KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  During the coordination of the KL in the mid-1930s, the general approach to labor changed. To start with, the Camp SS would not tolerate “idleness” and made work compulsory for all. As Theodor Eicke’s regulations for Esterwegen put it: “Anyone refusing to work, evading work, or, for the purpose of doing nothing, feigning physical weaknesses or sickness, is regarded as incorrigible and is made to answer for himself.”157 Meanwhile, the SS put an end to much of the labor outside the KL. Trying to shield its camps from prying eyes, it scaled back work for the wider community, epitomized by the abandonment of moor cultivation in Esterwegen.

  When the Camp SS looked at the economic use of prisoners in the mid-1930s, its gaze turned inward, to the construction and maintenance of the KL. All five concentration camps set up between 1936 and 1939, starting with Sachsenhausen, were built on the backs of prisoners, and the first weeks and months in a new camp always ranked among the worst; afterward, the Buchenwald survivor Eugen Kogon wrote, “misery at least consolidated itself.” In summer and autumn 1937, the first Buchenwald prisoners had to fell trees, erect barracks, dig trenches, and carry stones and tree trunks, struggling for twelve hours a day or more as the camp slowly grew. Illness and injuries were frequent, and prisoners who could not keep up, like the frail Hans Litten, faced slaps, kicks, and worse. What is more, the prisoners had to endure the primitive conditions typical of new camps. In the beginning, there were no beds, blankets, or running water in Buchenwald; mud was everywhere, clinging to the prisoners’ shoes, uniforms, and faces. These conditions, combined with SS terror and exhausting labor, had fatal consequences. Between August and December 1937, fifty-three prisoners died in the new camp at Buchenwald (over the same period, fourteen prisoners died in Sachsenhausen, which was already up and running). Of course, heavy construction work did not cease after the foundations had been laid. None of the large camps were ever finished, and the SS continued to exploit prisoners for repairs and extensions; during the prewar years, around ninety percent of all Buchenwald prisoners worked on the camp itself.158

  Beyond the building of the growing KL complex, the Camp SS pursued few serious economic activities in the mid-1930s. Himmler and other SS leaders had no real long-term strategy and showed little desire to enter large-scale production. Instead, the SS ran a patchwork of small and obscure businesses outside the KL, among them a porcelain factory producing tawdry statuettes of sausage dogs and Hitler Youths. As for the most valuable resource in the hands of the SS, its prisoners, their deployment was generally overseen locally, by the commandants.159

  The commandants, in turn, left much of the initiative to guards, who often continued to see labor as an excuse for abuse; however pressing a project was, there was always time for torture. Many years later, Harry Naujoks still remembered the day in 1936 when an SS man had suddenly forced him and other Sachsenhausen prisoners to stop flattening some cleared woodland and dig deep holes instead, at an ever-increasing pace. “We are only robots now,” Naujoks recalled. Driven on by kicks and punches, the prisoners shoveled manically until the area they had just leveled resembled a moonscape. “All our earlier work is being destroyed, completely pointlessly.”160

  Overall, then, SS economic ambitions for the KL remained modest in the mid-1930s—with one exception: the prisoner workshops at Dachau. These were not only the earliest SS economic ventures, but one of the most significant of the prewar years. It had all started in 1933, when the Camp SS set up workshops to cater for the immediate needs of the new camp. Despite some protests from local businesses about SS competition, the complex grew quickly over the coming years and soon started to supply SS troops elsewhere; by 1939, 370 prisoners in the big carpentry workshop produced bed frames, tables, and chairs for general SS use.161 Of course, SS terror still trumped economics. But the success of the Dachau venture—the most profitable SS business of the prewar years, thanks to forced labor—also demonstrated that prisoners could be exploited without compromising the general mission of the KL. SS leaders realized that effective production was compatible with terror. This paved the way for a much more aggressive economic policy in the late 1930s, spearheaded by one of the rising stars of the SS, Oswald Pohl.162

  Oswald Pohl and the SS Economy

  Looking for a manager to professionalize the expanding SS organization in 1933, Heinrich Himmler’s eyes fell on Oswald Pohl, at the time a navy paymaster. The two men met for the first time in May that year in the garden of the Kiel navy mess, and Himmler was immediately taken with the tall and imposing Pohl, eight years his senior at forty years of age. Pohl had exactly the kind of résumé Himmler was looking for, combining managerial expertise with ideological fervor. He came from a middle-class family and had joined the navy as a trainee paymaster in 1912, specializing in budgetary and organizational matters. At the same time, he was a far-right activist and Nazi veteran. After the German defeat in the First World War, Pohl served in the Freikorps and then the nascent Nazi movement. He claimed to have joined the party as early as 1923, “following the call of the blood,” as he later wrote, and became an SA member in 1926, rising to Obersturmführer by 1933. Himmler had found the right man to build up the SS administration, and apparently offered him a free hand to do so. Pohl jumped at the chance. An impulsive man burning with ambition, he felt trapped in the backwater of the navy. He was desperately seeking an “outlet” for his “lust for work,” he wrote to Himmler two days after they met, and promised to serve him “until I drop.” Pohl started his new job as chief of the SS Administration Office, with a pay raise and promotion, in late February 1934.163

  Over the coming years, Pohl accumulated more and more power. He centralized large parts of SS administration and finance, negotiated budgets with the Nazi Party and the Ministry of Finance, and audited SS branches. Pohl also began to reach beyond his original brief, gaining control over SS construction work and the fledgling economic ventures. Pohl’s ascent to the top echelons of the SS was swift, and in 1939, following a major restructure of SS operations, he was appointed as head of two separate main offices—administration and business, as well as budget and buildings.164 Pohl’s rise was accelerated by his ruthlessness, which hit both rivals and subordinates, and by his unwavering loyalty to Himmler, who backed him all the way.165

  The KL system was not immune to Pohl’s pull. The stronger he became, the more he drew the camps into his orbit. Pohl was closely involved with the Dachau workshops from 1934—he lived and worked nearby (the SS construction office was based in Dachau in 1933–34) and frequently inspected the sites, before taking sole charge in the late 1930s. He had his hand in other matters, too. By 1938, Pohl controlled the financial and administrative affairs of the camps and the SS Death’s Head troops, and supervised various building programs inside.166

  Pohl’s inroads into Camp SS territory set him on a collision course with Theodor Eicke. They held the same SS rank, following Pohl’s promotion to Gruppenführer in early 1937, and had a certain grudging respect for each other, using the informal “Du” even in official correspondence. Both men occupied special positions inside the SS, answerable directly to Himmler, and both were determined to make the most of their powers. They were “brutal characters,” Rudolf Höss later wrote, and probably recognized each other as kindred spirits.167 However, their relationship was far less amicable than some historians have suggested.168 They clashed over the camps’ administration, budgets, and buildings, and Eicke must have also begrudged Pohl’s occasionally taking credit for the KL; when Himmler conducted an official tour of Dachau in April 1939, for example, it was Pohl who gave the introduction, not Eicke.169

  Pohl’s position strengthened in the late 1930s, after Himmler ordered the massive expansion of the SS economy. Having long neglected economic matters, Himmler displayed a sudden zeal and oversaw the establishment of several major SS enterprises in 1938. It was a landmark year in the development of the SS economy, although historians still disagree about Himmler’s intentions; most likely, he sensed another op
portunity to enlarge his SS empire, this time at the expense of private industry.170 Whatever Himmler’s motives, the thrust of his policy was clear enough: concentration camp labor would become the main capital of the burgeoning SS economy, and Oswald Pohl its overall manager. In autumn 1938, Pohl bragged that it was his task “to find employment for the very numerous layabouts in our concentration camps,” a claim endorsed by Himmler.171 In practice, however, Pohl was not yet fully in charge, as commandants and the IKL also had their say.172 But there was no denying Pohl’s growing influence, and his control over the SS economy would prove the key to his takeover of responsibility for the entire KL system later on in the war.

  By far the most significant SS economic initiative in 1938 was the creation of the German Earth and Stone Works (Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH, or DESt), which became Pohl’s first significant enterprise. The catalyst was Hitler’s monumental construction program for German cities, masterminded by the young architect Albert Speer, who had recently been appointed as inspector general of building for the Reich capital, Berlin, the biggest prewar building site of the Third Reich. As Hitler’s megalomaniac vision required far more bricks and stones than German industry could ever deliver—Speer estimated an annual need of around two billion bricks—the SS stepped in. During a meeting in late 1937 or early 1938, Hitler, Himmler, and Speer agreed that KL prisoners would supply vast amounts of building materials. Himmler saw this as an attractive proposition, a first step toward large-scale SS production. Not only would it boost the status of the SS, but Speer provided much of the startup costs, offering an interest-free advance of almost ten million Reichsmark to DESt.

  The SS, which had already begun a search for suitable quarries and clay reserves back in 1937, greatly accelerated its efforts from spring 1938 onward, at the same time that the nationwide police raids started to drag more forced laborers into the camps. By summer 1938, Oswald Pohl was overseeing several DESt projects. Prisoners were feverishly building two new brick works, a small one in Berlstedt, some five miles from Buchenwald, and a much larger one near Sachsenhausen. Elsewhere, prisoners were setting up two entirely new KL, near quarries that were meant to provide blue-gray granite for building the Germany of Hitler’s dreams; these two new camps were Flossenbürg and Mauthausen.173

  The Quarry Camps

  Sometime during the second half of March 1938, Oswald Pohl and Theodor Eicke set off on a business trip across the south of the German Reich, accompanied by an entourage of SS experts. They were scouting locations for KL suitable for the planned economic ventures.174 Around March 24 the group traveled through the impoverished and inhospitable landscape of eastern Bavaria, near the Czechoslovakian border, with its dense forests and barren soil. What had brought them to this remote corner of Germany, sometimes jokingly referred to as the Bavarian Siberia, were the quarries around the village of Flossenbürg, which had operated there since the nineteenth century. Thanks to the building mania in the Third Reich, production had recently increased, and Pohl and Eicke agreed that there was an opportunity for the SS to join in. Later the SS search party crossed what had until recently been the Austrian border, heading toward Linz to inspect the nearby granite quarries around Mauthausen. Here, too, Pohl and Eicke found what they wanted and lost no time. Within days of their visits, the establishment of the two new camps was under way.175

  Flossenbürg opened first, receiving its first prisoners on May 3, 1938, and the camp continued to grow over the coming months. The SS leadership regarded it as an important project. Himmler himself visited on May 16, together with Oswald Pohl, and Theodor Eicke even spent his summer holidays there, sending pictures to Himmler; one snapshot showed an armed guard looking toward a large SS flag, with a white skull on dark ground, fluttering high above the heads of prisoners toiling below.176 In Mauthausen, meanwhile, the first prisoners arrived on August 8, 1938. The SS initially forced them into provisional quarters in the Wiener Graben quarry (recently leased by DESt from the city of Vienna), and later moved them to a permanent compound on the hill above the quarry.177

  The SS quickly put its stamp on the two new concentration camps. Their general layout followed the template of other KL, and the core of the SS staff, arriving from Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald, imported proven methods of terror and domination.178 Still, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen were different: for the first time, economic concerns had dictated the choice of KL locations.179 The focus of both camps on quarrying even shaped their appearance, with big granite watchtowers rising up; in Mauthausen, these towers joined up with vast granite walls that enclosed much of the compound, making it look less like a camp than a forbidding castle.180 Initially, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen were also much smaller than other KL for men, in terms of their prisoner numbers; by the end of 1938, Flossenbürg held 1,475 men and Mauthausen 994, at a time when Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Dachau held over eight thousand inmates each.181 Ambitious SS plans to enlarge the two new camps showed little immediate effect.182 Only during the Second World War did they catch up with the other KL.

  There was another striking difference—the makeup of the Flossenbürg and Mauthausen prisoner population. In 1938, the Camp SS launched its most ambitious attempt yet to gather the same prisoner groups in the same location, reserving the two new camps almost exclusively for social outsiders, especially so-called professional criminals. Mass transports of selected prisoners, rounded up in the big three KL for men, began as soon as the new camps opened.183 As a result, almost all Flossenbürg prisoners before the war wore the green triangle. In Mauthausen, too, the “greens” made up the largest group, closely followed by “asocials,” who arrived from other KL in 1939, with many Gypsies among them.184 More than a hundred so-called criminals died in Flossenbürg and Mauthausen before the war broke out, more than in the other three KL for men taken together.185

  Why did the SS concentrate “professional criminals” in the two new quarry camps? Forced labor in quarries was regarded as particularly punishing, and many Nazi officials believed that the worst prisoners deserved the hardest labor. When a senior SS officer suggested in late 1938 that concentration camp prisoners should be sent to lethal radium mines, Himmler responded enthusiastically, proposing to make “the most serious criminals” available.186 Although this particular plan came to nothing, the SS later adopted the principle of sending “criminally recidivist and asocial” inmates to the KL with the worst working conditions.187 Heinrich Himmler made no secret of his hatred for prisoners with the green triangle. In a speech in 1937, he described them as dangerous and violent born criminals, who had spent much of their lives behind bars. Himmler painted a terrifying picture of murderers, robbers, and sex fiends, like a seventy-two-year-old man who had committed sixty-three indecent assaults. “It would be an insult to animals to call such a person an animal,” Himmler raged, “because animals don’t behave that way.”188 When it came to filling the quarry camps in spring and summer 1938, Himmler and other SS leaders felt that it was these prisoners who should suffer.189

  The prisoners who arrived in the two new camps bore little resemblance to the gargoyles of Himmler’s imagination. Typical for men wearing the green triangle, they mostly were persistent but petty property offenders, from especially deprived social backgrounds, who fell back on small-time theft, fraud, and begging for subsistence and survival.190 One such man was Josef Kolacek, who had been living in poverty with his parents, whom he supported on his own, in a large working-class district of Vienna. Kolacek, who was suffering from tuberculosis, was detained by the criminal police on June 14, 1938, shortly before his thirtieth birthday. When he arrived in Dachau, he was still wearing the cheap jacket and collarless shirt with a missing button that he had been arrested in the previous day; the SS also noted with great interest the tattoos on his arms. Although the police had apparently picked him up during the nationwide raid on the “work-shy,” he was classified as a “professional criminal” in the KL. But Kolacek was no dangerous convict. Although he had bee
n sentenced eight times by the courts, the first time in his teens, almost all sentences were for trivial property offenses, punished with no more than a few days’ or weeks’ detention. Only his last conviction in 1937, for attempted burglary, had merited a longer term of eight months in a penitentiary. And yet, the SS labeled him a criminal menace, and on July 1, 1938, he was transported with many dozens of other “professional criminals” from Dachau to Flossenbürg, where he faced brutal forced labor and abuse. As one SS official noted ominously a few months later, Kolacek “is lazy and sluggish during work and has to be reproved all the time.”191

  The early months in the quarry camps of Flossenbürg and Mauthausen were especially hard. As in other new camps, prisoners had to build the infrastructure—exhausting and perilous work aggravated by the primitive living conditions in makeshift compounds. Meanwhile, hundreds of other inmates were already toiling in the quarries. Work began early in Flossenbürg, where three quarries were operational at the end of 1938. In Mauthausen, too, labor in three different quarries began in 1938, soon the largest such complex controlled by DESt. Prisoners had to carry out the most arduous jobs, preparing the ground with pickaxes and drills, and hauling huge granite blocks.192 Adolf Gussak, an Austrian Gypsy who came to Mauthausen on March 21, 1939, on a large prisoner transport from Dachau, later recalled the first days in the Wiener Graben: “In the quarry we had to carry heavy stones. With them on our backs we had to climb the 180 steps up [toward the compound]. The SS beat us. As a result there often was some pushing: everybody wanted to escape the blows. If anyone fell down he was finished off by a bullet in the back of his neck.”193