KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  The bold defiance of prisoners like Pastor Schneider briefly united inmates of all backgrounds in admiration. Such unity was rare, however, as the KL bred much division and discord. The most pronounced chasm, at least until the late 1930s, existed within the large group of left-wing prisoners, between German Communists and Social Democrats. The long history of antagonism between the parties—with each accusing the other of betraying the working class and enabling the rise of the Nazis—often crippled closer contacts in the camps.323

  In the early camps, Communists and Social Democrats were still sore from their recent clashes during the Weimar Republic. True, there was some solidarity across party lines, especially among the rank and file. But many revolutionary Communists had not forgotten their suppression at the hands of the pro-democratic forces in Prussia and elsewhere, and openly snubbed SPD-affiliated prisoners. Some Social Democrats, in turn, were dismayed at being sidelined by the more numerous and better organized Communists; one complained that Communists in his barrack treated him “like a leper,” while another lamented the absence of even “a minimum of comradeship.” On occasion, Communist inmates even denounced SPD prisoners to the camp authorities, or attacked them physically.324 Former SPD leaders, ridiculed as “bigwigs” by Communists and Nazis alike, endured the greatest hostility. Ernst Heilmann, for example, had been known for his uncompromising opposition to the KPD and did not change his views in captivity, earning him the lasting contempt of Communists in all the camps he was dragged through; no one had a trace of sympathy or compassion for him, the Communist Wolfgang Langhoff recalled. Apparently, guards also ordered KPD inmates to assault Heilmann, typical of SS attempts to inflame existing tensions between left-wing prisoners.325

  The conflicts between left-wingers continued into the mid-1930s and beyond. The scars of the Weimar battles healed only slowly, if at all, and there were repeated clashes over the distribution of Kapo posts, with Social Democrats complaining about Communist domination. Some individual friendships evolved, as they had done in the early camps, and open-minded prisoners like Harry Naujoks reached out and supported others irrespective of political differences. But the dominant mode was still that of mutual distrust, and the Left never formed a united front in Nazi captivity.326

  Women in the Camps

  It seemed a day like any other when, one Friday morning in early 1936, a guard unlocked Centa Beimler’s cell in Stadelheim. She expected to be escorted to work, as usual, but there was exciting news: she was about to leave the prison. Beimler began to hope that she would finally be set free, almost three years after her arrest. But the Gestapo had other plans. As long as her husband Hans remained at large, following his spectacular escape from Dachau, his wife would stay put. Rather than being released, Centa Beimler was moved from Stadelheim to the Moringen workhouse, which had become the central German protective custody camp for women.327

  Fortunately for Centa Beimler, Moringen was a world away from the camps for men. Moringen was not even an official SS concentration camp, as it was still controlled by the Prussian state, not by the IKL; its civilian director—a rule-bound bureaucrat from the civil service—was the antithesis of Eicke’s “political soldier.” Compared to the KL, inmate numbers were much smaller, with a monthly average of no more than ninety women on the protective custody wing. These women wore their own clothes, not uniforms, and faced monotonous but bearable labor; most of them knitted or mended clothes, working for less than eight hours a day. Most important of all, there were no physical assaults by the staff.328

  On the whole, Moringen resembled a regular prison, with many of the related hardships, like rigid schedules, bland food, and poor hygiene. However, the Moringen women—divided into several communal rooms and dormitories, according to their backgrounds—could mingle relatively freely. After her long time in a tiny cell in Stadelheim, Centa Beimler was grateful for the company of other Communists, including her own sister. The women played games and sang together, and held political discussions. “You could talk about everything, and that made it easier for all of us,” Beimler later wrote.329

  Centa Beimler was a leading figure among the Communist women of Moringen. Her husband, Hans, was a hero of the resistance, while Centa impressed even prisoners of different beliefs with her strength of will, unbowed by her long imprisonment.330 But the women around Centa Beimler did not dominate Moringen in the same way Communist men did in the KL. For a start, female Kapos gained far less power and influence.331 Moreover, the prisoner population in Moringen was more diverse. Jehovah’s Witnesses made up a sizable proportion already in 1935, reflecting the high level of female activists, and during 1937 they became the largest prisoner group; by November, around half of the protective custody prisoners were Jehovah’s Witnesses.332

  These changes in Moringen went hand in hand with sharply rising prisoner numbers, up from 92 in early January 1937 to around 450 in November 1937.333 Centa Beimler herself was no longer among them, having been released in February under tragic circumstances. Several months earlier, the Communist women in Moringen had heard that Hans Beimler was fighting with the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, further boosting his reputation. Then rumors spread that he had been killed during the defense of Madrid. Centa Beimler was tormented by uncertainty—she “walked around more dead than alive,” one fellow inmate recalled—until the director confirmed the news. Soon after, she was set free. Now that her husband was dead, the Nazis no longer needed her as a hostage; her sister followed a few months later.334 Most other inmates, however, stayed behind until the entire protective custody wing in Moringen was closed down and all remaining prisoners were transferred to Lichtenburg.

  Opened in December 1937, Lichtenburg was the first KL for women. It had taken Theodor Eicke three years to establish such a camp, highlighting the peripheral place of female prisoners in his vision; for him, the “enemies behind barbed wire” were men. Still, he finally felt forced to act. Not only was the detention of protective custody prisoners outside the IKL an anomaly, but the numbers of female inmates just kept on rising. Moringen was becoming too small, as Himmler himself had seen during an inspection in late May 1937, while the bigger Lichtenburg stood empty after its closure as a camp for men. It was quickly redesignated and soon filled up again; by April 1939, 1,065 women were held inside.335

  Upon arrival in Lichtenburg, Erna Ludolph—a thirty-year-old Jehovah’s Witness from Lübeck—immediately realized that the premises were much bigger than Moringen. Soon, Ludolph and the others saw further differences, almost all for the worse. As an SS camp, Lichtenburg was run along far more military lines, with roll calls in the corridors and the yard. Leisure time was cut back and forced labor extended by about two hours. The SS also made far greater use of Kapos. Above all, the women endured harder punishment and occasional violence. Jehovah’s Witnesses made up the largest prisoner group, and conditions were particularly grim for those, like Erna Ludolph, who were isolated as “incorrigible.” One day in 1938, after these women refused to line up to a radio speech by Hitler, the guards attacked them and sprayed them with high-pressure water hoses.336

  Although the local SS staff ensured the stricter treatment of female prisoners, they stopped well short of running Lichtenburg like a KL for men. It developed a distinct identity all its own, removed from the other SS concentration camps. The differences started with the camp’s appearance. The old castle in Lichtenburg, with its large dormitories, was a long way from the SS ideal of a modern barrack camp. More generally, the Lichtenburg women faced less terror than male KL prisoners. Forced labor was not yet all-consuming, violent excesses were infrequent, and punishments were less severe (according to the official regulations, there was no flogging, for example). As a result, the death rate was very low, with two confirmed prisoner deaths—both of them Jehovah’s Witnesses—between late 1937 and spring 1939, when the SS closed down the KL Lichtenburg.337

  “In the middle of May 1939,” Erna Ludolph recalled after the war, �
�we Jehovah’s Witnesses, all 400 to 450 of us, were brought by truck with the first mass transports to Ravensbrück.” Expecting the number of female prisoners to grow further, SS officials had decided sometime in 1938 to establish an entirely new camp for women. After plans to build it near Dachau fell through, attention soon turned to a secluded site by the town of Fürstenberg, some fifty miles or so north of Berlin. Once a small detachment of men from Sachsenhausen had erected the first barracks and buildings in the early months of 1939, the new camp, called Ravensbrück, was ready.338

  The prisoners’ living conditions deteriorated after the move from Lichtenburg, just as they had done after the prior move from Moringen. “Everything escalated to an unbelievable degree,” Erna Ludolph recalled. Roll calls in Ravensbrück were more torturous, forced labor more exhausting, punishment more severe, and life more rigid, with women now wearing identical dresses with blue and gray stripes, as well as an apron and headscarf.339 Still, terror remained gender-specific, as the Camp SS continued to reserve its most violent abuse for men. Although flogging was introduced as an official punishment in Ravensbrück, some other excesses, including hanging from a post, were still absent. Instead of brutal assaults, the local SS relied more heavily on guard dogs, because Himmler believed that women would be particularly scared of them.340

  The special status of Ravensbrück shaped its staff, too. When the SS first decided to open a concentration camp for women, it faced a dilemma. Until now, the Camp SS had been conceived as an exclusive male club, resting on hypermasculine values. But the deployment of men in a women’s camp was problematic, as the sexual abuses in early camps had shown. In the end, Himmler opted for a compromise. In Lichtenburg and Ravensbrück, SS men acted as sentries and occupied the senior positions in the Commandant Staff, starting with the commandant himself. The guards inside, however, who had most day-to-day contacts with prisoners, were women, though Himmler balked at admitting them into the SS; although female guards were part of the Camp SS, they were never full SS members. Even during the war, when they came under the jurisdiction of the SS, these women merely belonged to its retinue (Gefolge), wearing special field-gray uniforms.341

  The female guards of Ravensbrück differed from their male counterparts in other SS camps. True, most of them were volunteers, too, often in their mid to late twenties, but they normally had no previous history of political violence; the brawls of the Weimar and early Nazi years had been a male domain. Also, only a fraction of the female guards were NSDAP members, while the bulk of SS men had signed up with the party. What attracted most female recruits to the KL was not any ideological mission, but the prospect of social advancement. Many were poor and unmarried, with few professional qualifications, and the camp promised regular employment with decent pay and other benefits, such as comfortable quarters and even (from 1941) an SS kindergarten.342 Once inside Ravensbrück, the lives of the female guards were strictly regimented, though they were never subject to the same drill as male “political soldiers”; indeed, the frustrated Ravensbrück commandant repeatedly reprimanded his female guards for breaches of military decorum.343

  For now, women remained marginal in the KL system, both as guards and as inmates. True, the overall proportion of female prisoners was rising fast—from around 3.3 percent in late summer 1938 to 11.7 percent one year later—but Ravensbrück still lagged far behind concentration camps for men, both in size and severity.344 Nonetheless, its creation was significant, concluding the shift from the more traditional detention of women to the new forms of SS domination.345

  * * *

  The camps for women were late additions to the KL system, which had been created and cemented in the mid-1930s. Toward the end of 1934, it seemed as if the camps might disappear. Just three years later, they were firm fixtures of the Third Reich, outside the law, funded by the state and controlled by a new agency, the IKL. The SS had also developed a basic blueprint for the KL, drawing on its first camp at Dachau. Its key features were a uniform administrative structure, a common architectural ideal, a professional corps of SS men, and a systematic brand of terror. The simultaneous extension of the SS system—the prisoner population rose from around 3,800 in summer 1935 to 7,746 at the end of 1937—points to another key aspect of the KL, first highlighted by Hannah Arendt shortly after the Second World War. In a radical totalitarian state like the Third Reich, terror did not decrease after the regime established itself. Nazi leaders pursued ever more extreme aims, and so the KL expanded, even as domestic political opposition diminished.346 This extension was not yet over by late 1937; it was only just beginning.

  3

  Expansion

  Friday the thirteenth of May 1938 was a date etched into the memory of Buchenwald prisoners. The day had begun balmy and bright; spring was in the air and the countryside around the camp glowed vibrantly. It was still early in the morning, with the sun rising fast across the clear sky above the Ettersberg, but a large prisoner detail was already hard at work in the forest outside the camp, digging trenches for sewage pipes. At around nine o’clock, two of the prisoners, Emil Bargatzky and Peter Forster, went to collect coffee for the others, as usual, walking along a secluded path when they suddenly attacked the guard who escorted them. Before he had time to fire his rifle, SS Rottenführer Albert Kallweit was hit over the head with a spade. The two prisoners, who had long planned their escape, dragged the guard’s body into the undergrowth, grabbed his weapon, and ran for their lives.1

  The killing of Rottenführer Kallweit sent shock waves through the SS. Successful breakouts were extremely rare since Inspector Eicke exhorted his men to shoot at fleeing prisoners without warning. And a deadly attack on the SS was unprecedented.2 Heinrich Himmler flew to Weimar the next day to inspect the camp and Kallweit’s corpse, accompanied by Theodor Eicke. He also ordered a manhunt for the escaped prisoners. Regional papers carried sensational reports about the killing of the SS man and announced a hefty reward of one thousand Reichsmark for information leading to the fugitives’ capture; for weeks, the incident was the talk of the town in Weimar and beyond, a rare moment when the camps penetrated public consciousness in the late 1930s.3

  On May 22, 1938, after Emil Bargatzky had spent nine days on the run, the police found him hiding in a brick factory some 140 miles north of Buchenwald. Within a week, he faced a hastily arranged show trial before the Weimar Special Court. Reporting on the trial, the regional press made much of his criminal record. Born into a poor family in 1901 as one of fifteen children, Bargatzky had struggled to hold down a job during the calamitous Weimar years—working as a carpenter, butcher, and coachman—and committed several offenses. The press pounced on these transgressions as further proof of his subhuman nature. The Weimar state prosecutor, meanwhile, commended the KL guards who protected the national community from dangerous asocial elements like Bargatzky. He also spoke out in favor of the “preventive” policing against social outsiders, which was intensifying during the late 1930s and swept many thousands into overcrowded concentration camps—among them Emil Bargatzky, who had been held since 1937 because of his criminal past.4

  The judges at Bargatzky’s murder trial on Saturday, May 28, took less than two hours to pronounce the death penalty. He was now on death row and faced execution by the legal authorities behind prison doors. But his fate was to take a final twist after Heinrich Himmler asked Hitler for permission to have Bargatzky hanged in Buchenwald instead, near the scene of the crime. Hitler approved.5 Early on the morning of June 4, 1938, the Buchenwald prisoners lined up on the roll call square. SS guards surrounded them, some pointing machine guns at the crowd. Shortly before 7:00 a.m. the main gate opened and the manacled Emil Bargatzky was led onto the square, past rows of SS men. He walked as if in a trance and some prisoners speculated that the SS had drugged him. After a judge dressed in a black robe read out the death sentence, Bargatzky stepped onto a wooden box on the newly erected scaffold and put his head through a noose. On the word of Commandant Karl Otto Koch, the box was
pushed away and a prisoner, designated as the executioner, pulled the rope; Bargatzky twisted and turned for several minutes until he died. The SS left his disfigured corpse dangling for some time on the roll call square, as a grisly warning to all prisoners.6

  The SS staged this first official execution of a concentration camp inmate, which echoed ritual German executions in the early modern era, as a demonstration of might, attended by high-ranking dignitaries like Theodor Eicke, who eagerly reported the details to Himmler.7 SS leaders brazenly turned an ignominy—two escaped inmates and a dead guard—into political capital, presenting it as proof of the barbarity of the prisoners and the fundamental importance of the camps. Already before Bargatzky’s hanging, a popular SS periodical had tried to boost the status of the Camp SS in a graphic article, complete with mug shots of the two fugitives and a photo of the slain guard in heroic pose. The article, which drew heavily on Eicke’s worldview, claimed that the “cowardly attack” by the two “racially inferior criminals” showed just how dangerous the mission of the political SS soldiers really was (in reality, Camp SS men were far more likely to be injured by friendly fire from other guards than by prisoners). Under the headline “He died for us!” the influential SS weekly waxed lyrical about the pasty Rottenführer Kallweit, hoping to elevate him into the pantheon of Nazi martyrs, and also praised the other unsung heroes of the Death’s Head SS, who were “permanently facing the enemy” while the rest of Germany was “peacefully going about its daily business.”8 The image of SS guards as valiant guardians of the nation was meant to strike a chord at a time when Eicke was in the midst of a major recruitment drive, greatly expanding the size of the Camp SS in the run-up to war.