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The meeting concluded on this note, and I suggested a division of tasks to prepare for the next meeting. Rizzi would try to study the validity of his idea; Jederma
At this last remark, Rizzi had thrown me a curious glance; after the meeting was adjourned, I brought him into my office. “Do you have reasons to believe that the Häftlinge don’t receive what they are supposed to?” he asked in his dry, abrupt ma
I swiftly understood, alas, that my initial enthusiasm would be damped. The ensuing meetings got bogged down in a mass of technical details as voluminous as they were contradictory. Isenbeck had made a good analysis of the menus, but seemed incapable of demonstrating their relationship to the rations actually distributed; Rizzi seemed to be focused on the idea of emphasizing the division between skilled and nonskilled workers, and of concentrating our efforts on the former; Weinrowski couldn’t manage to come to an agreement with Isenbeck and Alicke on the question of vitamins. To try to stimulate the debate, I invited a representative from Speer’s ministry. Schmelter, who headed their department for the allocation of labor, told me it was high time for the SS to take this problem into account, and sent me as his representative an Oberregierungsrat with a long list of grievances. Speer’s ministry had just absorbed some of the responsibilities of the Ministry of Finance and had been rebaptized Ministry for Armaments and War Production, or RMfRuK according to the barbaric acronym, in order to reflect his expanded authority in this domain; and this reorganization seemed to be reflected in the unwavering self-confidence of Dr. Kühne, Schmelter’s envoy. “I don’t speak just for the ministry,” he began when I introduced him to my colleagues, “but also for the companies that use the labor the SS provides, whose repeated complaints reach us daily.” This Oberregierungsrat wore a brown suit with a bow tie, and had a Prussian toothbrush moustache; his few strands of stringy hair were carefully combed to the side, to cover the oblong dome of his skull. But the firmness of his speech contradicted his rather ludicrous appearance. As we surely knew, the inmates generally arrived in the factories in a feeble condition, and often, exhausted after only a few weeks, they had to be sent back to the camp. Their training required a minimum of several weeks; there was a shortage of instructors, and they didn’t have the means to train new groups every month. What’s more, for the slightest job requiring even a minimum level of qualification, at least six months had to go by before output reached a satisfactory level: and few inmates lasted that long. Reichsminister Speer was very disappointed by this state of things and thought that the contribution of the SS to the war effort, on this level, would benefit from being improved. He concluded by handing out a memo containing extracts of letters from various firms. After he left, as I looked through the memo, Rizzi shrugged his shoulders and licked his thin lips: “That’s what I’ve been saying since the begi