Paul Doll's domination of and dependence on Szmul

Paul Doll’s domination of and dependence on Szmul is one of the camp’s starkest unequal relationships: Doll commands him as a subordinate, but relies on the labor and expertise that make Szmul difficult to replace. At the Spring Meadow, Doll alternates between contempt, praise, and a challenge to revolt, while Szmul’s silence and exhausted appearance reveal the human cost concealed by the language of usefulness. Their encounter turns the relation between commandant and prisoner into a confrontation between the man who gives orders and the man whose coerced work sustains them both.

Command and Degradation

Doll addresses Szmul by his role as Sonderkommandofuhrer and begins from an assumed right to judge his appearance. In the yard, he calls him “an atrocious sight” and compares his own eyes favorably with Szmul’s. Doll describes those eyes as “dead, defunct, extinct,” then names them “Sonder eyes.” The phrase makes the damage legible while also reducing Szmul to the position the camp has imposed on him: his identity is read through his forced work among the dead. Szmul does not answer this appraisal. He shrugs and glances toward a hunk of bread he has thrown to the ground, a small physical detail that stands against Doll’s grand claims of authority.

Doll’s power appears again when he summons Szmul to accompany him north-east by truck. At Sector 4IIIb(i), Szmul jumps down from the flatbed as Doll arrives at the edge of the Spring Meadow. The place is not merely visible: Doll says he can hear it, and describes popping, splatting, and hissing beyond the mound. He and his colleagues cover their faces with handkerchiefs. In this setting, Doll calls for Szmul while looking across the field, placing the prisoner beside the machinery of mass death that his assigned position forces him to serve.

Usefulness as Protection and Threat

Doll tells Szmul that his group will soon expand tenfold and that he will become “the most important man in the entire KL,” adding, “After myself, naturally.” The promised importance is strictly hierarchical: Szmul may rise in operational significance, but Doll insists on remaining above him. The announcement is also inseparable from the impending work. Doll does not describe the expansion as an opportunity for Szmul to choose or act freely; he presents it as an order of events, then tells him to come along.

The double edge of Szmul’s usefulness becomes explicit later, at night by the pyre. Two hoist-frame plinths have collapsed, and Szmul is down in a depression in the dunes, trying to fit pieces together, when Doll’s open-topped jeep draws up on the gravel road. Doll approaches in brown shorts and sandals, carrying Russian vodka and an oxhide whip. He thanks Szmul for his initiative and dedication, calls him invaluable, and then says, “I think we’ve got the hang of it now. We could probably muddle along without you.” Praise and dismissal arrive in the same breath. Doll recognizes Szmul’s contribution but treats the possibility of replacing him as a power he can exercise at will.

Yet Doll’s confidence has a revealing qualification. He tells Szmul, “You lead a charmed life, Geheimnistrager. Because you’ve made yourself indispensable.” The remark identifies usefulness as a kind of protection, but one granted by the perpetrators’ need rather than by any recognition of Szmul’s rights. Doll links this survival tactic to factories elsewhere, suggesting that he sees the same logic operating wherever the system depends on coerced labor. His own command depends on the prisoner he humiliates: Szmul’s value is real, but only within a structure Doll controls and can threaten to withdraw.

The Challenge to Resist

Doll asks Szmul why he does the work and why he does not rise up. He asks where Szmul’s pride is, speaking as though resistance were a simple choice available to a man whom the camp has trapped in forced labor. Szmul answers that the men still hope. When Doll presses him about his own hope, Szmul replies, “It’s human to hope, sir.” The exchange exposes the gulf between Doll’s command and Szmul’s constrained position. Doll can ask for revolt without surrendering his authority; Szmul must answer within the terms of address imposed on him.

The scene does not present Szmul’s answer as proof that he is safe or that the prisoners can escape. It records hope as a human capacity that remains speakable even in conditions Doll helps enforce. Doll’s questions therefore carry an accusation that rebounds on the questioner: he demands pride from Szmul while continuing to direct and exploit him. His sorrowful tone does not cancel the whip in his hand, the vodka, or his reminder that the Aktion may end and the men’s usefulness with it.

The Violence Beneath the Exchange

While Doll drinks, Szmul’s hand closes around the shaft of a hammer in a canvas bag. The narrated intention is specific: if Doll tips his head back to drink again, Szmul will bring the hammer down, claw-first, on Doll’s exposed instep. The thought makes the imbalance briefly reversible in possibility, but not in fact. Szmul does not strike. Doll appears to perceive the danger, tells him to look into his eyes, and says he sees murder in Szmul’s mouth. The encounter thus holds together a suppressed act of resistance and the continuing power of the commandant who can identify it without being attacked.

Doll ends by calling Szmul afraid to die but not afraid to kill, then declares that such people have their uses and orders him to work for Germany. The language turns the danger Doll has sensed into another assessment of utility. Even the prospect of violence is absorbed into the vocabulary of service: Szmul is dangerous, Doll says in effect, but danger too can be useful. The relation is therefore not simply one of mastery over a passive prisoner. Doll rules, but he also depends on the labor and contained capacity for violence of the man he rules.

The Relationship’s Limits

The scenes make no reciprocal bond of trust between the two men. Doll’s recognition of Szmul’s skill does not soften his domination, and Szmul’s answers do not amount to consent. Instead, the relationship is held together by the camp’s coercive arrangements: Doll can order Szmul to accompany him, judge him, and threaten his place; Szmul’s labor, meanwhile, becomes important enough that Doll calls him indispensable. The brief possibility of the hammer makes the violence beneath that arrangement visible without changing its outcome.

Doll’s later fate does not provide a recorded resolution between the two men. He was demoted to a clerical post in June 1943, later reinstalled as commandant, captured in March 1946, tried at Nuremberg, and hanged outside Bunker 11 at Kat Zet I on April 16, 1947. Those later events establish the end of Doll’s authority, but the account does not say what became of Szmul or describe a final reckoning between them. The relationship remains suspended in the scenes that define it: Doll’s claim to command, Szmul’s coerced usefulness, and the unacted possibility of resistance between them.