Senior Camp SS officials were well aware that numerous killers struggled with the murderous tasks, reflecting general concerns by SS leader Heinrich Himmler that his men might “suffer damage” when executing prisoners in concentration camps.194 In the case of the Soviet “commissars,” SS leaders could have limited the circle of perpetrators by assigning a few expert executioners (as they would later do at the Auschwitz gas chambers). Instead, they often roped in as many men from the Commandant Staff as possible. “Almost all block leaders of the camp participated,” a Sachsenhausen SS man admitted after the war, and their duties in the neck-shooting barrack rotated, as another killer testified: “Each block leader did, at different times, shoot through the gap, play the doctor, clean away the blood, and so on.”195 In this way, the burden of the killings was widely shared, leaving many Camp SS men with blood on their hands. Their shared complicity bound the killers ever closer together and made it harder to step outside the group.
To help the killers forget their grisly experiences, Camp SS leaders held regular comradeship evenings. After a long day of mass shootings in Sachsenhausen, block leaders would say “Come on, let’s grab some food,” and head for the SS canteen, where delicacies like pork schnitzel with fried potatoes were waiting.196 Free schnapps and beer was even more popular.197 Alcohol had fueled outrages in the camps since the early days. There was always plenty to drink, especially for younger and unmarried rank-and-file men, who spent much of their spare time in the canteen. On weekdays, alcohol was served at lunchtime and again in the evenings until late, and on Sundays the tap often ran all day.198 Not only was alcohol an enabler of violence, it helped to deaden scruples after the deed. Just as Nazi murderers on the Eastern Front dulled their conscience with drink, so, too, did Camp SS men who murdered Soviet POWs.199 But some killers continued to struggle with their conscience, however hard they tried to silence it. The Sachsenhausen block leader Max Hohmann, who was known as a reluctant killer, once drunkenly asked a political prisoner whether he looked like a murderer. When the prisoner answered in the negative, Hohmann replied: “But I am one!” and unburdened himself about the shootings.200
To lift the morale of their executioners, Camp SS leaders promised riches and glory. To show the appreciation of the fatherland, IKL bosses distributed a one-off payment in November 1941; the SS killers in Gross-Rosen, for instance, shared the tidy sum of six hundred Reichsmark between them. In the same month, the IKL asked commandants for the names of all “SS members involved in the executions,” so that they could be awarded military decorations. In the eyes of Heinrich Himmler, shooting Soviet POWs in the neck, gassing them, or giving them lethal injections merited an award for bravery, the Kriegsverdienstkreuz 2nd Class with Swords—an honor previously reserved in the Camp SS for commandants.201
The biggest reward for the executioners was a holiday abroad, an unheard-of luxury for most SS men. Their destination was Italy. In spring 1942, more than two dozen Sachsenhausen killers set off for a trip to the south; a few months later, a party from Dachau went the same way, heading for the Isle of Capri. The killers celebrated in SS style; some Sachsenhausen guards trashed their hotel rooms in a drunken stupor, causing considerable damage. In the small town of Sorrento, the men found time to pose for a German magazine, which later printed one of the photos on its title page: an Italian girl dances the tarantella, while several Sachsenhausen block leaders—in full regalia, with hats, black leather gloves, and ceremonial sabers—relax in the background, slumped into wicker chairs. Even a holiday in the sun could not clear the minds of all killers, however. On his return, at least one of the Sachsenhausen shooters confessed to a colleague that he was still plagued by nightmares about the murdered POWs.202 In the end, mass murder proved harder than some SS men had imagined. Coming face-to-face with their helpless, naked victims, they had struggled to live up to the ideal of the merciless political soldier.203
Even so, the murderous operation largely proceeded as planned. Occasional SS scruples did not create any real obstacles, and neither did the growing awareness of the killings by regular prisoners. Within weeks, well-informed inmates knew what was going on. Kapos in camp laundries received truckloads of Soviet army shirts, coats, and uniforms, and Kapos in the crematoria, who helped to burn the bodies, found Soviet medals and coins among the ashes.204 Soon the murders were an open secret inside the KL. “We are all shattered by these mass murders, which have already claimed more than a thousand [Red Army soldiers],” political prisoners in Sachsenhausen wrote in a secret note on September 19, 1941. “We are currently unable to help them.”205 Once more, prisoners were confronted with their helplessness. And they also feared for their own lives. Now that the SS had moved to mass murder inside the camps, who would be next? Rudolf Wunderlich, a Communist Kapo in Sachsenhausen, recalled not long after that all prisoners were “gripped by impotent fury, also fear and depression.”206 The Camp SS leaders, meanwhile, saw their first foray into mass extermination as a success and soon turned to even more expansive programs of abuse and mass murder.
MURDEROUS UTOPIAS
There was a time, in the early years after the Second World War, when historians showed little real interest in Hitler’s worldview. Writing him off as a madman or an opportunist, they overlooked his core convictions. Of course, Hitler’s rambling writings and speeches, and his interminable monologues over lunch and dinner, never added up to a systematic body of thought, and there continues to be some debate about the extent to which his views dictated the course of the Third Reich. Nonetheless, Hitler clearly held strong political beliefs that guided him and shaped the new Germany he wanted to build.207
At the very center of Hitler’s worldview—together with his fanatical hatred of Jews and Bolsheviks—stood the belief that Germany could not survive without the conquest of living space. Hitler had already made up his mind about this in the mid-1920s, when he still seemed destined for political obscurity. Germany needed to expand, he believed, and its future lay in the east, above all in the Soviet Union, with its vast stretches of land and rich agricultural resources. Hitler remained fixated on this goal for the rest of his life. Even as he was cowering in a maze of bunkers under the garden of the bombed Reich Chancellery, not long before his suicide in April 1945, he talked feverishly about the German mission to secure living space in the east.208
Back in summer 1941, right after the start of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s dream appeared to be within his grasp. Germany was on course for a crushing victory over the Soviet Union, or so it seemed; within a month of the invasion, the Wehrmacht had crossed the Dnieper, taken Smolensk, and closed in on Kiev. On July 16, 1941, in a top-level conference, Hitler laid out his vision. All the European areas of the Soviet Union would remain in German hands, Hitler announced: “We have to turn the newly gained eastern territories into a Garden of Eden.”209 Over the coming weeks and months, Hitler fantasized again and again about the glorious future awaiting Germany in the east. His mind kept wandering over his new dominions, daydreaming about all the towns and cities he would build. In three hundred years, Hitler mused, the bare and empty expanses would be flowering landscapes. Lording over the remaining Slavic population, the German rulers would live in opulent settlements, connected by a huge network of roads. “If only I could give the German people an idea,” Hitler sighed in private in early September 1941, “of what this space means for the future.”210
Settlements in the East
One man who needed no convincing was Heinrich Himmler, who was infatuated with the idea of living space. Soon after the German victory over Poland in autumn 1939, he had traveled across the occupied territory with his friend Hanns Johst, who afterward wrote how the Reichsführer SS, who had studied agriculture as a young man, got out of his car, gazed across the fields, and picked up some earth: “Thus we stood like ancient farmers and we smiled at each other with twinkling eyes. All of this was now German soil!”211 Himmler made it his mission to colonize this soil, after Hitler charged him in aut
umn 1939 with “shaping the new German settlement areas” through major population transfers, replacing dangerous “racial aliens” with ethnic Germans.212 Himmler took his cue from Hitler. Backed by a large new organization, he oversaw the brutal deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Polish Jews eastward, as well as the influx of ethnic Germans into the western parts of Nazi-occupied Poland.213
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler lost no time in staking his claim on these possessions, too. As the head of the Nazi terror apparatus, Himmler was in charge of policing the newly conquered areas.214 And as the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of the German People, he tried to transform this territory along the lines of Nazi racial thinking. On June 24, 1941, just two days after the German invasion, Himmler charged his chief planner, Professor Konrad Meyer, with drawing up a blueprint for “new settlement planning in the East.”215 Himmler’s men set to work on the so-called General Plan East, which gained, over the coming weeks and months, truly monstrous proportions. It aimed to reconstruct the entire face of eastern Europe. The SS planners did not advocate cosmetic changes but butchery, with whole cities razed, vast regions Germanized, and tens of millions of civilians deported, enslaved, and killed.216
These plans for Germany’s colonial future required a gigantic construction effort, an assignment tailor-made for the expanding SS economy under Oswald Pohl. By early 1942, Himmler had put Pohl in charge of all SS peacetime building projects in the east, a huge task that included the construction of dozens of new bases across the former Soviet Union.217 Back in mid-December 1941, Pohl had already presented Himmler with a comprehensive postwar building program for Germany and much of Nazi-controlled Europe. The estimated cost was a staggering thirteen billion Reichsmark, with almost half of it earmarked for SS and police structures on former Soviet territory. But in January 1942 Himmler rejected these plans, not because they were too outlandish, but because they were too cautious. One had to think even bigger, Himmler lectured Pohl, to create the “mammoth settlements” with which “we will make the east German.” At Himmler’s insistence, the SS building program went through ever more gargantuan drafts over the coming months.218
Much of the projected building work was supposed to be carried out by concentration camp prisoners. This made economic sense, as far as the SS leaders were concerned. The war had severely strained Germany’s financial resources, Himmler reminded Pohl, and the German state would have to spend prudently after the victorious war. At the same time, the SS plans could not wait. Himmler’s solution was simple: costs would be kept down by upping production in SS quarries and brick factories.219 This vision was grounded in the colonial euphoria and genocidal utopianism that gripped the SS, from the highest echelons down to foot soldiers like the Mauthausen Hauptscharführer who ordered prisoners to draw detailed plans for a castle in Crimea.220 Like all true zealots, the SS believers wanted to turn their dreams into reality as fast as possible. Even though their most ambitious plans were scheduled for after the war, they felt that construction should start straightaway; after all, they expected a swift victory. And because prisoners were critical to their plans, they set out to transform the KL system.
There was no mistaking the stronger emphasis of Camp SS leaders on forced labor. To begin with, they launched one of their periodic restructures of KL labor. In late September 1941, the ineffectual bureau for prisoner labor, set up the previous year in Pohl’s SS Main Office for Budgets and Building, was incorporated directly into the IKL, together with its local representatives in camps, the so-called labor action leaders (Arbeitseinsatzführer). Although the immediate impact was negligible, the move demonstrated the growing preoccupation of the Camp SS with “major visionary, economic and war-essential tasks,” as Inspector Richard Glücks put it.221
The main focus of SS leaders was not on organizational matters, but on the prisoners themselves. Himmler zeroed in on their training. Earlier SS initiatives to teach practical skills had not amounted to much. Now Himmler demanded the creation of an army of skilled inmates. In early December 1941, he ordered Pohl to have at least fifteen thousand concentration camp prisoners trained as stonemasons and bricklayers. Himmler added that this program should be completed by the end of the war, so that the prisoners were ready for deployment in “large-scale construction which would then be undertaken,” such as Hitler’s monumental city building projects, which had been the main stimulus of the SS economy since the late 1930s.222 But Himmler’s gaze had already shifted from rebuilding Germany to settling the conquered east, which would require even more inmate labor. And so prisoner training became an idée fixe for Himmler and his managers. One senior IKL official stressed in late 1941 that “every healthy inmate” had to become “a skilled worker.”223 Like many of Himmler’s favorite projects, this remained a pipe dream. Proper training would have required decent treatment, adequate food, and reasonable conditions—the exact opposite of what the KL stood for. If Himmler’s plans had been realized, the camps would no longer have been the camps, and no SS manager was willing to contemplate this. In any case, prisoner training alone would never be enough to create the workforce required for the SS construction program. What the SS leaders really needed were masses of new slave laborers.
Soviets as Slaves
With his planners busily redrawing the map of Europe, turning entire countries upside down, Heinrich Himmler did not hold back when it came to forced labor, either. He envisaged huge concentration camps filled with slaves to realize his monumental vision; the new settlements in the east would be erected on soil soaked with the sweat and blood of KL inmates. Himmler’s main push came in September 1941, when his eyes fell on Soviet POWs.224 At the time, there seemed to be an infinite supply of Soviet prisoners. Vast numbers had fallen into German hands, with many more on their way (by mid-October 1941, the Wehrmacht had captured more than three million men), and Himmler identified them as an untapped resource. Nazi leaders had previously banned their deployment for the German war economy, so they had often remained idle in the hands of the Wehrmacht. When this resolve to shut out Soviet POWs was weakening in late summer 1941, Himmler saw his chance: Why not exploit some as forced laborers in concentration camps?225
Himmler moved fast for Soviet POWs, supported by Hitler.226 On September 15, 1941, he evidently discussed his plans with his closest confidant, Reinhard Heydrich, and with Oswald Pohl; he probably also raised them with the godfather of the KL, Theodor Eicke, that same day. The following morning, he telephoned Pohl once more; we do not know the details of their conversation, but Himmler’s notes reveal the magnitude of his plans: “100,000 Russians take over into concentration camps.”227 Enormous as these figures were, Himmler soon doubled them. On the drawing boards of the SS, radical plans were quickly torn up and replaced by even more radical ones. By September 22, 1941, when Himmler met with Camp Inspector Glücks (who had been briefed some days earlier), he wanted two hundred thousand POWs for the KL.228 Discussions were already under way with the Army High Command, and it did not take long to reach a deal: in late September the army agreed to leave up to one hundred thousand Soviet POWs to Himmler.229 It seemed as if the Reichsführer SS had reached his initial goal with speed and ease.
Even before the negotiations with the army were concluded, the Camp SS prepared for the influx of Soviet soldiers. Some of these prisoners, Himmler decided, would be diverted to existing camps. On September 15, 1941, the same day he talked to Heydrich, Pohl, and Eicke, the IKL sent an urgent telex to commandants, asking them how many POWs they could accommodate. The plan was to put them in new barracks—as basic as possible—but to speed things up the local Camp SS also cleared some old barracks of other inmates. By October 1941, special areas, separated from the rest of the compounds and identified by signs such as “Prisoner of War Labor Camp,” had been hastily completed in Neuengamme, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau, as well as in Mauthausen, which was earmarked as the largest such site within the pre
war German borders.230
The bulk of Soviet POWs, however, were assigned elsewhere, after SS planners decided to build two massive new concentration camps on occupied Polish soil. The first was established in Lublin, some one hundred miles southeast of Warsaw, and became known as Majdanek (from the Majdan Tatarski district to the north). Majdanek was the first KL in the General Government. In the early phase of the occupation of Poland, Nazi leaders had decided against such a camp. As governor Hans Frank told senior German police officials in May 1940, it would be redundant: “Any suspects on our patch should be liquidated straightaway.” But during a visit on July 20, 1941, Himmler selected Lublin as the site of a big new concentration camp, to help turn the region into a major outpost for German settlements. His order was not immediately implemented, perhaps because it was not yet clear where all the prisoners would come from. Only two months later, during Himmler’s quest for Soviet POWs, did the SS push ahead with the plan. On September 22, 1941, Dr. Hans Kammler, recently appointed as the head of the construction office in Pohl’s SS Main Office for Budgets and Building, ordered the erection of the camp on the edge of Lublin, with a projected capacity of fifty thousand prisoners; construction began on October 7, 1941. But the blueprint for Majdanek was outdated as soon as it had been drawn up. As Himmler’s appetite for Soviet POWs grew, so did the projected prisoner figures for Majdanek. By early November 1941, Dr. Kammler already expected some 125,000 POWs, rising to 150,000 by early December.231
The second major new camp in occupied Poland was set up on land already controlled by the Camp SS. On September 26, 1941, just days after the construction order for Majdanek had gone out, Dr. Kammler ordered the building of a huge new camp near the town of Auschwitz. During a local inspection on October 2, 1941, Kammler chose the location of the new POW camp, less than two miles west of the main Auschwitz camp, to which it was subordinated. The spot was slightly moved a few days later, on the insistence of Commandant Höss: the new camp would grow on the site of a village called Birkenau (Brzezinka), inside the large SS interest zone that had been cleared of all inhabitants several months earlier. Construction began on October 15, 1941, and just like in Majdanek, the SS planners set their sights high. In late September 1941, the SS already expected fifty thousand prisoners, a figure revised within weeks to a hundred thousand.232 There were no signs yet that Birkenau would one day stand at the center of the Holocaust.233 The new subcamp was not built to murder the Jews of Europe, but to exploit vast numbers of Soviet POWs in the quest for German living space. In part, the SS hoped to turn the city of Auschwitz into a model settlement. More important, no doubt, were the plans for settlements elsewhere. As the most easterly established KL, Auschwitz would be a good base for the expansion of the SS, following in the footsteps of the revered Teutonic Knights.234
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 39