A clip from the end of The Young Lions.
Running a concentration camp is not a picnic, believe me. With all the gas chambers, target ranges, doctors with their experiments. I had an extermination quota of 1,500 people per day. Jews, Poles, Russians, French, political prisoners. And I had only 260 men to do it. Still I managed it. Then they sent [unclear] from Berlin. Inspectors running, shouting. "In Auschwitz they killed 20,000 per day!"
[phone rings]
I know who it is. It's Berlin again. For the fourth time today.
[answers]
Yes? Yes. Very near. A few miles. I told you. Alright, I didn't tell you. I told whoever it was that called. I have ten men left. How can I kill everybody in the camp? Don't you understand? The equipment is not working. Nothing is working. I don't care what they did in Buchenwald! I am here alone, and I have no personnel left!
[hangs up]
You know what this is, this phonecall? They want me to kill every man, woman, and child in the camp before the Americans get here. 6,000 people. And the man who asked me to do this? This same man will walk the streets free, and they will come to him, the Americans, the Russians, and he will say, "I never heard of concentration camps." He will say, "There never was a national policy to kill 12 million people. The SS invented it. Nobody in the government ever heard of it." And I'll be here trying to explain to the Americans. You know, the Americans may not understand what they see here.
Apparently the fiction writers of this period still believed that:
- Gas chambers and medical experiments were in every camp.
- The bodies of the dead found at Buchenwald were executed.
- It somehow made sense to give a secret execution order at the
end of the war.
But I am surprised to see "12 million" here. I now wonder where that number originates from.
