But the new camps in the occupied east were not alien bodies in the KL cosmos. For a start, the camps still belonged to WVHA, and most rules and staff were drawn from the regular Camp SS. Moreover, the whole KL system was changing from autumn 1943, becoming far more disparate and decentralized, epitomized by the shift away from main camps to a vast network of satellite camps. From this perspective, the new sites in the east embodied the improvised type of concentration camp that would characterize the KL system toward the end of Nazi rule, when the grip of the central authorities weakened and some established practices were thrown overboard in a desperate attempt to shore up the sinking Third Reich.
Action “Harvest Festival”
At the same time as the Camp SS was putting down roots across the Baltic, it continued its expansion in occupied Poland. Numerous new camps were added to the KL portfolio in the incorporated Polish territory. From September 1943, the WVHA began to take over the remaining large forced labor camps in Upper Silesia from SS Oberführer Albrecht Schmelt; around twenty camps were turned into Gross-Rosen satellite camps, and several more into satellite camps of Auschwitz. Among the largest was Blechhammer (Blachownia): when it was attached to Auschwitz in April 1944, more than three thousand prisoners were toiling there on the grounds of a synthetic fuel factory.176 Farther to the east, in the General Government, former labor camps for Jews came under the WVHA, too. Details of their takeover were settled in a high-powered meeting on September 7, 1943, between Pohl, Glücks, and Globocnik, who agreed that his labor camps in the Lublin district, around ten in all, would turn into satellite camps of Majdanek. In addition, larger labor camps elsewhere in the General Government would also become KL, all “in the interest of a general clearing-up,” as Pohl put it; a few weeks later, following local inspections by his men, Pohl signed off on a list of prospective new KL sites, including Radom and Krakow-Plaszow.177
The WVHA expansion plans were abruptly disrupted in early November 1943 by a vast bloodbath in the General Government. In the Lublin district alone, SS and police forces slaughtered some forty-two thousand Jews in forced labor camps. Apparently, Himmler had ordered this action in response to a recent prisoner uprising in Sobibor, the only one of Globocnik’s death camps still operational. Mass murder in Sobibor had continued at a lower pace in 1943 than during the previous year, and once Himmler had abandoned his plan to turn it into a KL (following an intervention by Pohl and Globocnik), it was only a question of time until the camp and its last remaining prisoners were liquidated. Before the SS could implement its plans, however, the prisoners rose up. On October 14, 1943, they attacked and killed twelve SS men and two Ukrainian auxiliaries, and more than 350 prisoners attempted to escape, many successfully. SS leaders were already on a knife edge, following a similar revolt in Treblinka two months earlier and the Warsaw uprising in spring, and amidst mounting SS hysteria about the dangers of the last ghettos and labor camps, Himmler ordered the large-scale mass murder of Jewish forced workers in the eastern parts of the General Government.178
Majdanek stood at the center of the slaughter. Under the idyllic code name Action “Harvest Festival,” some eighteen thousand Jews were murdered here on November 3, 1943. That morning, the eight thousand Jewish prisoners in the camp had been isolated; those who tried to hide were pulled out by SS men and guard dogs. Driven on by the Camp SS, the prisoners were marched along the main camp street, joined by some ten thousand prisoners from nearby Lublin labor camps. They stopped behind the building site of the new crematorium (under construction since September 1943), at the far corner of the camp. Here, the men, women, and children were forced to undress and lie in large ditches; then they were shot in the back of the head or mown down by machine guns; any wounded survivors were buried alive under the bodies of those shot after them. Most of the killers were SD and policemen, who had been specially dispatched to Majdanek. After the war, one of the killers, Johann B., casually talked about the victims to a film crew, in his jovial Bavarian accent: “Well, they did do some griping. They griped, some came up to us with raised fists. And ‘Nazi pigs,’ they screamed. You couldn’t really blame them, we might have done the same, if we’d got it in the neck.”
In an effort to camouflage the salvos, the Majdanek Camp SS piped light music—Vienna waltzes, tangos, and marches—across the ground, using specially erected loudspeakers. Finally, late in the evening, the shots and the music fell silent, after the last prisoner had been executed. Several volunteers from the Camp SS who had participated in the shootings returned to their quarters and held a wild party, drinking much of the vodka they had received as a special reward; some did not even bother to wash off the blood from their boots before they reached for the bottle.179 What they celebrated was the largest single massacre ever in an SS concentration camp. More people were murdered in Majdanek on November 3, 1943, than any other day in any other KL, including Auschwitz. The massacre also marked the end of Majdanek as a Holocaust camp. Mass gassings had already stopped in September 1943, and now all the remaining Jewish slave laborers were dead; at the end of November, there was not a single Jewish prisoner left inside the main camp.180
The wave of mass murder in early November 1943 affected the KL system more widely. Several Jewish labor camps destined for WVHA takeover were effectively wiped out, among them Globocnik’s large camp at the old airport in Lublin, which had functioned as a central collection point for the clothes of murdered Jews.181 Several other labor camps were still incorporated into the KL system from early 1944 onward, though this process now took longer than the SS had anticipated: some camps were established as late as spring 1944, just months before they were abandoned again in the face of the Soviet advance. Among the new camps were three larger former labor camps in Bliżyn, Budzyń, and Radom, which became satellite camps of Majdanek, as did a smaller camp on Lipowa Street in Lublin itself. By mid-March 1944, these four new satellite camps held some 8,900 prisoners (mostly Jews), almost as many as the Majdanek main camp.182
Only one of the Jewish labor camps absorbed by the WVHA in early 1944 was turned into a main concentration camp—Plaszow (Płaszów), the third main KL in the General Government and the last to be established in occupied eastern Europe. In autumn 1942, the German authorities had started to set up a forced labor camp in the Plaszow district on the outskirts of Krakow, mainly for Jews from the local ghetto that was about to be liquidated. Only in January 1944 was this camp transferred from the authority of the regional SS and police leader to the WVHA. By March 1944, Plaszow had overtaken Majdanek in size, holding some 11,600 Jewish men, women, and children (as well as 1,393 Poles in a separate compound). Several thousand more prisoners were detained in six attached satellite camps; unlike at Riga and Vaivara, however, the focal point of forced labor remained the main camp itself, with prisoners pressed into workshops, construction, and a quarry.
Plaszow’s conversion into a concentration camp resulted in various administrative changes, including the introduction of the WVHA camp rules. The inmates themselves, some now wearing the typical striped uniforms, had initially placed great hopes in the new rulers, the former prisoner Aleksandar Biberstein wrote after the war. But these hopes were soon dashed. Instead of better conditions, terror became more efficient under the auspices of the Camp SS. “The random murders and shootings of Jews ceased,” Biberstein recalled, only to be replaced by the systematic “extermination of the rest of the Jewish camp inhabitants,” with frequent selections and some transports to Auschwitz.183 Here, the victims may well have encountered some of the last Jewish survivors of the older KL within the Third Reich’s prewar borders, who had been deported together to Auschwitz back in autumn 1942.
SS Exceptions: Jewish Prisoners Inside Germany
On September 29, 1942, Heinrich Himmler inspected Sachsenhausen, guided by Inspector Richard Glücks and Commandant Anton Kaindl, who tried to impress him with various economic ventures. Although Auschwitz had already grown into the largest KL, Himmler retained an interest in his ol
der camps, and he probably knew that just a few months earlier the Sachsenhausen SS had committed the bloodiest anti-Semitic massacre inside the German heartland since the 1938 pogrom. In “revenge” for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, SS men had executed around 250 Jews on May 28–29, 1942, apparently inside the neck-shooting barrack built for Soviet POWs. Most victims had been rounded up in Berlin for execution. The others were prisoners randomly selected in Sachsenhausen itself, who begged for mercy as they were dragged away. The massacre had been observed by senior SS and RSHA officials. Other Nazi leaders applauded from afar. “The more of this dirty scum is eliminated,” the Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary, “the better for the security of the Reich.”184
When Himmler came to Sachsenhausen on September 29, 1942, there were only a few hundred Jewish prisoners left inside. Murder and lethal conditions had decimated the already small group of Jews in concentration camps within Germany’s prewar borders; overall, there were no more than around two thousand Jewish prisoners left across these KL, mostly German and Polish Jews.185 But even such a small number was too large for Himmler. At the time, Hitler was pushing for the complete removal of all Jews from the German Reich, and Himmler was keen to comply; during his visit to Sachsenhausen, he ordered the deportation of Jews from all the KL on German soil.186 Written directives followed a few days later; apart from inmates in important positions (who could be temporarily exempted), all Jewish prisoners would be taken to Auschwitz or Majdanek. In this way, concentration camps in the Reich would finally become “free of Jews,” the WVHA informed its commandants.187 Meanwhile, it ordered the Auschwitz SS to dispatch some Polish prisoners as replacements.188
Deportations trains to the east soon started to roll. Gross-Rosen was among the first camps to realize Himmler’s wishes, dispatching its last group of Jewish prisoners on October 16, 1942.189 In Sachsenhausen itself, the deportations triggered an unprecedented mutiny. When the Camp SS rounded up Jewish prisoners on the evening of October 22, 1942, and ordered them to hand over their belongings, panic spread as inmates feared a repetition of the May massacre. A small group of young Jewish men ran onto the roll call square, pushed over some of the SS guards, and shouted: “Just shoot, you dogs!” The Camp SS quickly restored control, though there were no immediate repercussions. The SS men were determined to keep the deportations on schedule, and for once refrained from punishing rebellious prisoners. That same night, a train with 454 Jewish men departed for Auschwitz, including the former boxer Bully Schott, whom we encountered earlier. Arriving on October 25, the prisoners were led to the Auschwitz main camp and registered. But they were not spared for long. Just five days later, the SS carried out a large-scale selection among prisoners recently deported from the westerly KL. Some eight hundred of them, among them Bully Schott, were sent to the IG Farben building site near Dwory for murder through labor. Hundreds more were led straight to the Birkenau gas chambers.190
Before long, almost all Jewish prisoners had been deported from concentration camps inside the German heartland; by the end of 1942, the KL in the Reich (excluding Auschwitz) imprisoned fewer than four hundred Jews.191 The majority of them were held in Buchenwald, which continued to receive some more arrested Jews from the Gestapo, much to the irritation of the local commandant.192 In late 1942, there were 227 Jewish men left in Buchenwald. Most of them had been trained as bricklayers and were needed for urgent construction work. Their status as skilled laborers protected them from deportation and from some of the worst SS excesses. For the time being, they were safer than almost any other Jewish prisoners in the KL system. The twenty-eight-year-old Austrian Jew Ernst Federn, for example, worked on an SS prestige project outside the camp. Prisoners here received double the rations of ordinary Buchenwald inmates, while SS guards acted “in every way humanely and correctly,” as Federn recalled, because they were restrained by the presence of civilians around them.193
In Sachsenhausen, too, a few skilled workers were saved from deportation. Back in summer 1942, the WVHA had begun to assemble a small group of Jewish draftsmen and graphic designers in barrack 19, for a project of national importance, though none of them knew what it could be. Then, in December 1942, a senior SS officer from the RSHA foreign desk, Bernhard Krüger, came to initiate them into a top-secret mission ordered by Himmler and backed by Hitler. Code-named Operation Bernhard (after the shameless Krüger), the prisoners would forge foreign banknotes and stamps.
The Sachsenhausen counterfeiting commando eventually grew from 29 to more than 140 Jewish men. Most of them had arrived from Auschwitz. One of them, Adolf Burger, felt “as if I had come from hell into heaven.” The prisoners were no longer beaten and enjoyed sufficient food, worked in heated rooms, had time for reading, cards, and radio, and slept in proper beds. Their main task was forging British currency (attempts to copy U.S. dollars never went past the experimental stage). Overall, the prisoners later estimated, they produced banknotes to the value of 134 million pounds. The RSHA only deemed a fraction of this to be good enough to buy gold and foreign goods, and to pay off spies; some of the remaining banknotes were dropped over England to destabilize its currency. For this outlandish plan to succeed, the whole of Operation Bernhard had to remain secret. This was why the forgers remained almost completely isolated from the rest of the Sachsenhausen camp (though their secret still leaked out). And this was why the RSHA had selected only Jews, since they could be killed at any time. In the end, through a series of flukes, the prisoners survived the KL. The products of their labor, which had ultimately saved their lives, also endured, as many of the forged banknotes remained in circulation for years to come.194
The story of the Sachsenhausen counterfeiting commando was exceptional. But such exceptions matter, not only because they saved Jews like Adolf Burger, but because they demonstrate that the Nazi authorities could be pragmatic if they had to—in this case by partially suspending Himmler’s autumn 1942 directive to remove Jewish prisoners from the Reich. This points to a wider truth about the Holocaust: in their pursuit of the wholesale extermination of European Jewry, SS leaders were always willing to consider “tactical retreats.”195 This willingness was nowhere more obvious, perhaps, than in the 1943 order to set up a new KL for Jews, right inside the German Reich.
As the genocide of European Jews reached a frenzied climax during the second half of 1942, the leaders of the Third Reich decided to spare a few victims and exploit them as “valuable hostages,” as Heinrich Himmler called them. Obsessed by global conspiracy theories, Nazi leaders had long contemplated the use of Jewish “hostages” as leverage against enemy nations supposedly ruled by Jewish politicians and financiers. Now both the SS and the German Foreign Office agreed that some selected Jews and their families—those with connections to Palestine or the United States, for example—might be exchanged for Germans interned abroad or else for foreign currency and goods. With Hitler’s agreement, Himmler in spring 1943 ordered the establishment of a collection camp for Jews who might be used in these prisoner exchanges. He made clear that conditions should be such that the Jewish prisoners “are healthy and remain alive.”196
The new camp was set up in Bergen-Belsen, between Hanover and Hamburg in northern Germany, on the half-empty grounds of an existing POW camp.197 Despite its unusual mission, reflected in the official title “residence camp” (Aufenthaltslager), Himmler designated it as an SS concentration camp run by the WVHA. It was initially staffed by SS men from Niederhagen, the camp at Wewelsburg castle that had just closed down. The first large prisoner contingent came from Buchenwald, on April 30, 1943, to prepare the site for the so-called “exchange prisoners,” who arrived from July 1943 onward; by December 1944, a total of around fifteen thousand Jewish prisoners had been taken to Bergen-Belsen, where they were held in different sectors, depending on their backgrounds. The proliferation of compounds added to the camp’s confusing layout, which turned into a shantytown of barracks and tents. To further complicate matters, the SS later added
a KL compound for regular protective custody prisoners, though numbers here remained small, at least initially; during 1943 and 1944, Bergen-Belsen was predominantly a camp for Jews.198
The Jewish prisoners in Bergen-Belsen dreamed about leaving on exchange transports. Fanny Heilbut, who had arrived with her husband and two sons (a third son had died in Mauthausen) from Westerbork in February 1944, recalled that the hope of freedom “went a long way to keep us going.” But this dream only came true for a small proportion of Jewish inmates. By the end of 1944, only some 2,300 prisoners had been allowed to exit the Third Reich. Fanny Heilbut and her family were not among them. One of the lucky few was Simon Heinrich Herrmann, who departed from Bergen-Belsen on June 30, 1944, with 221 other prisoners bound for Palestine (in exchange, a group of ethnic German settlers from the Protestant Templar sect, who had been interned by the British in Palestine, were sent to Germany). As the former prisoners left Bergen-Belsen behind, Simon Herrmann later wrote, “an invisible hand removed the shackles from our bodies and souls, opening the doors and windows in our hearts.” Herrmann and the others safely landed in Haifa on July 10, 1944. Not many other transports left the camp in 1943–44, and by no means all of those headed for freedom. In fact, more than two thousand Polish Jews were deported from Bergen-Belsen to Auschwitz. The German authorities had deemed them unsuitable candidates for exchanges, unwilling to recognize their prospective Latin American citizenship certificates (so-called Promesas). By far the largest such transport, with some 1,800 inmates, left on October 21, 1943; all of them were murdered two days later in Auschwitz.199
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