Rödl at Buchenwald, and other commandants such as Kurt Franz at Treblinka and Rudolf Höss at Auschwitz-Birkenau, used these songs to enforce compliance and to provide additional macabre entertainment for the perpetrators in the forced and often parodic singing. Like the duplicitous language of resettlement to the East, promises of work or salvation, these songs contained false promises of survival through work and acceptance of prisoner and subordinate status.
As the command clung to delusions of grandeur until the bitter end of the war, music was also forced on the victims of the Holocaust throughout the liquidation of the camps and the brutal death marches. Musical sadism, a hallmark of the treatment of Jews until 1945, was maintained as a last vestige of cruelty including the continuously compelling camp song. Structures of power from the camps lingered, as the SS maintained prisoner hierarchy with political detainees and non-German perpetrators elevated over Jewish inmates.
One Buchenwald survivor remembered the Buchenwaldlied in its entirety and sang it to his interviewer in the context of the final days of the war. He compared his perfect recall of the song to a school anthem or military service; he was a “graduate” of Buchenwald. The musical sadism of the SS was deeply ingrained in the prisoners psyche, and remained a merciless entertainment for the perpetrators until the end of the war. This survivor who conveyed the text of the song mentioned that his memory of the song was like his school anthem, a rote recitation that he could easily recite more than sixty years after liberation and identical in text and melody to written preservations of the song.
The Treblinka song compelled by commandant Kurt Franz paralleled other songs used during roll-call and work transports in the camps. These songs were a perpetual reminder of prisoners’ conditions within the camp, a ceaseless dogmatic repetition of an accepting, even redemptive text. Like the other songs, the Buchenwaldlied offers a false promise of redemption or freedom for hard work, not a genuine expression of longing or hope for prisoners, but a cruel false talisman of freedom to place at the redemptive feet of their guards – masters of life and fate. The song also contains the kind of fatalistic language of the Treblinka song, accepting the daily trudge to work and the fate of being in the camp. The most telling line of a ‘deserved’ fate is “we don’t whine and complain […] we choose life” falsely implying that behaviour rather than random fate would earn some redemption from the guards. The use of these songs until the very end of the war in the camps parallels the camaraderie of the troops and the use of troop song in indoctrination. Rather than indoctrination in a glorious mission for the triumph of the Reich, these collective choralities of prisoners were to reinforce a passive acceptance of brutality which never could lead to freedom.
Some prisoners understood the parodic plea for freedom, and were able to reclaim the meaning of these forced songs, like Robert Leibbrand who “put his hatred” into the song when it was forced upon him. Professional musicians like Arthur Gold at Treblinka were able to survive for longer in the camp by attaining a privileged position performing forced music. Under horrifying conditions of compelled musical sadism, examples of personal antipathy and the spitting of hateful lyrics back at gleeful perpetrators should be viewed as musical resistance and defiance.
Why make prisoners repeat these humiliating and parodic lyrics until the end of the war? The use of musical sadism parallels the final attempts of the SS to murder the Jews of Europe, from macro efforts such as the deportations of Hungarian and Greek Jews well into 1944, to the murder of columns of prisoners sent on death marches, to individual horrors such as the murder of arriving marches by petrol injection at Sachsenhausen as late as 20 April 1945. The SS continued its bizarre behaviour in a strange dichotomy where it was more interested in maintaining its power and being entertained by its murderous games than in "completing" the task of the Holocaust. At the same time, however, the guards were acutely aware of impending loss and liberation, and had a desire for self-preservation and the ability to ensure their own escape and survival. Functionally useless torture such as musical sadism and the imposition of lyrics praising hard work for freedom, as in the Buchenwald Song, demonstrate the endurance of SS brutality during the Holocaust.
By Alexandra Birch, July 2024