KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  But Majdanek never rivaled Auschwitz. As a camp for slave labor, it remained insignificant. The SS focused its resources and prisoners on Auschwitz, the KL showcase in the conquered east. Majdanek, by contrast, was regarded by Inspector Glücks as a “difficult camp”—dilapidated, distant, and dirty. Inmates, too, were struck by the difference between the two camps. When Rudolf Vrba looked back in April 1944 to his transport from Majdanek to Auschwitz, nearly two years earlier, he recalled that “after the filthy and primitive barracks in Lublin, the brick buildings [in the Auschwitz main camp] made a very good impression. We thought we had made a good deal.” While Auschwitz pushed ahead with economic prestige projects, most prisoners at the far smaller site at Majdanek continued to work on the construction and maintenance of the camp itself; despite the high death rates, there were normally more prisoners than jobs.147 As a Holocaust death camp, too, Majdanek stood in the second rank. The WVHA and RSHA managers regarded Auschwitz as a far more convenient target for transports from western and central Europe, while most Jews rounded up in the General Government were deported to Globocnik’s death camps.148

  The Operation Reinhard Camps: An Anatomy

  Historians tend to draw a clear line between the Globocnik death camps (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka) and the two SS concentration camps most closely involved in the Holocaust (Auschwitz and Majdanek). There were indeed fundamental differences between these two types of camps, both structural and organizational. To begin with, they came under different authorities, Globocnik’s office (in Lublin) and the WVHA (in Berlin) respectively. The Globocnik death camps were staffed by the Chancellery of the Führer with key personnel from the “euthanasia” program, and these men mostly stuck together, even after their murderous mission in the east was completed in autumn 1943. Camp SS officers, meanwhile, as the self-styled shock troops of Nazi terror in the KL, looked down on Globocnik’s motley gang of killers as a “true selection of total failures,” in the words of Rudolf Höss.149

  Just as the perpetrators of the two types of camp differed, so did their victims. The great majority of Jews murdered in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka came from the General Government, while the great majority of those murdered in Auschwitz came from more western and southern parts of Europe.150 And their operation differed sharply, too. Globocnik’s death camps were built for one purpose only: the rapid mass extermination of deported Jews. By contrast, Auschwitz and Majdanek continued as slave labor reservoirs, even after they had become Holocaust death camps; their hybrid nature was epitomized by the mass selections of deported Jews on arrival. There was no real equivalent in Globocnik’s death camps; selections had taken place before the transports departed—in ghettos and elsewhere—and all those on board were destined for extermination. The SS authorities in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka only needed a very small number of prisoners to keep the camps running; it has been estimated that one out of every hundred prisoners survived for more than a few hours. Even at the height of mass murder in autumn 1942, the three death camps together held no more than 2,500 so-called “work Jews,” who maintained the sites, assisted in mass extermination, and sorted the belongings of the dead. Consequently, these camps were small in size. The grounds of Sobibor, for example, initially measured about 600 × 400 yards; its core staff included twenty or thirty German officials, some two hundred foreign helpers (so-called Trawniki men), and perhaps two or three hundred Jewish prisoners temporarily spared for labor. By contrast, the so-called interest zone of the Auschwitz SS measured around twenty-five square miles (excluding several more far-flung satellite camps); at the end of January 1943, some 40,031 prisoners (including 14,070 Jews) were held across the Auschwitz complex, surrounded by several thousand SS guards.151 Compared to Auschwitz, terror was greatly compressed in Globocnik’s death camps, down to its very essence.

  And yet, the links between the two types of death camp were closer than is commonly assumed. To begin with, there were parallels in the mechanics of mass murder. As with the WVHA death camps (and Chelmno), Globocnik’s camps relied on a combination of deception, speed, threats, and violence. When Eliasz Rosenberg, one of the few survivors of Treblinka, arrived in the camp in August 1942, on a deportation train from Warsaw, he saw a large sign telling Jews that their “way leads to the bath. Receipt of fresh clothes there and then transfer to another camp.” There were neat flower beds and reassuring speeches, with SS men telling the victims that they would move to a work camp as soon as they had washed and their clothes were disinfected (some of this trickery was later abandoned, after knowledge of the mass extermination had spread among Polish Jews). Separated by gender, the victims had to undress in a special barrack and were forced, at breakneck speed and with frequent blows, into the gas chambers. After each mass killing, a group of Jewish prisoners, held in isolation from the rest of the camp, was forced into action. Just like the wretched Special Squad in Auschwitz, they had to dispose of the corpses, rip out gold fillings, and prepare the next gassing. In Treblinka, one of these prisoners was Eliasz Rosenberg. At running pace, he and another inmate had to carry the dead to huge mass graves (later, railway trolleys were used instead). In late February 1943, the SS supervised the exhumation of these rotting corpses, which were thrown on iron rails above shallow ditches and burned.152 The similarities with Auschwitz and Majdanek are evident, and owed much to the influence of SS cremation experts like Paul Blobel and of the mass killing techniques pioneered during the “euthanasia” program.153

  As for life inside the small labor compounds of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, many of the basic structures were borrowed directly from the KL system, probably by some of the former Camp SS men who had arrived via the T-4 operation and now occupied leading positions in Globocnik’s death camps. There were daily roll calls, for example, as well as strict prisoner hierarchies, with camp elders, work supervisors, and block elders. Prisoner punishments were familiar from the KL, too. One Sobibor NCO testified after the war that “work Jews” were frequently whipped, enduring ten to twenty-five lashes in front of the assembled prisoners, in order “to maintain discipline in the camp.”154

  The connections between the WVHA and Globocnik’s apparatus extended well beyond such structural similarities. There were operational links, too, resulting from the participation of both of these agencies in the Holocaust. In summer 1942, Himmler put the WVHA in charge of processing all the valuables amassed during Operation Reinhard, including the goods plundered in Globocnik’s death camps; senior WVHA officials inspected the death camps to ensure that central orders about the plunder were implemented.155 In addition to stealing from the dead, both agencies cooperated in the exploitation of Jewish forced workers.156 The closest contacts existed in Majdanek. Regional Nazi chieftains often meddled in the affairs of the nearest concentration camp.157 But Globocnik’s endless interference in Majdanek was quite exceptional. He got closely involved in construction projects, and even diverted some cash, plundered from Jews, to fund Majdanek’s extension.158 And although the concentration camp came under the authority of the WVHA, he was allowed to enter the grounds without formal identification, and frequently dropped by, sometimes at night; his main area of interest, it seems, was the new gas chambers, which he had apparently initiated.159 At times, Globocnik treated Majdanek like one of his own camps, giving orders directly to the Camp SS and even proposing its commandant, Hermann Florstedt, for promotion.160

  This is not to say that the various parts of Operation Reinhard added up to a seamless whole. As we have seen, the Holocaust camps run by the WVHA and by Globocnik, respectively, had separate identities and structures. There were also rivalries between officials on both sides, competing to kill and plunder more effectively. Globocnik’s main adversary was Rudolf Höss in Auschwitz, who recalled after the war that his rival “was absolutely determined to be at the top with ‘his’ exterminations.” But Höss saw himself as the real master of genocide and dismissed Globocnik as a loudmouth and dilettante who hid the “utter chaos of the
Lublin Action Reinhardt [sic]” behind a façade of distortions, exaggerations, and lies.161

  These personal tensions were exacerbated by visits to the rival death camps. Höss toured Treblinka, Globocnik’s most lethal camp, and left unimpressed. He regarded the use of carbon monoxide as not “very efficient,” as the motors did not always pump enough gas into the chambers to kill straightaway. “Another improvement we made over Treblinka,” Höss noted, “was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time”; even in Allied captivity, Höss was bursting with professional pride about his murderous inventions.162 For his part, Odilo Globocnik and his men apparently resisted pressure to switch their gas chambers from carbon monoxide to Zyklon B, as pioneered in Auschwitz.163 Globocnik also used the occasion of a visit to the new crematoria and gas chamber complex in Birkenau to disparage the local operation, much to Höss’s irritation. Far from being impressed with the up-to-date machinery of mass murder, as other visitors had been, Globocnik claimed that his men worked much faster, and lectured Höss about the greater killing capacities of his own camps. He “exaggerated outrageously, at any opportunity,” Höss wrote after the war, still seething about Globocnik’s attempts to outdo him as the greatest mass murderer of the Third Reich.164 This genocidal competition between Höss and Globocnik illustrates once more the entanglement of their camps. Looking at these and all the other points of contact, it is no longer possible to suggest that there were no institutional and organizational connections between Globocnik’s camps and the KL system.165 The Holocaust in the different Nazi death camps of eastern Europe was a collective SS endeavor.

  New Camps for Jews

  The longer the Holocaust lasted, the more closely involved became the concentration camps. The role of the KL system in Nazi genocide grew during 1943, as the focus of mass extermination began to shift from the killing fields of eastern Europe and Globocnik’s death camps to the new killing complex in Birkenau and, to a lesser extent, Majdanek. At the same time, the KL system became a bigger hub for Jewish slave labor. Back in October 1942, Himmler had informed Oswald Pohl and other SS leaders that remaining Jewish forced workers in the General Government should be pressed into concentration camps, until these Jews, too, would “disappear some day in accordance with the Führer’s wish.” During the following year, Himmler relentlessly pushed for the liquidation of labor camps and ghettos on occupied Polish and Soviet soil. To ensure that work on essential projects could continue, the SS set up several new KL in former ghettos and labor camps, extending its control over the remaining Jewish forced workers.166 Oswald Pohl had contemplated the construction of new concentration camps almost as soon as his WVHA had taken control of the KL system.167 From spring 1943, expansion became reality, at a brisk pace. Within a few months, the WVHA had opened four main camps in eastern Europe (Warsaw, Riga, Vaivara, Kovno), as well as dozens of satellite camps. Unlike other SS concentration camps, these new camps were set up explicitly for the exploitation of Jewish slave labor.

  One of these new concentration camps in the occupied east was opened in July 1943 in Warsaw, among the ruins of what had once been the largest ghetto. After a German attempt to round up Jews for deportation in January 1943 met with an armed response, an incensed Himmler had ordered the destruction of the entire ghetto. The German assault began on April 19, 1943, against desperate resistance. After four weeks of carnage, the uprising was crushed, leaving many thousands of Jewish men, women, and children dead. Himmler then ordered the WVHA to flatten what was left of the ghetto. This scheme included plans for a new KL (such plans had been on the table since autumn 1942), whose prisoners would help to demolish the remaining buildings. Despite some large prisoner transports, however, the Warsaw camp remained smaller than anticipated; instead of 10,000 men, just 2,040 were working in demolition by February 1944. The camp itself was set up in a former military prison, extended with materials from the destroyed ghetto. The work in the ruins—breaking down walls, collecting scrap metal, stacking bricks—was hard and dangerous, and having to toil in a ghost town haunted by Nazi mass murder weighed heavily on the prisoners. “The streets of the ghetto were a dreadful sight for us,” recalled the Polish Jew Oskar Paserman, who had arrived from Auschwitz in late November 1943. Months after the uprising, Paserman still stumbled over decaying bodies. “It stank of corpses, which were lying in the bunkers and under ruins. The streets were covered with pieces of furniture and burned clothes.”168

  In the wake of the Jewish resistance in Warsaw, SS leaders redoubled their attempts to wipe out the remaining labor camps and ghettos in the occupied east. Much of their focus turned to the Reich Commissariat of the Eastern Land, that is, the territory under German civilian administration that included parts of Belorussia as well as Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the three Baltic States annexed by the Soviet Union after the Hitler-Stalin pact. On June 21, 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered the closure of all ghettos in the Eastern Land. The surviving Jews would be forced to work in concentration camps instead, while those who were superfluous to slave labor would be killed. Despite some objections from German officials in the army and the civilian administration, who worried about losing “their” Jewish workers and possible repercussions for war production, the order was implemented over the coming months.169

  The first new KL complex in the Baltic region emerged in Latvia. Local SS officials had lobbied for a concentration camp for Jews around Riga since the German invasion of summer 1941. According to an internal SS memorandum that autumn, such a local camp promised several advantages over a ghetto: prisoners could be exploited more fully for forced labor, and the separation of men and women would “put an end to the further procreation of the Jews.”170 But it was not until the SS extended its hold over Jews in the Baltic territories that it finally established a KL. In March 1943, around the time of a visit by Himmler to Riga, five hundred prisoners from Sachsenhausen arrived to erect the camp in the small suburb of Kaiserwald (Mežaparks), known in the interwar years as an exclusive seaside resort. The early dimensions of the new camp were modest by SS standards, with four prisoner barracks for men and four for women, separated from each other and the outside world by electrified fences. The camp filled up with Jewish inmates from July 1943 onward, including large numbers of German and Czech Jews who had been deported to the Baltic region back in 1941–42. The prisoners initially came in large columns, laden with their remaining belongings, from the nearby Riga ghetto, which had been emptied by November 1943; later transports arrived from other Baltic ghettos farther afield and from Hungary (via Auschwitz). But most inmates did not stay put for long. The SS quickly realized that it would be impractical to move all local ghetto workshops into the small Riga main camp, and set up satellite camps near these sites of work instead. In all, at least sixteen such camps were established, most of them in Riga itself. The main camp in Kaiserwald now functioned primarily as a transit hub; after registration, new inmates were quickly shunted to one of the satellite camps. By March 1944, the various satellite camps of Riga held around nine thousand prisoners, compared to an estimated two thousand in the main camp.171

  This imbalance was even more pronounced in another new Baltic concentration camp, Vaivara, a settlement in northeast Estonia. A small contingent of SS men had to improvise here, Richard Glücks conceded, setting things up “completely from scratch.” Officially opened on September 19, 1943, after hasty preparation, the KL complex grew within weeks to include at least eleven satellite camps; several of them—such as Klooga, some one hundred and fifty miles to the west—rivaled or surpassed the Vaivara main camp in size. Among the prisoners were many families, and it was the young and the elderly who succumbed most quickly to the SS regime of violence and exhausting labor, which included construction work, the production of explosives, and the extraction of oil shale from marshy terrain. In November 1943 alone, at a time when 9,207 prisoners were held across the Vaivara KL complex, some 296 prisoners died. Hundreds more followed during the bitter wint
er.172

  A third main concentration camp in the Reich Commissariat of the Eastern Land was set up in the Lithuanian city of Kovno (Kaunas). Just as in Riga, regional SS forces had already proposed a KL for Jews here in summer 1941, but it was established only in autumn 1943. During the final SS push for the liquidation of ghettos, it turned the Kovno ghetto into a main concentration camp, which held some eight thousand Jewish prisoners at the end of the year. Other former ghettos and labor camps in the region became satellites of Kovno. Among them was the largest Lithuanian ghetto, Wilna. Suspected by the SS as a hotbed of Jewish unrest, it was decimated in summer and autumn 1943. Some fourteen thousand Jews were deported, mostly as KL slave laborers for shale extraction in Estonia, a priority project for Himmler. One of the deported prisoners sent a letter from Vaivara to friends back in Wilna: “We are still alive and working … It rains hard here and it’s very cold. Conditions are hard enough … Good that you stayed.” In fact, those left behind faced lethal violence as the Camp SS established itself in the former ghetto. By late 1943, just 2,600 Jews were still alive in Wilna, spread across four satellite camps.173

  There was something novel about the new eastern European concentration camps. Already at first sight, the compounds looked very different from the KL model devised in the 1930s. Many prisoners were still wearing civilian clothing, and sometimes whole families lived together. In a former ghetto like Kovno, they even continued to occupy the same houses as before (the Jewish Council initially remained in place, too). Another contrast to older KL complexes was the rapid proliferation of satellite camps across the Baltic lands, where prisoner numbers began to outstrip the main camps. Turning to the new camps’ administration, they did not adhere to the strict division of the SS Commandant Staff into five departments, which had been the standard in the KL since the mid-1930s. Instead, the internal SS organization was significantly pared down.174 The local Camp SS staff was also supervised in a novel way; while the ultimate power still rested with WVHA headquarters, the commandants in the Baltic region reported not only to Berlin but to a regional WVHA office in Riga, led by a so-called SS economic officer (SS-Wirtschafter), which was responsible for the KL and other economic and administrative matters in the area.175