For Kanada was a commercial enterprise. Every item that was not broken was collected, sorted, stored and repackaged for domestic consumption back in the Fatherland. In one month alone, some 824 freight containers were transported by rail from Auschwitz back to the Old Reich , and those were just the ones carrying textiles and leather goods. Walter could see this traffic for himself, how a goods train would pull up every weekday to be loaded with stolen property. It could be high-quality men’s shirts on a Monday, fur coats on a Tuesday, children’s wear on a Wednesday. Nothing would be allowed to go to waste. Even the unusable clothes were sorted, then graded: grade one, grade two, grade three, with that last category, the worst, shipped off to paper factories, where the garments would be stripped back to their basic fibres and recycled. If there was even a drop of value, the Nazis would squeeze it out. Murder and robbery went hand in hand .
Some of these goods would be distributed for free to Germans in need, perhaps via the Winterhilfeswerke, the winter relief fund. A mother in Düsseldorf whose husband was off fighting on the eastern front might have her spirits lifted by the arrival of a thick winter coat or new shoes for the children – so long as she did not look too closely at the marks indicating the place where the yellow star had been torn off or think too hard about the children who had worn those shoes before.
Besides the women’s clothing and underwear and children’s wear, racially pure Germans back home were eligible for featherbeds, quilts, woollen blankets, shawls, umbrellas, walking sticks, Thermos flasks, earmuffs, combs, leather belts, pipes and sunglasses, as well as mirrors, suitcases and prams from the abundant supply that had caught Walter’s eye. There were so many prams that just shifting one batch, running into the hundreds, to the freight yard – pushed in the regular Auschwitz fashion , namely in rows of five – took a full hour. Ethnic German settlers in the newly conquered lands might also get a helping hand, in the form of furniture and household items, perhaps pots, pans and utensils. Victims of Allied bombing raids, those who had lost their homes, were also deemed worthy of sharing in the Kanada bounty: they might receive tablecloths or kitchenware. Watches, clocks, pencils, electric razors, scissors, wallets and flashlights: they would be repaired if necessary and despatched to troops on the front line . The fighter pilots of the Luftwaffe were not to miss out: they were given fountain pens that had once inscribed the words and thoughts of Jews.
A few items would find a new owner on the spot. Those SS men who could get away with it, accompanied by their wives, would treat themselves to a trip to Kanada, dipping into the treasure trove for whatever took their fancy, whether it be a smart cigarette case for him or a stylish dress for her. The place was brimming with luxuries for every possible taste.
Still, it was not these delights that gave Kanada its economic value or that took Auschwitz closer to its founding goal of becoming a moneymaking venture. A clue to the greater treasure was in that bench of women squeezing toothpaste tubes, looking for jewels or rolls of banknotes. Even beyond the high-end goods, Kanada was awash with precious stones, precious metals and old-fashioned cash.
Walter saw it with his own eyes, often barely concealed, stashed by victims in their luggage. It might be in dollars or English pounds, the hard currency that deportees had got in exchange for their property: their homes or their businesses, sold at giveaway prices in the hurried hours before their expulsion from the countries where their families had lived for generations. There was a team of clearance workers who specialised in finding money and jewels, but everyone in Kanada had the argot: ‘napoleons’ were the gold coins that carried the image of the French emperor, ‘swines’ the ones that bore, even a quarter-century after the Bolshevik revolution, the face of the Russian tsar. There seemed to be cash from every corner of the globe, not only francs and lire, but Cuban pesos, Swedish Croons, Egyptian pounds.
Walter had never seen wealth like it, a colossal fortune tossed note by note and coin by coin into a trunk set aside for the purpose. All the stolen valuables went into that trunk: the gold watches, the diamonds, the rings, as well as the money. By the end of a shift, the case would often be so full that the SS man would be unable to close it. Walter would watch as the Nazi in charge pressed down on the lid with his boot , forcing it to snap shut.
This was big business for the Reich. Every month or so, up to twenty suitcases , bulging with the wealth of the murdered, along with crates crammed with more valuables, would be loaded on to lorries and driven, under armed guard, to SS headquarters in Berlin. The destination was a dedicated account at the Reichsbank, held in the name of a fabulously wealthy – and wholly fictitious – individual: Max Heiliger.
Not all the gold shipped off to enrich the non-existent Herr Heiliger came from wedding rings, bracelets and necklaces, and not all of it passed through Kanada. There was another source too. The Nazis resolved that merely plundering the belongings of those they murdered was not enough: there was wealth to be extracted from their bodies too. The men of the Sonderkommando , already tasked with removing the corpses from the gas chambers minutes after death, were given an extra duty. They were to shear the hair off the dead. It had both a commercial value – bales of cloth made from human hair found their way to German factories – and a military one – hair could be used in delayed-action bombs , as part of the detonation mechanism. Ideally, it would be women’s hair , which was thicker and longer than men’s or children’s.
Any artificial limbs found on a corpse were also unscrewed and collected, for reuse or resale. Still, the more lucrative asset was an internal one. It fell to some men of the Sonderkommando to prise open the mouths of the dead, often still foaming, and check for gold teeth. If they spotted any, they ripped them out with pliers. It was hard work, interrupted by regular breaks as the ‘dentists’ paused to vomit . But all those gold teeth added up. Between 1942 and 1944, an estimated six tons of dental gold were deposited in the vaults of the Reichsbank. Overall, an internal and top-secret ‘List of Jewish property received for delivery’ compiled at the start of February 1943 estimated that over the preceding year the haul from the archipelago of Nazi-operated death camps across Poland had reached 326 million Reichsmarks : in the US currency of the early 2020s, that would be $2 billion.
Walter only knew what he could see, which was a corner of the camp kinetic with sorting, bundling, loading and shipping. To the naked eye, it would have looked like any other trading station, busy and thriving. Nevertheless, even if Walter could not see the full impact of Kanada on the war economy of the Third Reich, he would soon understand how it shaped the bizarre and upside-down world of Auschwitz itself.
At the end of his first day, serving as a glorified mule, dodging the sticks and clubs of the Nazi overseers, ferrying cases and trunks back and forth, he got his first inkling of how things worked. As always, he and the other prisoners lined up in rows of five, ready to march back to the camp. First, though, there would be an inspection.
About fifteen men were picked out and searched thoroughly. If they were found to have stolen so much as a tin of sardines, they were flogged. Perhaps twenty SS lashes for a couple of lemons, twenty-five for a shirt. A stolen hunk of bread would bring lighter punishment: a good kicking and a thump. After that, the Clearing Command were sent on their way, only to face another check once they had reached the gate of the main camp. There Fries and his henchmen awaited, poised to give the men of Kanada another good frisking. They found one man who had taken a shirt, and Fries promptly murdered him on the spot, beating him to death. But he was the only one. The rest of them made it to Block 4 and the chance to assess what the day had brought.