Chapter 373: Hypocrisy

In a large factory area in western Poland, there was a tall guard tower at regular intervals, with German SS soldiers carrying rifles and patrolling back and forth.

The sky was just beginning to brighten, and the barking of the wolfhounds led by the patrolling soldiers could still be faintly heard, making this huge factory complex, which was hidden in the thick fog, seem particularly quiet and strange.

“Wooo—!” The sound of an alarm broke this tranquility. The wolfhounds also barked more frequently and loudly. Two men with German flag armbands on their arms walked with their hands behind their backs to the front of one warehouse-like building after another and shouted, “Stop being lazy! Get up and work!”

A thin and frail old man silently pushed open the main door. The pulleys scraped sharply on the iron rails. More people walked out, most of them looking sallow. These people were silent. The people who came out of the two larger barracks were separated from the people from the other barracks. Their bodies were also stronger, and the direction they walked was also the opposite.

These strong men were going to work in the A factory area, because the A factory area was a factory that produced bullets, so the food standard for these people was also higher. Of course, most of them were from the factories of Poland and the German Junker aristocratic class, and their cultural level was relatively higher.

The people in the distance who were so hungry that their faces were yellow and thin were the pitiful workers of the clothing factory and the workshops that produced bandages and other products. These people had no special skills and could only do some simple work. And most of them were women. Because they had to take care of their children, they were also relatively stable.

The children were organized to participate in pro-German education and to learn German. This was the “hundred-year plan” ordered by Akado, which required the children in the occupied territories to learn German, and to use their German exam scores for promotion and academic assessment. If the exam score was below 30, the entire family would be “exiled” to the central region of Poland.

Compared to western Poland, that place was a real hell. The people there were arbitrarily suppressed, and their status was not much better than that of the serfs of the past. Most of the land was enclosed by large farm owners. Everyone had to register their identity with the German government. If they did not have a pass issued by the government, they would be shot if they went out at night.

“Old blacksmith, I hear you used to have a big factory in Munich, and could even produce aircraft engine parts?” a big, bearded man with a national flag armband and a field cap asked, walking to the side of the old man who was in charge of opening the door for the two barracks with good treatment and smiling. “How did you end up in this state?”

The old man did not speak but sighed and walked forward, bent over. He had cried and had made a scene. Apart from being beaten and ridiculed, no one here sympathized with a bankrupt and fallen Junker aristocrat. In terms of enmity with the Führer or the Reich, many people here had a much deeper hatred than him. But having come here, one foot was already in hell. Who would still remember such a distant thing as revenge?

It was impossible to forget hatred. The people who had come here had all been arrested because of the prosperity of the Reich. Some had been implicated and arrested because of the British agents’ attempt to assassinate the Führer. Some had been arrested because they had violated the laws of the Reich and had used shoddy goods in the production process and had been found out. And some had been completely framed by the SS or had a grudge with some big shot and had also been arrested in this way.

At the beginning, they had still been thinking of getting out, of escaping from prison or resisting. But when they were abused and beaten day and night, when they were locked in solitary confinement and could only wail like ghosts, when they were tortured by hunger to the point of exhaustion—the guards had only to say one sentence, “Work, and you can live like a human,” and they would suppress their hatred and work desperately.

There were also those who couldn’t get over it, who had sabotaged the machinery and affected production. But the next day, someone had dragged the other’s wife and daughter to this concentration camp, had ravaged them for a day in front of everyone, and after that, the family, men and women, had been hung naked on the barbed wire fence. They had now become a pile of white bones. And that family’s daughter, driven mad, had been locked up in the “good place” next door, which was full of the young wives and daughters of the men who had committed crimes. The prisoners who worked hard could go there for “recreation.”

So after a long period of subtle influence, the people here already had a kind of pathological submissiveness. When new people came in, they would help the guards to abuse them together. If someone wanted to resist, they would be mercilessly reported. They pathologically enjoyed this kind of life and did not mind in the slightest that the corpses transported out of the barracks every day could fill a truck.

There was not the slightest bit of the prosperity and magnificence of Berlin here, nor did it seem to have the slightest relationship with the great and powerful Third Reich. This was the entrance to hell on earth. This was the hall of disaster and terror.

The old man’s two sons and one daughter all worked in the concentration camp. His granddaughter and grandson were also attending school nearby. So he could be said to be one of the most submissive people in the entire concentration camp. He could even go to the guardhouse to deliver the washed and ironed clothes and then help the guards to polish their leather boots and guns.

“Old man, tell me, tell me. Don’t be so stingy!” the big man persisted, grinning and asking as he chased after the old man’s steps. “The warden said you used to be a very rich man.”

This was a factory that had been contracted out to a Jewish financial consortium. It was unknown whether this was the Führer’s intention. The things produced by this factory had a profit of about several hundred thousand a year, but the cost was almost zero. So ever since the existence of these “flesh and blood” factories, some of the big capitalists in Germany had developed a fondness for the Third Reich as if it were their own father.

The old man stopped in his tracks, pointed to a factory building in the distance, and introduced softly, “Originally, I had a factory that big, which was responsible for producing spare parts for airplanes. Originally, I also had some friendship with the military. Later… I don’t know how, but I became relatives with a few Junker aristocrats. Originally, I thought it was a good thing, but when the Führer was purging the Junkers, those few people were not sensible, so they implicated me here.”

Although the old man spoke simply, he still had some sadness. In fact, his crime was not great, and he might not even have been implicated. If it were an ordinary family, they might have been able to get away with it by giving some money and using some connections. It was just that the military had taken a fancy to the factory he operated, and such a reason to directly seize it had come up, so they had acted without any mercy.

The old man himself had also repeatedly thought about this problem. If he had had the thinking he had now back then, he would have given the factory to the military early on. He estimated that he could still have gotten an idle position, helping the Reich to manage a small private enterprise or something. But now it was too late to regret. The whole family had already been arrested. To get out would be in the year of the monkey and the month of the horse.

The big man, because he was new, did not say much more. After all, he was just a non-official representative sent by the owner of this concentration camp. He only had the power to supervise and to inquire. Most of the time, he could only play a deterrent role. What really made the prisoners here turn pale at the mention of them were the “devils” in the black SS uniforms.

To appease the working prisoners, every month they would go to see their relatives who were locked up on the other side, and would talk for a few minutes to comfort each other. This system was thought up by Akado and was very useful for managing these prisoners who had lost all hope. Under this system, they were like grasshoppers on a string, without the slightest ability or thought to resist.

The old man turned on the lights inside the factory building, and the entire workshop was instantly brightened. This was a large-scale munitions production base in Germany. There were many other factory buildings of this scale in other concentration camps, mass-producing cheap 7.92mm ammunition.

Most of this ammunition was supplied to the troops for normal training and for the second-line units. Every box had the signature of the strict inspector and every production process personnel. If a problem occurred, the personnel who had produced these bullets could be found immediately. Because it was for normal training and for the second-line units, there was no worry that there would be a great impact.

Of course, near the Polish “provincial capital” of Warsaw, there was also a relatively high-level factory that specially supplied the 13mm machine gun bullets and 30mm cannon shells used by the air force. It was also for air force training, while the weapons and ammunition of the frontline units were all produced in the regular factories in Germany.

These free laborers began to work at their own posts, tense and orderly. Although they didn’t care about the opportunity to visit the wives and daughters of others, at the very least, they had to ensure the safety of their own wives and daughters, right? If something went wrong and they caused trouble for their own wives and children not far away, wouldn’t it be too late for regret?

The old man, with his hands behind his back and a stoop, patrolled the factory with its roaring machinery, his eyes narrowed. Apart from opening and closing the door, he also had a job of patrolling all the places, to maintain hygiene and cleanliness. Of course, there were other personnel for cleaning. He was only responsible for inspection. When it was dirty to a certain extent, he just had to notify the person in charge of management.

Only when he was patrolling could he feel that he was still a leader in a factory, still that factory director whom every worker had loved and respected very much. At this time, he could even have some smiles on his face, but he just did not dare to look at those cold gazes, for fear of waking up from his own dream.

In fact, he did not know why he had been chosen to do such a seemingly easy and pleasant job, instead of being starved to death like the other old men and then cremated to become a pile of fertilizer. He just occasionally guessed that it might be that after occupying his property and savings and seizing that factory with a monthly income of several hundred thousand, the big shots of the SS still felt a little bit guilty.

In fact, he had guessed wrong. The reason he could stand here and continue to live was because the Führer, disregarding the SS’s suggestion to kill those whose assets had been seized, had ordered that those who had everything taken away for no reason be treated well.