KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Experiments in Mass Murder

  One of the SS officers invited to watch the demonstration of the Sachsenhausen neck-shooting mechanism in mid-September 1941 was the Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis. The IKL had invited him, together with other commandants, to learn “how to liquidate the Politruks and Russian Commissars,” he later testified. Ziereis was duly impressed. Upon his return to Mauthausen, he oversaw the construction of a similar apparatus in his own camp, ready for the first execution of Soviet officers on October 21, 1941.152 He was not the only commandant inspired by his Sachsenhausen colleagues. In Buchenwald, Karl Otto Koch also set up an execution chamber that closely resembled the Sachsenhausen prototype.153 Others went in a different direction, however. Inspector Glücks still valued local initiative and allowed his commandants to choose their own methods. As a result the KL turned into testing sites for mass execution in autumn and winter 1941.

  In Dachau, the murder of Soviet “commissars” started in early September 1941, just like in Sachsenhausen. But instead of elaborate new techniques, the Dachau SS used the very method that Nazi killers elsewhere sought to abandon—open mass shootings. At first, the Dachau SS killed outside the bunker, as it had done on previous occasions, but as the number of victims increased, it moved the executions to its shooting range in Hebertshausen, about a mile and a half away. Here, Camp SS men forced the Soviet soldiers to strip naked and line up. Everything happened at great speed. A commando of SS men pounced on those in the first row, with five SS men grabbing one prisoner each, dragged them around a corner, and shackled them to posts. Then an SS squad opened fire, often shooting wildly at the helpless victims. The remaining POWs knew exactly what awaited them; they heard the salvos and saw the growing mountain of corpses. Some of the doomed men were paralyzed, some cried, some struggled, some screamed, some held up crosses, some pleaded for their lives. But the shootings only stopped when every prisoner had been executed. Afterwards, the killers would clean the mud and blood from their uniforms, using fresh towels and hot water brought over from the camp.154

  Twenty-eight-year-old Ignat Prochorowitsch Babitsch was one of around 4,400 Soviet POWs murdered in Dachau between September 1941 and June 1942. A married man from a small village in northern Ukraine, Lieutenant Babitsch had served in an infantry division when he was captured in July 1941 near Berdychiv. He initially stayed in the occupied east, in Stalag 325 in Zamosc, before being moved to the Hammelburg camp in Germany. The army mug shot taken on arrival in mid-March 1942 shows a man with delicate features, a shaven head, and a quizzical expression. Just two weeks later a Gestapo commission selected him for extermination, presumably because Babitsch, a teacher, was regarded as a member of the intelligentsia. The RSHA approved his execution on April 10, 1942. A few days after that he was deported to Dachau and executed on the shooting range.155

  The corpses of Soviet POWs murdered in Hebertshausen, like Ignat Babitsch, were brought to the Dachau camp crematorium. When one of the Kapos there asked SS camp compound leader Egon Zill where to store the ashes, he was told to just dump “the dirt of these Bolshevik swine.”156 It is not clear why Dachau Camp SS leaders continued with these massacres, when they could have employed the more clinical method practiced in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. Perhaps they felt too proud to follow the lead of another camp—Dachau, after all, had been the first model KL. Or maybe they wanted to show that they were tough enough to kill without deception, in a gruesome display of what passed for manliness within the Camp SS.

  The Dachau SS was not alone in favoring mass shootings. In Flossenbürg, the SS also mowed down Soviet “commissars” on its shooting range from early September 1941. These executions were hastily abandoned a few months later, however, apparently after blood and body parts had been swept by a nearby river into Flossenbürg village, leading to complaints from locals. In Gross-Rosen, too, rumors among the local population put an end to mass shootings of Soviet POWs, which had initially been carried out on a field near the crematorium; the Camp SS had forced other prisoners to sing at the top of their voices, but this had not masked the sounds of the shootings.157

  In both Flossenbürg and Gross-Rosen, the Camp SS replaced mass shootings with lethal injections. SS men subjected Soviet “commissars” to fake medical exams, measuring and weighing them, and then gave the deadly injection; the murderers tried various poisonous substances, including prussic acid, carbolic acid, and petrol.158 This method of killing proved more effective, though it was hardly new; as we have seen, the Camp SS had already begun to use deadly injections during its earlier murders of Muselmänner. As a result, the wider significance of the killings in Flossenbürg and Gross-Rosen was limited. The same cannot be said for the executions of Soviet POWs in another KL, farther to the east. Here, the experiments in autumn 1941 produced devastating results that would affect the very nature of Nazi mass extermination. The site of these trials was Auschwitz.

  Inventing the Auschwitz Gas Chamber

  One day in early September 1941—probably on September 5—a train from the Neuhammer POW camp in Lower Silesia arrived at Auschwitz. Hundreds of prisoners spilled out of the railcars. All of them were Soviet POWs identified by the Gestapo as “commissars.”159 By the time they marched through the Auschwitz compound, it was dark. The silence was punctured by barking guard dogs and the screams of the prisoners, beaten and whipped by cursing SS men. The noise stirred some inmates who had been asleep inside their barracks. Breaking strict SS instructions, they peered through the windows and saw the columns of POWs, illuminated by searchlights, disappear into block 11. Of all the places in Auschwitz, this was the most feared: it was the bunker, the SS center for torture and murder. Prisoners called it the “death block,” and Camp SS men associated it with death, too, which is why they had turned it into a makeshift gas chamber for Soviet POWs.160 The Auschwitz SS was about to carry out the first mass gassing inside a concentration camp.161

  Inspired by the earlier murder of prisoners in the T-4 gas chambers (during Action 14f13), Auschwitz SS officials had decided to experiment with poison gas as well.162 They chose prussic acid—more commonly known by its trade name, Zyklon B—which had been used in the KL for some time to fumigate vermin-infested buildings. SS orderlies were trained in handling this delousing agent and knew how dangerous it was. It was also easier to deploy than the carbon monoxide used in T-4 killing centers, as there was no need to install pipes or gas cylinders—the murderers just had to drop Zyklon B pellets into a sealed chamber.163 A first lethal test had taken place around late August 1941, when the Auschwitz SS executed a small group of Soviet prisoners. The action was supervised by camp compound leader Karl Fritzsch, a Camp SS veteran who later bragged to colleagues that he was the inventor of the Auschwitz gas chambers.164 Commandant Rudolf Höss quickly agreed to a larger trial. In preparation, the SS cleared the bunker; doors were sealed and the cellar windows filled with cement.

  It was into this cellar—a series of small cells and corridors—that the Auschwitz SS led the Soviet “commissars” that fateful night in early September 1941. As they were forced down the stairs, the POWs saw some 250 other prisoners sprawled across the floor, invalids from the infirmary who had been selected to die with them. Once the last Soviet prisoner had been crammed into the cellar, the SS threw Zyklon B crystals inside and locked the doors. On contact with the warm air and the captives’ bodies, highly toxic prussic acid was released and desperate screaming started, carrying all the way to the adjacent barracks. The gas quickly destroyed the victims’ mucous membranes and entered their bloodstream, asphyxiating them from within. Some dying men stuffed bits of clothing in their mouths to block the gas. But none survived.165

  Commandant Rudolf Höss, who had watched outside with other SS men, took off his gas mask and congratulated himself; hundreds of prisoners had been killed without an SS man firing a single shot.166 Still, the practical-minded Höss saw room for improvements. For a start, block 11 was too far away from the Auschwitz crematorium: the corpses
had to be dragged through the whole camp for disposal. Moreover, there was no built-in ventilation in block 11. The building had to be aired for a long time before the SS could force other inmates inside to recover the bodies. By then, the corpses—swollen, entangled, and stiff—had started to decay and proved hard to dislodge. One witness, the Polish prisoner Adam Zacharski, saw everything: “The scene was truly eerie, because one could see that these people had scratched and bitten each other in a fit of madness before they died, many had torn uniforms … Although I had already got used to some macabre scenes in the camp, I became sick when I saw these murdered people and I had to vomit violently.”167

  To make mass murder more efficient, the Auschwitz SS soon relocated gassings to the morgue of the crematorium. It lay outside the camp compound, which meant that there would be fewer unwelcome witnesses among the regular prisoners. The morgue could hold hundreds of victims and already had an effective ventilation mechanism, making its conversion into a gas chamber easy; the doors were insulated and holes were hammered into the ceiling, so that Zyklon B could be dropped in from the flat roof above. Afterward, the corpses would be burned in the adjacent crematorium ovens. The Auschwitz SS had stumbled across the prototype of the death factory.168

  Its first lethal test came in mid-September 1941, when the SS gassed some nine hundred Soviet POWs in the Auschwitz crematorium.169 As the prisoners arrived, SS men told them to undress and then forced them into the morgue, supposedly for delousing. SS men now slammed the doors shut and threw in the gas pellets. Commandant Rudolf Höss watched once more: “After the insertion, some screamed ‘gas,’ followed by mighty howling and pushing toward the two doors. But they withstood the pressure.” It took several days, he added, to burn all the bodies.170

  Höss was convinced that the Auschwitz SS had made an important discovery. True, his men continued to use other methods to kill.171 But when it came to large-scale murder, Höss much preferred gassing over shooting, because it was less stressful for the SS. “Now I was relieved indeed,” he noted later, “that all of us would be spared these bloodbaths.” Höss also claimed that gassings were kinder on the victims, blanking out the terrible death struggle of all those crammed into the gas chamber.172

  After the Auschwitz SS pioneered the use of poison gas in concentration camps, other KL followed, just as they had imitated the Sachsenhausen neck-shooting apparatus. Camp SS officers, already familiar with the principle of gassings (from the T-4 centers), were keen to test the latest innovations in mass murder. Once again, Franz Ziereis in Mauthausen was especially eager. From late autumn 1941, he oversaw the construction of a gas chamber, converting a cellar near the crematorium. The first large-scale gassing here took place in May 1942, killing 231 Soviet POWs with Zyklon B.173 Meanwhile, the Mauthausen Camp SS doctor requested a mobile gas van, built by the Criminal Technical Institute (KTI) of the Reich Criminal Police Office. The local SS used such a van, probably from spring 1942, to murder hundreds of Mauthausen prisoners, among them sick inmates and Soviet POWs.174

  Mobile gas vans had originally been developed during the Nazi search for more effective ways of murdering Jews in the Soviet Union. Before the vans were deployed in the occupied east, however, the KTI had tested them inside Germany in autumn 1941. The location of these lethal tests was Sachsenhausen, and the victims were Soviet POWs, who were gassed instead of being shot. Camp SS men would force the naked prisoners into the van, customized to pump carbon monoxide from the engine into the hold. Then the van drove off. When it came to a stop outside the Sachsenhausen crematorium, all prisoners inside were dead, their bodies turned pink by the fumes.175 These experiments must have piqued the interest of the Sachsenhausen SS officers, though it was not until later, probably summer 1943, that they constructed their own stationary gas chamber; the first victims were once again Soviet POWs.176 Several other concentration camps added gas chambers in 1942–43, too, following in the footsteps of Auschwitz. The Neuengamme SS, for example, murdered some 450 Soviet POWs in autumn 1942 by dropping Zyklon B pellets into its converted bunker.177

  Although many concentration camps used poison gas, it never became the main weapon of choice of the Camp SS: it was just one among many in its deadly arsenal. The main exception was Auschwitz, where the victims of the gas chambers were soon counted in the hundreds of thousands.178 The separate path of Auschwitz was due to its transformation, in 1942, into a camp of the Holocaust. Commandant Höss himself had briefed Adolf Eichmann from the RSHA about his experiments with Zyklon B, and both men agreed to use it for the genocide of Jews. Less than a year after the first gassings in Auschwitz, many thousands of Jews from across Europe were exterminated there each month.179 However, although the Auschwitz gas chambers have long since become synonymous with the Holocaust, their origins lie elsewhere.180

  SS Executioners

  The mass extermination of Soviet POWs in 1941–42 turned hundreds of Camp SS men into professional executioners.181 Most were low-ranking members of the Commandant Staffs who had served in the KL since the prewar years and had long become used to terror and destruction.182 Several Sachsenhausen killers, for example, had earned their spurs as block leaders in the notorious death squad; a man like Wilhelm Schubert had become a murderer long before he started shooting Soviet soldiers in the neck.183 And yet, the mass extermination of the POWs broke new ground, even for the most experienced SS men. Instead of occasional murders, they now participated in serial killings. Organized mass murder became part of the daily routine.

  Many Camp SS men quickly adjusted to the new demands. Their self-image as political soldiers—the cornerstone of their collective identity—must have helped them to construe the killing of defenseless men as a valiant act of warfare against the “Jewish Bolshevik” enemy; it was their contribution to the war in the east, continuing the Nazi campaign of extermination behind the barbed wire of the camps. Such thinking was encouraged by widespread talk about Soviet atrocities. After the start of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi propaganda swamped the Third Reich with graphic reports about beastly Bolshevik crimes. Camp SS officers, too, told their men that Soviet “commissars” were savage insurgents and partisans, guilty of heinous crimes against German soldiers, and praised the SS executioners for performing an important duty for the fatherland.184 The feeling that the Nazi leadership had entrusted them with such a vital mission must have filled many Camp SS killers with pride and a sense of purpose.185

  In addition to these ideological factors, the executions provided SS perpetrators with their biggest stage yet to impress comrades in the camps’ theater of cruelty. Participation in the mass killings, which some SS men belittled as a “shooting match,” was seen as a test of character, and those who passed it without flinching received respect from their peers and praise from their superiors. Just as German air force pilots bragged to other soldiers about the number of enemy planes they had downed, Camp SS killers would boast about the number of commissars they had finished off.186 Some SS men also demonstrated their cold-bloodedness by mocking the dead and violating their bodies. What passed for SS humor knew no bounds of decency. On the Dachau shooting range, an SS man once grabbed a long wooden stick and aimed a swing at the genitals of a murdered Soviet prisoner, shouting to his colleagues: “Look here, he is still standing!”187

  Other Camp SS men, however, felt far less comfortable about all the bloodshed. Some were scared of infection, since Soviet “commissars” were widely suspected as carriers of dangerous diseases. SS killers in the neck-shooting barracks wore protective clothing and cellophane masks, but despite these precautions, several of them contracted typhus, brought inside from the abominable POW camps; one block leader died as a result.188 A number of SS men harbored doubts about the righteousness of the whole operation. A Sachsenhausen official, who was not directly involved in the killings, warned that the Red Army would retaliate by executing German soldiers (a fear shared by some Wehrmacht officers). The mass murder in the Nazi camps was wrong, he told the camp elder Harry N
aujoks in autumn 1941, and it meant that the Third Reich had already lost the war, at least morally. Meanwhile, over at the shooting ranges and the execution barracks, several killers could not stand the carnage and fainted or broke down (just like some task force men in the occupied east). Others were very reluctant participants and tried to get out of the massacres; after their superiors announced the roster of designated killers for the next execution, they reported late for duty, or quietly stole away when the execution commando assembled.189

  But it was hard to do the right thing. The concentration camp was an inverted world, where those who showed courage—by challenging the murderous status quo—were branded as cowards. Several unwilling executioners cracked under pressure from gung-ho comrades, with group conformity continuing to fuse Camp SS men into a large criminal gang. Any hesitation was seized upon with alacrity by the others. In Sachsenhausen, Wilhelm Schubert openly derided another SS block leader as a “wet blanket” for killing fewer POWs. SS men who tried to duck out altogether faced even more mockery about their manliness, and often caved. In the end, their fear of shame was stronger than their fear of killing. Nobody wanted to be seen as a “limp dick,” one Sachsenhausen killer later said (using a revealing phrase).190 If social pressure was not enough, SS superiors brought reluctant killers into line.191 Only a handful of SS men continued to refuse. A few of them were probably excused, though punishment was another realistic prospect.192 Oberscharführer Karl Minderlein, a member of the Dachau SS since 1933, stubbornly rejected calls to participate in the executions. Following a heated confrontation between Minderlein and the commandant, an SS court sentenced the disobedient SS man to imprisonment; he spent several months in solitary confinement in Dachau, before being transferred in summer 1942 to a penal company on the Eastern Front.193