Caesar

SS Lieutenant Colonel Dr. [Joachim] Caesar was the director of the agricultural section of Auschwitz. Dr. Caesar had studied and was certified in agriculture. He had worked for several years at the Federal Institute of Plants, and was a plant expert. After Hitler came to power, Dr. Caesar was the mayor of Holstein. In 1934 he joined the SS School Administration and was soon in a leading position. He was responsible for the SS pamphlets that outlined conduct, and later on, for all the literature that was issued by the Indoctrination Office. At the beginning of the war, he created the first field library for the Waffen SS. They remodeled large buses and made field bookstores out of them in the shops at Concentration Camp Sachsenhausen. This is when I got to know Caesar much better.

He was conceited about his knowledge and ability. On top of all that he was dogmatic and did not allow any opinion but his own. He had a tremendous desire to show off and always wanted to play a controlling role. He was a typical example of the master race type and aloof from everything! This is the way he also treated his subordinates. Despite all this he was good-hearted and could occasionally be very friendly. There is one incident which highlights his whole outlook. When he was working with the motorized libraries, he often had business at Sachsenhausen. One evening we sat together in the officers club in Sachsenhausen. At that time a large number of SS officers from the General SS were present who had been called up for service. These men had very important jobs at the federal level and in the economic offices. Caesar steered the conversation to Himmler’s settlement program in Poland. Opinions about that really bounced around the room. Caesar completely believed in Himmler’s plans and claimed to know them in great detail. He believed that the way Himmler wanted the Farm Settlement Plan implemented could not be done in the Eastern region. Only large, extended plantations with strong, farseeing, generous people could be best managed. These plantations were to be given to the master types [Herrentypen]. Only these aristocrats with the necessary prestige of large land ownership would be able to dominate the Slavic people of the East! Almost no one there would agree with him; most of them saw the Germanic farm population as the guarantee of the continuation and the spread of the German people.

In 1941 Caesar saw that he could not advance himself either in the SS School Administration or in his main office. Also he repeatedly had serious differences of opinion with his chief of staff and, therefore, started looking for a different field of work.

This is how Caesar got to be in Pohl’s office. Lieutenant Colonel Vogel, who was the chief of the Economic Office, knew Caesar at the time, when Caesar was gaining experience on the farms. He introduced Caesar to Pohl. Pohl was immediately enthusiastic about his winning appearance and his mannerism. Through Vogel’s proposal, Pohl saw immediately in him the man who was qualified to carry out Himmler’s grandiose agricultural experimental plans at Auschwitz. And so Caesar came to Auschwitz as director of the agricultural operation with complete and important powers. His subordinate position to me, then and even now, was never made clear. According to him everything in the field of agriculture prior to him had been done wrong. He wanted to change everything around. Aside from basic orders and Himmler’s plans, I let him alone. Our agricultural philosophies were far apart and for the most part conflicted. He was a theoretician; I was from the practical school. He was a passionate scientist about raising plants and the use of laboratories; I was interested in farming and raising animals using the old tradition and practical experience. In addition to all that there was our totally opposite view concerning all aspects of life. We could not agree on anything, even though there was no lack of good will on my part.

As I mentioned before, he was not popular with those who worked for him; not because he was too strict or asked too much, but because of his arrogant behavior. He thought everyone was stupid and that he was the only one who had the knowledge. In a strange way, he had a totally different attitude toward the prisoners. Because he was so good-hearted, he overlooked a lot concerning the prisoners and let them do what they wanted, especially the women prisoners. He had complete confidence in the Kapos. He constantly fought for the prisoners in the agricultural department to be governed by his rule. In a large part he prevailed upon Pohl to separate these prisoners and let them be housed at the farms. The prisoners who were in the plant-growing section were placed under “historical monument” protection. According to Pohl’s orders, they had to be treated with kid gloves so as not to endanger Caesar’s scientific work. Among these prisoners there were many women, mostly French Jewesses, who were academically trained. He treated them almost as colleagues. As a natural consequence, this led to the worst cases of lack of discipline. When the necessary punishments were carried out, Caesar took it very personally. He also was very successful in getting the best clothing for his prisoners. It was hard to distinguish the civilian employees from the prisoners in the laboratories, particularly as there were many Russian agricultural specialists and scientists working on the “Koc-Sagys” research project. He was able to get everything he wanted from Pohl because he knew how to convince Pohl about the tremendous importance of the science of raising plants. Included in this project was the much-needed ability to obtain natural rubber from dandelion-type plant families.1

It was impossible to cut down on the German farming area, which in itself was not large enough, by planting experimental vegetables. Caesar couldn’t see that as he was a theoretician. He was blinded by his ideas and couldn’t see the everyday reality. Thus he never understood that the farm-building projects had to take second place to the critical general interests of the camp. Caesar’s second marriage was a happy one, and there were children. He was divorced from his first wife because she did not want children. His second wife worshipped him and mirrored him in his mannerisms and his philosophy of life. A tragic fate took her from him. She died in 1942 from typhus. In 1943 he married his first lab assistant, who worked with him in the experimental works at Raisko, and she was a great help to him in all the important things. It was a continuation of the second marriage in that this wife also considered him a god.

As to the general camp interests, Caesar did not face the facts and turned a deaf ear to them. Stubbornly, he only saw his agricultural special interests and referred constantly to Himmler’s orders, which stated that the agricultural experiments were to be pushed ahead to the fullest. This, of course, also included any building that had to be done!

He didn’t see most of the conditions in the camps and for the most part learned about what was happening from his men and the prisoners. He did not realize that the elimination of these conditions was more necessary than the most urgent agricultural building projects.