KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
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The Kapo system was firmly entrenched by the mid-1930s and continued to grow as the KL expanded. At the end of 1938, for example, when Buchenwald held around eleven thousand prisoners in all, there were over five hundred Kapos.281 Senior Kapos were now appointed by the SS—though the officers often listened to proposals by prominent prisoners—and formed a parallel organizational structure to the SS.
Broadly speaking, Kapos fell into three functional groups. The first were the work supervisors, with larger labor details—sometimes holding hundreds of inmates—having several prisoner foremen in addition to a chief Kapo. Such Kapos had various duties, like reporting delays and preventing escape. Above all, they had to be “good slave driver[s],” as one survivor put it. SS expectations were summed up in an internal manual: “The Kapo is responsible for the strictest implementation of all orders and for all incidents in the labor detail.”282
Second, there were Kapos who supervised prisoner life inside the quarters. Each barrack (or block, as it was often called) was led by a block elder, supported by a few block service inmates, room elders, and table elders. In the absence of SS guards, who only entered the barracks intermittently, the block elder held full authority. Each morning, he supervised the rigorous routine after reveille. Then he led his prisoners to the roll call square, where he reported the tally to the SS. After the others had left for work, he would inspect the barrack, to ensure—as SS regulations demanded—that beds were made “impeccably” and no “work-shy prisoners” were hiding inside (only the block elder and his men were allowed into barracks during the day). Come evening, he controlled the distribution of food, reported missing prisoners, initiated new arrivals, and prepared for lights-out. Afterward, he was “responsible for quiet at night,” as the SS regulations stated.283
Finally, more and more inmates served as Kapos in the camp administration. Prisoners had already been drafted as orderlies into infirmaries of some early camps, a practice that would become more widespread from the late 1930s.284 Kapos also worked in the prisoner kitchen, storeroom, and bunker, and as clerks in various SS offices. At the top of the hierarchy stood the camp elder (often with two deputies), who supervised the other Kapos and reported to the SS, acting as the main conduit between oppressors and oppressed. Few prisoners were mightier than the camp elder. However, it was a dangerous post, and by no means all inmates aspired to it. The political prisoner Harry Naujoks, for instance, initially resisted attempts by others to install him in Sachsenhausen, until some of his Communist comrades—who dominated Kapo positions in the prewar concentration camps—persuaded him to accept. His general strategy, Naujoks wrote in his memoirs, was to make Kapos indispensable by ensuring the smooth operation of roll calls and labor details, thereby keeping the SS at bay. But he knew that the SS wanted more, aiming to use Kapos as auxiliaries of terror. How individual Kapos reacted to these pressures and how they used their “small room for maneuver,” as Naujoks called it, determined their standing among the rest of the inmates. Some became the scourges of prisoner lives; others, like Naujoks, won a reputation for decency.285
All Kapos gained a measure of influence over other prisoners, and some enjoyed great powers, issuing commands and hitting out.286 This led some inmates to speak of the Kapo system as a form of “self-administration,” a term widely adopted in the historical literature.287 But the term is misleading, implying a level of autonomous decision-making absent in the KL.288 After all, Kapos had to serve, first and foremost, the wider interests of the SS; block elders reported to SS block leaders, medical orderlies to SS doctors, labor supervisors to SS commando leaders, and so on. A Kapo who failed to fulfill SS expectations faced punishment and dismissal.289 Despite the privileges that came with being a Kapo, then, it was a precarious existence. Even Harry Naujoks, who was more adept at playing the SS than most, did not last. After he had spent three and a half years as Sachsenhausen camp elder, the SS one day threw him into the bunker, accusing him of a Communist conspiracy, and then dispatched him to another camp.290
Inmate Groups
“The camps were a veritable circus, as far as colors, markings, and special designations are concerned,” the Buchenwald survivor Eugen Kogon wrote shortly after the war, ridiculing the SS obsession with emblems, acronyms, and badges.291 Triangles—which came in eight colors, with various additional markings—became the main visual markers to differentiate the prisoner population. Of course, the classification by the camps’ political office was often erratic. Some Communists who had fought the Nazis were designated as asocials, while some Jews who had broken anti-Semitic laws were labeled as professional criminals.292 Nonetheless, Camp SS men relied on the triangles for initial guidance, and prisoners, too, used these SS symbols to distinguish one another. The color of the triangle shaped each inmate’s identity, whether they liked it or not.
Until 1938, the majority of inmates were classified as political prisoners, mostly wearing red markings on their uniforms.293 In November 1936, for example, the authorities identified 3,694 of all 4,761 concentration camp inmates as political prisoners.294 Among them was a hard core of political activists, first and foremost Communists.295 Many were veterans of the early camps. Following their release in 1933–34, they had often rejoined the underground resistance and soon found themselves back in the KL.296 On Himmler’s orders, issued in March 1936, such prisoners, held for a second time, faced extra punishment and were only considered for release after a minimum of three years (not three months, as in the case of other inmates).297 In Dachau, there were an estimated two hundred so-called second-time-rounders by early 1937, wearing special markings. Their barrack was fenced off from the rest of the compound, effectively creating a camp inside the camp. For the first time, an entire group of inmates was isolated from the others, setting an inauspicious precedent. These second-time-rounders received no books, fewer letters, and less medical care, while facing the most exhausting work. One of the prisoners was the German-Jewish lawyer Ludwig Bendix, whose time in Dachau in 1937 was a far cry from his first spell in protective custody back in 1933. Bendix, who was now weak and ill, experienced forced labor in Dachau as a martyrdom “which I feared I would not survive and which I could only bear by mobilizing all my strength.”298
Despite Himmler’s obsession with left-wing opponents, the overall proportion of underground activists among KL inmates decreased in the mid-1930s, reflecting both the gradual demise of the resistance and the general shift to policing other forms of deviance. When it came to opposition against the regime, the police now cast its net wider than before. Grumbling and dissent probably accounted for some twenty percent of all protective custody cases in 1935–36; in some months, as many individuals were detained for jokes or verbal attacks as for Communist activities.299 It did not take much to be branded a dangerous enemy of the state. Magdalene Kassebaum, for example, endured two spells in Moringen, first for singing “The International,” then for burning a picture of Hitler.300
The police also detained some clergymen, part of the wider Nazi confrontation with Christian churches in the mid-1930s. Although the number of arrests remained very small—no more than a few dozen Catholic and Protestant priests were held in the KL in 1935—they carried symbolic weight and caused some disquiet within German society.301 The clergymen, who had to wear the red markings of political prisoners, were frequently singled out for violent abuse. The Camp SS was militant in its anticlericalism, even more so than the general SS, and most men renounced the Church, goaded by the fanatical Eicke, who summed up his views as follows: “Prayer books are things for women and for those who wear panties. We hate the stink of incense.”302 Eicke’s hatred erupted spectacularly in 1935, after the Berlin Cathedral chaplain Bernhard Lichtenberg had privately questioned the conditions in Esterwegen. Responding to the accusations in a note to the Gestapo, Eicke blasted the interference of “Rome’s black agents,” who “leave their excrement on the altars,” complained about the stain of “poisonous state-eroding saliva” on his SS uni
form, and called for Lichtenberg to be sent to Esterwegen himself.303 Many guards emulated Eicke when they encountered imprisoned priests. So brutal were the verbal and physical assaults that even the wives of some Camp SS men expressed sympathy for the plight of clergymen.304
By far the largest group of religious prisoners in the mid-1930s was Jehovah’s Witnesses, who, having pledged their allegiance to God, resisted the total claim of Nazism. Their persecution had started early in the Third Reich and soon intensified, after they refused to serve in the new German conscript army, continued to proselytize after their religious association was banned, and distributed critical leaflets. The regime tried to stamp out such defiance, with some paranoid Nazi officials picturing the Witnesses as a mass movement in cahoots with Communists (in reality, they only had some twenty-five thousand members). Several thousand believers were arrested in the mid-1930s. Most ended up in regular prisons, but others were taken to the KL. At the height of repression in 1937–38, more than ten percent of all men in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald were Jehovah’s Witnesses. So large was this prisoner group that the Camp SS gave them a special insignia: the purple triangle.305
Prisoners with the purple triangle endured great hardship. “The Jehovah’s Witnesses are the daily targets for every kind of persecution, terror, and brutality,” one of them wrote in 1938, not long after his release. Some abuse was ideologically motivated, with Camp SS men mocking their victims as “heaven clowns” and “paradise birds.” Asked after the war why he had buried one of the prisoners up to the neck, the former report leader in Sachsenhausen replied: “He was a conscientious objector. As such he had no right to life, in my view.”306 What really enraged the SS men, however, was not the prisoners’ religious beliefs but their “obstinate” behavior, as Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to carry out certain orders and even tried to convert other prisoners.307 The leaders of the passive resistance were hit with great venom. One of them, the miner Johann Ludwig Rachuba, was punished by the Sachsenhausen SS between 1936 and 1938 with more than 120 days strict detention, more than one hundred lashes, four hours hanging from a post, and three months in the punishment company (he later died in the camp). Such brute tactics rarely worked, however, as many prisoners saw the torture as a test of their faith. Only later in the war did SS officials become shrewder, realizing that many Jehovah’s Witnesses made reliable workers as long as they were not deployed in ways that conflicted directly with their beliefs.308
Just as the German police continually expanded the circle of political suspects, so, too, did it widen its assault on social outsiders. The main victims were those pursued since 1933 as asocial or criminal, identified in the camps by black or green triangles. They were joined in the mid-1930s by another group: men arrested as homosexuals, who had to wear pink triangles. Following the murder of Ernst Röhm, the regime cracked down hard on homosexuality. Existing legislation became stricter in 1935 (though women were still exempt) and the police stepped up its raids, led by the obsessively homophobic Himmler; it was regrettable that gay men could not be killed, Himmler told SS leaders in 1937, but at least they could be detained. Again, the vast majority of arrested men were sent to prison, but some found themselves in the KL.309 In 1935, these men were briefly concentrated in Lichtenburg—in June, 325 of all the 706 inmates here were classified as homosexual—but mostly they were distributed across the SS camp system.310
Men detained as homosexuals suffered unusually harsh treatment in the KL. The SS saw them as perverts deserving special punishment. To “protect” others, some officials put men with the pink triangle into isolated barracks. And to “cure” them, guards often forced them into particularly hard labor details, like the latrine and punishment company.311 In addition, several prisoners were castrated. Under Nazi law, homosexuals had to consent to such operations, but Camp SS officials forced some into submission. Among them was the Hamburg tailor Otto Giering, who, having been convicted repeatedly for homosexual acts, was taken to Sachsenhausen in early 1939, at the age of twenty-two. In mid-August 1939, Giering was called to the infirmary and sedated. When he woke up, with a heavy bag of sand on his stomach, he was told that he had just been castrated. A few days later, the commandant himself walked in and triumphantly held up a glass: “You can have one more look at your balls, but as a conserve.”312
SS men watched homosexual prisoners with great suspicion, and those accused of sexual contacts inside the KL were tortured to extract “confessions”; occasionally, the men were then handed over for criminal trials to courts.313 Some of the suspects had been denounced by other inmates. Given the force of SS homophobia, accusations of homosexuality proved a potent weapon against competitors and antagonists. More generally, many fellow inmates shared the social prejudices against homosexuals and ostracized them; even sympathetic prisoners kept their distance. As soon as he received the pink triangle on his uniform, Otto Giering recalled, he was “subjected to mockery and harassment” by prisoners “of all categories”—just one example of the many rifts between inmate groups.314
Solidarity and Friction
Harry Naujoks felt at home inside the Communist movement. He had been born in 1901 into a poor working-class family, not far from the ships on the Hamburg docks, and the small and sturdy man even looked like a sailor, with his strangely swaying gait. He had actually trained as a boilermaker, leaving school early, and quickly became politicized in his local union. In March 1919, not yet eighteen years old, he joined the recently founded KPD and later led the party’s Hamburg youth wing. Naujoks was a loyal local functionary and in 1933 joined the resistance against the Nazis. He would pay a heavy price: detention in several early camps in 1933–34, more than two years in a penitentiary, and well over eight years in the KL. Throughout, Naujoks remained devoted to the cause and was repaid with support from other Communist inmates. From the moment he set foot inside Sachsenhausen on November 11, 1936, his comrades took him under their wing. As he entered the camp, he was shown to the storeroom by a fellow Hamburg Communist; his block elder, another Hamburg comrade, told him about the most important rules of camp life; then yet another former KPD functionary from Hamburg took Naujoks to get food from the camp kitchen. At the end of his first day in Sachsenhausen, Naujoks later wrote, he already felt a sense of belonging.315
Newcomers from other large prisoner groups—such as Social Democrats and Jehovah’s Witnesses—could count on friends and comrades for moral and material support, too.316 Solidarity within these groups was often close and could pave the way to better positions inside the camp, as in the case of Naujoks, who was transferred in early 1937 (with the help of another old Hamburg associate) from the exhausting forest clearing detail to a coveted post as a joiner. “There are no [more] screams, no beatings, not even any pressure to work fast,” Naujoks wrote. Prisoners united by a shared past maneuvered trusted individuals into Kapo positions to gain greater influence. The Communists proved particularly adept at this, thanks to their large numbers and tight discipline. Harry Naujoks himself was installed in late summer 1937 in the storeroom, beginning his rise to camp elder.317
Since members of the same prisoner group spent much of their free time together—because the SS tended to assign barracks based on triangle colors—these groups became focal points for collective self-assertion. In the evenings, prisoners would conduct illicit discussions and lectures about politics, religion, history, and literature. In Esterwegen, the much-weakened Carl von Ossietzky seemed to revive when he engaged fellow prisoners in debate. “It was always quite an experience to listen to him, to argue with him, to ask him questions,” a former Communist prisoner recalled reverently.318
There were some bigger meetings, too. In Sachsenhausen, Harry Naujoks and his comrades held a first large gathering in December 1936, as SS guards were getting drunk at their staff Christmas party. The covert meeting was organized by a former KPD Reichstag deputy, who gave a brief speech, followed by the recitation of poems and songs of the labor movement. “Each one of u
s at that event was touched by the power of the collective, giving us the strength to withstand the terror,” Naujoks wrote in his memoirs.319 Communist prisoners were not alone in fostering a community spirit. Jewish prisoners held cultural events in their barracks—with music, poetry, and plays—and Christians came together to pray on festive days.320
Any more direct challenges to SS dominance remained extremely rare. In the early camps, prisoners had occasionally stood up to protest, emboldened by their belief in the imminent demise of the Third Reich.321 But there was no sign of the Nazi regime crumbling, and by the mid-1930s SS guards took great pleasure in crushing even hints of defiance. Only a few individuals still dared to confront the SS. Among them was the Protestant pastor Paul Schneider, held in Buchenwald since late 1937. The following spring, Schneider was dragged into the bunker, where he was starved and abused for months, after he had refused to salute a new swastika flag hoisted above the main gate. But Schneider was not deterred. On Sundays and holy days, he sometimes shouted brief words of encouragement from the bunker to prisoners on the roll call square, before furious SS guards silenced him with whips and fists; his voice finally fell quiet in summer 1939, when he succumbed to the SS torture.322