Thies Christophersen - Auschwitz: A Personal Account

These memoirs of a German soldier, stationed at Auschwitz from January to December 1944, caused a sensation when they were first published in 1973—because the author dared to point out that all the time he had been at the camp—including Auschwitz-Birkenau—he had never seen gas chambers or any evidence of mass-killings.

Thies Christophersen was badly wounded in the early stages of the war, and was declared medically unfit for combat after 1940. Because of his background as a farmer, he was then sent on a specialized agricultural training course and assigned to a research center in German-occupied Ukraine that experimentally cultivated a variety of dandelion (kok saghyz) as an alternative source of natural rubber derived from the plant’s latex.

In the face of Soviet military advances, the center was transferred to the labor camp of Raisko, a satellite of Auschwitz. During the period he lived and worked there, Christophersen was responsible for the daily work of inmate laborers.

The young second lieutenant supervised about 300 workers, many of them Jewish, of whom 200 were women from the Raisko camp, and 100 were men from the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.