Death was frequent in Mauthausen. In the first year between August 1938 and July 1939, at least 131 prisoners perished, divided almost evenly between so-called criminals and asocials.194 Relative to the small size of its prisoner population—there were only 1,431 inmates on July 1, 1939—Mauthausen may well have been more lethal than any other KL during this period. In other camps, inmates began to dread a transfer to Mauthausen, after returning prisoners described the huge quarries as hell on earth.195 Those in Flossenbürg had a better chance of survival: fifty-five prisoners perished before the outbreak of war (almost eighty percent of them so-called professional criminals).196 Among the survivors was Josef Kolacek from Vienna, who was eventually released after more than nine months in Flossenbürg.197
A High-Tech Factory
No project better sums up the economic hubris of the SS in the late 1930s than its giant new brick works at Oranienburg. In summer 1938, on the wooded banks of a canal little more than a mile from Sachsenhausen, the SS began to build what would have been the world’s largest brick factory, with a projected annual output of 150 million bricks, around ten times more than large factories normally produced. The project—probably initiated by Albert Speer, who advanced the necessary funds to DESt—was heavily promoted by the SS as a showcase for its economic prowess. Determined to prove its ability to harness modern technology for the Nazi regime, the SS opted for the most costly and cutting-edge equipment, so-called dry press machines, which promised both speed and efficiency. SS managers staked their reputation on a successful outcome. Heinrich Himmler apparently attended the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone on July 6, 1938, and remained keenly interested in progress at the building site.198
The entire project rested on forced labor. Although the SS used some civilian contractors for the brick works, the bulk of the labor force came from Sachsenhausen. In the prewar years, a daily average of 1,500 to 2,000 prisoners was deployed, making it the largest labor detail in any SS concentration camp at the time. After the prisoners had cleared many of the trees on site, they began the building work, excavating a dock area, moving and leveling the ground, and constructing the main factory building. Another labor gang worked on a railway line for transporting clay, from its source a few miles away, to the plant.199
The contrast between the plant’s high-tech design and the primitive conditions on the construction site could hardly have been greater. Prisoners performed the most strenuous labor with the most basic tools or no tools at all. Large groups of inmates carried piles of sand in their uniforms, worn back-to-front so that the back of jackets formed a kind of apron. Others moved large mounds of earth on rickety wooden stretchers or shifted sacks of cement on their shoulders. Elsewhere, prisoners climbed scaffolds and poured down cement, barely clinging on in their wooden clogs. There were many accidents—severed limbs, crushed bones, and the like—but no respite. SS terror was as abundant as facilities were scarce; the latrine, for example, was no more than a beam across a ditch, and SS guards liked to push exhausted inmates into the pool of excrement below.200
The Sachsenhausen inmates feared the brick works as a particularly destructive labor detail.201 In the mornings, they faced a long march to the building site, moved along with clubs and whips by SS men, only to stagger back to the compound in the evenings, carrying the sick, the wounded, and the dead. On site in Oranienburg, the prisoners spent the entire day without shelter; after the glistening heat of summer 1938, they braved the bitter winter, always working at a ferocious pace. Because the deluded SS managers had agreed on an impossibly tight schedule for their flagship plant, guards and Kapos drove prisoners with a brutality unusual even for a KL.202
Countless prisoners perished on the desolate Oranienburg building site, succumbing to exhaustion, accidents, and abuse; there were some suicides, too.203 The worst period came in winter 1938–39, when a renewed SS push to complete the project coincided with a cold snap across the Berlin region. Prisoners worked in thin uniforms and without gloves as the temperatures fell below freezing for almost three months; often, the soup they ate for lunch would turn to ice.204 Between December 1938 and March 1939, at least 429 Sachsenhausen prisoners died at the brick works and elsewhere in the camp, more than in any other KL during this period.205 The great majority of the dead were so-called asocials, who made up the largest prisoner group at the Oranienburg building site and often faced special harassment by SS and Kapos.206
One victim was the fifty-five-year-old agricultural laborer Wilhelm Schwarz, who was part of a fifty-man-strong earth-leveling detail—all of them, like him, “asocial” prisoners—toiling at the brick works. Schwarz died on the morning of March 21, 1939, some nine months after he had arrived in Sachsenhausen as a “work-shy” prisoner. According to the responsible Kapo, who was interviewed during a routine investigation, Schwarz had been crushed to death as he tried to empty a dump truck filled with sand. This may not have been the whole story, but whatever the truth, the Kapo, a political prisoner, clearly had no sympathy for inmates like Wilhelm Schwarz, even in death: he complained bitterly that the “asocials” in his unit were extremely “lazy” and “unreasonable,” refusing to “make the slightest effort during work.”207 The SS guards cared even less about the gruesome death of Wilhelm Schwarz, or any of the other fatalities at Oranienburg. The dead could be replaced straightaway, as there was no shortage of prisoners, and so the Camp SS worked more prisoners to death, in an early display of lethal disregard for its forced laborers.208
But even with a boundless supply of forced labor, the Oranienburg brick works would not have become the expected triumph, as SS ambitions far exceeded SS abilities. The brick works turned into a giant disaster, reminiscent of some vast and pointless state projects pursued by the Soviets in the Gulag. The decisive moment came in May 1939, during the first proper trial run, with the plant already months behind schedule. SS officials watched in disbelief as their dreams turned to dust, quite literally: the bricks that left the brand-new kilns just crumbled and fell apart. In their ignorance and haste, SS managers had committed a litany of elementary errors. Most grievously, they had never bothered to check whether the local clay was suitable for dry press production. It was not. The vast new factory, which had claimed so many lives, would never produce a single usable brick.209
The debacle at Oranienburg was a devastating indictment of SS incompetence. Clearly, the SS was in no position to run a large high-tech factory.210 The reaction of Oswald Pohl was equally telling. Instead of scaling back SS ambitions, he pressed ahead with brick production in Oranienburg, whatever the price. Obstacles would not stop the SS; they had to be overcome. To save face, and his own career, Pohl moved fast in the summer of 1939, hoping to keep Himmler in the dark about the true scale of the disaster. Looking for scapegoats, he got rid of the private building contractor and the hapless chief executive of DESt. Pohl handed control of DESt to younger men with a greater understanding of modern management, who combined opportunism, drive, and professionalism with commitment to the Nazi cause. Soon, prisoners had to tear down structures they had only just erected in Oranienburg; they demolished kilns and ripped out machines and concrete foundations. Meanwhile, a huge rebuilding program added new parts, this time using the more reliable wet press process. All this cost yet more lives and money, and the SS still had little to show for it. In 1940, after production had restarted on a small scale, the plant barely produced three million bricks, almost all of which were needed on site. And although the output rose in the following years, it never even came close to the original targets.211 However, SS hubris remained unchecked, as SS managers stubbornly clung to the belief that any plans, however far-fetched or deadly, could be willed into reality.
Illness and Death
The KL of the late 1930s were no full-scale slaughterhouses. Living conditions were not lethal for most prisoners, and systematic mass extermination was not yet on the SS agenda. As a result, the bulk of the inmate population survived, at least for now. This was true
, above all, for female prisoners, only a handful of whom perished during the late 1930s.212 Although the prospects for men were bleaker, the great majority of them pulled through, too. True, death was no longer the exception; but it was not yet the norm, either. Of the well over fifty thousand men taken to concentration camps sometime between January 1938 and August 1939, 2,268 are known to have lost their lives inside. Despite the immense hardship of the camps, then, survival remained by far the most likely outcome.213
Still, many more men died in KL than in the mid-1930s, especially during the most lethal phase, between summer 1938 and spring 1939. To some degree, this reflected the general growth of the prisoner population at the time. But the death rate rose much faster than inmate numbers. In Dachau, for example, the average prisoner population doubled in the late 1930s, while the death rate shot up tenfold.214 There were several causes. Daily forced labor became more ruinous than before, as we have seen, with most prisoners forced into heavy construction. At the same time, basic living conditions declined due to shortages and overcrowding. Another important factor was the poor medical care for ill and injured prisoners, a crucial aspect of the KL that requires further scrutiny.
The Camp SS generally neglected the prisoners’ health, focusing instead on security, punishment, and labor. In the absence of firm direction from above, the medical infrastructure varied from camp to camp. And although the different infirmaries expanded during the late 1930s, adding more space and technical equipment—in Sachsenhausen, there was now a regular operating room and an X-ray department—the overall standard of care remained woefully inadequate.215
The biggest threat were the Camp SS men themselves. It was a basic SS tenet that ailing inmates were still dangerous enemies. SS men automatically suspected sick prisoners of being cheats and stopped many of them from receiving medical help altogether. When an ill Dachau prisoner dared to approach camp compound leader Hermann Baranowski for permission to see the doctor, one day in 1937, he provoked a wild tirade: “So what! During the [First World] War, people marched for hours with their guts in their hands! You have to learn to endure pain! I will make sure of it! Dismissed!”216 SS doctors, meanwhile, actively searched for supposed malingerers, following orders from Theodor Eicke. “Prisoners trying to avoid work by unfounded or prissy sick-reporting,” Eicke insisted, “are detailed to the ‘penal work’ section.”217 KL doctors were also complicit in countless other acts of terror. They routinely declared prisoners “fit” to be whipped, denied them care for wounds, and covered up murders by forging autopsy reports and death certificates.218
SS doctors were in short supply, and although it is hard to generalize, it seems that those who ended up inside the KL were often inexperienced, incompetent, or both. As graduates, they stood out from other Death’s Head SS officers, almost none of whom had set foot inside a university, except perhaps to beat up left-wing students in the Weimar years. Many KL doctors had only recently qualified and saw the camps, and the harsh treatment of prisoners, as a springboard for their medical careers. One of this breed of young SS physicians was Dr. Ludwig Ehrsam, the head of the Sachsenhausen infirmary. Not yet thirty years of age, Dr. Ehrsam rarely bothered to examine his patients. Instead, he would force them to perform physical exercises, supposedly to determine whether they were ready to return to work. His callousness cost numerous prisoner lives, earning him a fitting nickname among the Sachsenhausen prisoners: Dr. Gruesome.219
There were exceptions, of course. A few SS doctors tried to improve the treatment in the KL and occasionally even sent inmates to specialists in proper hospitals.220 Mostly, though, sick prisoners could expect poor provision, neglect, and abuse. It would have been easy to improve things, if only the SS had wanted. After all, there were experienced physicians among the prisoners who could have assisted in infirmaries, as they had done in some early camps.221 Camp SS men knew very well that these inmates were often much better qualified than SS doctors were.222 However, by the late 1930s, the SS often refused to draw on prisoner doctors, some of whom now helped their fellow inmates in secret.223 Instead, it left most daily duties in the infirmaries to prisoners with little or no medical training. These Kapos worked under SS orderlies, who were often even more ignorant, and SS doctors, who rarely deigned to deal with routine matters.224
The indifference of SS doctors threatened the entire prisoner population. Poor hygiene created a breeding ground for infectious diseases, and several epidemics spread through KL in the late 1930s. Buchenwald was hardest hit, following an outbreak of typhoid fever in the overcrowded camp in late 1938. The epidemic soon spread beyond the compound, after wastewater contaminated a nearby stream. Alarmed municipal officials placed several villages under quarantine and blamed the Buchenwald SS for its negligence. By the time the SS medical staff finally took action—isolating sick prisoners in a special barrack and banning the use of the open latrine—it was too late. The epidemic in the camp raged for weeks, killing scores of inmates.225
One of the last victims was Jura Soyfer, a young poet and writer arrested as a left-wing opponent in Austria after the Nazi takeover in spring 1938. The Buchenwald SS had forced him to work as a corpse carrier and it was here that he caught typhoid fever. Jura Soyfer died on February 16, 1939, only days after he had learned that the SS was about to release him. He was mourned by other inmates, who had been inspired by the witty parodies of the SS he had secretly performed in the barracks. As his wooden coffin left the camp on the back of a van, on its way to the Weimar crematorium, a fellow prisoner wondered “how many unwritten poems, how many unfinished works have we locked inside with him!”226
Jura Soyfer was one of around one thousand men who perished in Buchenwald between January 1938 and August 1939, making it, in absolute terms, by far the most deadly KL at the time. In Dachau, by contrast, just over four hundred prisoners lost their lives over the same period, even though it admitted slightly more men than Buchenwald.227 How do we account for Buchenwald’s wretched record? It was the most recent among the big SS camps, and sanitary conditions were worse there than in Dachau and Sachsenhausen, epitomized by the typhoid epidemic. And the Buchenwald SS was particularly violent, whipped up by the traumatic killing in May 1938 of SS Rottenführer Albert Kallweit. But there was another crucial factor, perhaps the most important of all. Buchenwald held far more Jewish prisoners than any other KL at the time, and Jews remained the favorite victims of the Camp SS; of all the Buchenwald prisoners who died in the late 1930s, almost half were Jewish, Jura Soyfer among them.228
JEWS
“I would not like to be a Jew in Germany,” Hermann Göring quipped on November 12, 1938, at a top-level Nazi meeting on anti-Jewish policy, only days after a devastating state-sponsored pogrom had engulfed Germany, with Nazi mobs razing thousands of synagogues, shops, and houses, and humiliating, robbing, and assaulting tens of thousands of Jews; hundreds had died, murdered during the storm of violence or driven to suicide.229 The pogrom was the climax of years of Nazi persecution, which saw the gradual but relentless exclusion of Jews from German social, cultural, and economic life, pursued by radical forces from below and above. It was becoming impossible for Jews to live in Germany, and around half of the estimated five hundred thousand Jews left their fatherland during the prewar years, despite the uncertainties of life abroad, the Nazi levies on emigration, and the difficulties of securing visas. The remaining Jews—impoverished, isolated, and deprived—faced a desperate future trapped inside the Third Reich.230
The history of Jews in prewar Nazi Germany has been told before, though rarely with more than a passing glance at the concentration camps.231 There is an obvious explanation for this oversight: except for a brief moment after the pogrom, only a fraction of the Jewish population was held in the camps. In the prewar years, the focal point of anti-Jewish policy was elsewhere—in schools, at work, in courts, on the streets. And yet, the persecution of Jews in the prewar camps was important, too, as the KL spearheaded anti-Semitic terror and pioneered sever
al radical measures that later hit all Jews under Nazi rule.232
Take racial legislation. It was an article of faith for Nazi leaders that sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews were a monstrous sin. But even though there had been talk of an official ban since 1933, the regime initially bided its time. From spring 1935, local Nazi thugs across Germany, frustrated with the general direction of the dictatorship, took matters into their own hands and attacked “mixed” couples. The police, in turn, dragged numerous “race defilers” to concentration camps in summer 1935. German courts could not yet punish them; the police and the SS could. “To put an end to his sensual greed,” the Magdeburg Gestapo noted in one such case, involving a Jewish man accused of sex with his “Christian” housekeeper, it was “absolutely necessary to confine him in a concentration camp.”233 Such cases declined only after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, which formally made Jews into second-class citizens, and outlawed extramarital relations and future marriages, threatening culpable men with prison or penitentiary (women did not fall under this provision). From now on, the Gestapo reserved protective custody for “race defilement” largely for men suspected of “particularly serious” offenses, and later some Jewish women, too (or “Jewish whores,” as one police officer put it).234
The KL also broke new ground when it came to driving Jews out of the country. Forced emigration only emerged as the primary aim of Nazi anti-Jewish policy in the late 1930s.235 But the police had already gained extensive experience inside concentration camps. From 1935, the Gestapo had routinely taken German émigrés who came back home into protective custody, suspecting them of “atrocity propaganda” abroad.236 Among them were many hundreds of Jews. Before they were released again, normally after around six months, the Gestapo insisted that they would have to leave the country, preferably for Palestine or beyond. Before long, the release of other Jewish prisoners had become conditional on emigration, too, pushing even more of them out of Germany; anyone returning once more to German soil was threatened with lifelong detention in a concentration camp.237
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 24