fastidious man. His calculations were exact, his words carefully chosen, his fingernails always manicured. He wore his hair neatly oiled and parted. In addition to being Hitler’s favorite chemist, Ambros was the manager of IG Farben’s synthetic rubber and fuel factory at Auschwitz. With the Red Army bearing down, the Farben board members had ordered the destruction and removal of all classified paperwork; Ambros and colleague Walther Dürrfeld were at Auschwitz to do the job. In addition to being the plant manager of this hellish place, Ambros was the youngest member on Farben’s board of directors.
All over the camp, SS guards were destroying evidence. Crematoria II and III were being dismantled, and a plan to dynamite Crematoria V was in effect. Some of the SS officers were already fleeing on horseback, while others were preparing to evacuate prisoners for the death march. Whips cracked. Dogs barked. Tanks painted white for camouflage outside the camp rolled through the muddy streets. Rumors swirled: The Red Army was only a few miles away. A female chemist in Farben’s Buna-Werke Polymerization Department asked the prisoner and future world-renowned writer Primo Levi, a chemist by training, to fix her bicycle tire. After the war, Levi recalled how strange it was to hear a Farben employee use the word “please” with a Jewish inmate like himself.
Auschwitz was the Reich’s largest extermination center. As a concentration camp it consisted of three separate but symbiotic camps: Auschwitz I, the main camp; Auschwitz II, the Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria; and Auschwitz III, a labor-concentration camp run by the chemical giant IG Farben. Since April 7, 1942, IG Farben had been building the Reich’s largest chemical plant at Auschwitz, using a workforce of slave laborers selected from the Auschwitz train car platforms. Farben called their facility “IG Auschwitz.”
IG Auschwitz was the first corporate concentration camp in the Third Reich. The barracks in which the slave laborers lived and died was officially called Monowitz. “Those of us who lived there called it Buna,” recalls Gerhard Maschkowski, a survivor of the camp. Maschkowski was a nineteen-year-old Jewish boy spared the gas chamber because he was of use to IG Auschwitz as an electrician. That he was still alive in the second week of January 1945 was something of a miracle. He had arrived at Auschwitz on April 20, 1943, which meant that he had been there for a year and nine months. At Buna, the average lifespan of a slave laborer was three months. Many of Gerhard Maschkowski’s friends had long since been worked to death or had been murdered for minor infractions, like hiding a piece of food.
Gerhard Maschkowski remembers January 18, 1945, with clarity, because it was his last day at Auschwitz. It was still dark outside when the SS burst into the barracks. “They shouted, ‘Get up! March!’ They had large guns, thick jackets, and dogs,” Maschkowski recalls. He put on his shoes and hurried outside. There, nine thousand emaciated, starving inmates from Buna were lining up in neat rows. Maschkowski heard cannon fire in the distance and the crack of firearms close by. There was chaos all around. SS guards were burning evidence. Bonfires of papers sent ashes up into the dark sky. Snow fell fast, then faster. There was a blizzard on the way. The guards, dressed in warm coats and boots, waved submachine guns. “Dogs on leather leashes barked and snarled,” Gerhard Maschkowski recalls. Wearing thin pajamas, the prisoners at Buna-Monowitz began a death march toward the German interior. Within forty-eight hours, 60 percent of them would be dead.
Primo Levi was not part of the death march. A week before, he had contracted scarlet fever and had been sent to the infectious diseases ward. “He had a high temperature and a strawberry tongue,” remembered Aldo Moscati, the Italian doctor-prisoner who tended to him. “With a [104-degree] fever I was extremely feeble and could not even walk,” Primo Levi explained after the war. Lying supine in the infectious diseases ward, he listened to the sounds of the emptying camp.