“Every German in the camp was master over life and death, but not everyone exercised this power”—this was how a Majdanek survivor summarized the unpredictable behavior of the Camp SS.156 Numerous SS officials in the occupied east relished their jobs; even some of their colleagues suspected that these officials had found their true calling inside the KL.157 Among them was Auschwitz administration leader Karl Ernst Möckel, who announced in 1943 that he was so happy he never wanted to leave.158 It was not just bureaucrats like Möckel who enjoyed themselves. There was no shortage of enthusiastic torturers and killers—men who laughed after they gouged out prisoners’ eyes and urinated on the corpses.159 A few were pathological killers. Hauptscharführer Otto Moll, for example, the chief of the Auschwitz crematorium complex, clearly took great pleasure in unimaginable acts of cruelty.160
By the same token, there were reluctant perpetrators. Just as some Camp SS men had struggled during the killing of Soviet POWs in 1941, others hesitated during the Holocaust; the daily slaughter of women and children, in particular, hit them harder than they cared to admit.161 A handful of SS officials evaded such murderous tasks or refused outright to participate; in Monowitz, one SS sentry openly told a Jewish inmate that he would never kill a prisoner: “It would go against my conscience.”162 But few others followed their lead, even though there was little risk of serious SS punishment. In fact, some men had been told by their officers that they could excuse themselves from certain unpleasant tasks.163
Even SS officials who put in for transfer away from camps like Auschwitz continued to do their duty until they departed. Among them was Dr. Eduard Wirths, who was appointed as chief garrison physician in September 1942, aged thirty-three, and served until January 1945. An ambitious doctor and committed National Socialist, with a particular interest in racial hygiene, Wirths cut a contradictory figure. He confided in Commandant Höss that he was troubled by the mass extermination of Jews and by prisoner executions, and repeatedly asked to be moved to a different post. At the same time, however, Wirths played a central part in the Holocaust in Auschwitz. He initiated new SS doctors and drew up their rosters, and supervised selections at the ramp and the subsequent gassings.164
As we have seen before, the participation in extreme violence can be partly explained by group pressure. This was true for the Holocaust, too: men who stepped outside their comrades’ circle of complicity were shunned and excluded from rewards and promotions.165 In his memoirs, Rudolf Höss claimed that even he had found the carnage hard to bear. However, he made a point of attending gassings and cremations, and of remaining “cold and heartless” throughout, to set an example to his men and to cement his authority as a tough leader. A perverse sense of pride came into play, too. During official inspections, Auschwitz SS men liked to flaunt their toughness by upsetting visitors with the grisly reality of mass extermination. Rudolf Höss took “great pleasure in showing the ropes to a deskbound bureaucrat” like himself, recalled Adolf Eichmann, who claimed that he had shied away from watching the murders close-up.166
Camp SS perpetrators also gained tangible benefits from the Holocaust in the occupied east. As lethal as the KL were for Jews, they were safe havens for the SS men, at least compared to fighting at the front. This was one reason why even reluctant perpetrators did not volunteer for deployment elsewhere.167 Then there were the material advantages. In addition to gaining access to the property of murdered Jews, perpetrators received official recognition, like promotions and rewards (just as they had done during the murder of Soviet “commissars”).168 The troops also got a small bonus for each selection, gassing, and cremation. It did not take much to make men volunteer. The Auschwitz camp physician Dr. Kremer noted in his diary on September 5, 1942, that SS men were queuing up for “special actions” to get their hands on “special provisions”: five cigarettes, one hundred grams of bread and sausage, and, most important, seven ounces of schnapps, with the Camp SS once more using alcohol to ease mass murder (drink fueled the perpetrators in Globocnik’s death camps, as well).169 SS Rottenführer Adam Hradil, one of the so-called gas chamber drivers, who steered trucks with old and sick Jews from the Auschwitz ramp to the gas chambers, testified after the war that he found the trips “not a lot of fun.” Nonetheless, he liked his job: “I was happy when I received a special ration of schnapps.”170
Previous experience with torture and abuse made it easier to participate in the Holocaust. The leading concentration camp officers in eastern Europe could look back on many acts of extreme violence. Some had made their mark outside the KL. Before Amon Göth joined the Camp SS as commandant of Plaszow in 1944, he had committed countless atrocities during ghetto clearances and as the commander of Plaszow forced labor camp.171 But most senior officers were veterans from the Camp SS, for whom the Holocaust was the climax of their cumulative brutalization.172 Many of them had gone through the school of violence in the prewar SS camps. In the Auschwitz main camp, two of the three senior commandants (Rudolf Höss and Richard Baer) and four of the five camp compound leaders had begun their careers back in Dachau in 1933–34.173 There are similar biographies among the lower ranks. Gustav Sorge, who had joined the Camp SS in 1934 and became leader of the Sachsenhausen death squad, was transferred to eastern Europe in the second half of 1943. Sorge had frequently demonstrated his propensity for extreme violence against Jews in the past, and as camp leader of several Riga satellite camps, “Iron Gustav” (as he was known here, too) continued his crimes. One former prisoner testified that Sorge had devised a novel way of identifying male prisoners he wanted dead. During roll call, he would kick them with full force in the groin; then they were dragged away by the camp elder, never to be seen again.174
For Camp SS men like Sorge, the Holocaust was the crowning moment in a career of violence. But even these men did not commit atrocities mechanically. Experienced perpetrators still acted within the wider moral landscape delineated by their superiors. And although almost all acts were sanctioned during the Holocaust, there were some limits, for the sake of what Himmler called decency and for more tactical reasons. How such restraints affected even hardened Camp SS killers can be illustrated by briefly turning westward, to the Herzogenbusch concentration camp in the occupied Netherlands.
Herzogenbusch was staffed in January 1943 by several Camp SS veterans. The new work service leader was none other than Gustav Sorge (prior to his posting to Riga). He had been transferred from Sachsenhausen with several notorious block leaders, as well as a feared guard from the bunker, who became the new camp compound leader. The first commandant was another hardened SS man: Karl Chmielewski, who had proven himself as the murderous compound leader of the Mauthausen subcamp Gusen, not least during the mass murder of Dutch Jews in 1941.175 Gathering such violent veterans would seem like a recipe for atrocities. The reality turned out differently, however. As we have seen, the higher SS and police leader in the Netherlands, Hanns Albin Rauter, held considerable sway over the camp and believed that a more moderate regimen in the transit compound for Jews would mislead the inmates about the Nazi Final Solution. He urged similar moderation in the protective custody compound (opened in mid-January 1943), which mostly held Dutch men detained for alleged political, economic, and criminal offenses; conceived by Rauter to showcase the supposedly strict but fair German occupation policy, treatment here was comparatively mild, too.176
The unexpected demand for restraint in Herzogenbusch baffled SS veterans like Gustav Sorge, who complained that it went against all the established practices of the Camp SS.177 Over time, however, most guards adjusted to the unfamiliar requirements. Those who did not faced sanctions for prisoner abuses and other violations. Rauter was serious about preserving the façade of his “model SS enterprise,” as he called it, and initiated a number of cases in SS and police courts.178 The most prominent target was Commandant Chmielewski; after his taste for violence and corruption became open knowledge outside the camp, he was arrested in autumn 1943. The following summer, he was sentenced to f
ifteen years in a penitentiary and sent to Dachau as a prisoner.179
Location really mattered, then, in Herzogenbusch and elsewhere. It was of great importance where concentration camps lay in occupied Europe, with the occupation authorities treading more carefully in the west than in the supposedly “backward” east. In Herzogenbusch, such tactical considerations resulted in more lenient conditions, compared to other KL. In eastern Europe, where the German occupiers ran a far more draconian regime, Camp SS leaders had no such reasons for restraint. Here, deadly violence became so frequent, a former Majdanek sentry testified after the war, that “it did not attract any attention when a block leader murdered a prisoner, by shooting or beating to death.”180
Colonial Masters
The outlook of the Camp SS in the east rested on the supremacist ideology that shaped the Nazi occupation of Poland and the Soviet Union as a whole. Accordingly, SS staff stood at the top of the racial hierarchy, towering over Poles, Soviets, and Jews, who made up the great bulk of the prisoner population. The Camp SS had unleashed extreme violence against these groups for some time, and this violence was bound to escalate in the colonial setting of Nazi rule over eastern Europe.181 Encounters with prisoners reinforced SS prejudices, as the conditions in the camps in the east made some inmates resemble the miserable caricatures of Nazi propaganda.182 This was still not enough for some SS officials, who snatched any remaining shreds of dignity from prisoners; in Majdanek, inmates were occasionally forced to walk around the mud in ball gowns, high heels, or children’s clothes.183 The prisoners’ dehumanization often had the desired effect, making it easier for the Camp SS to commit genocide. As the SS man Pery Broad wrote in 1945, his colleagues in Auschwitz “simply did not see a Jew as a human being.”184
It has been argued that hands-on Nazi killers were untroubled by their actions because they believed them to be necessary.185 There is some truth in this. Rudolf Höss, for one, saw himself as something of an expert on Jewish matters—he had even been to Jerusalem during the First World War—and regarded Jews as existential threats who had to be exterminated.186 But the mass slaughter in camps like Auschwitz and Majdanek also sowed doubts in the minds of some officials, prompting their SS superiors to reaffirm the moral right of the Final Solution. In Auschwitz, Höss and other SS leaders gave regular pep talks, telling the block leaders that Jewish prisoners deserved to die because they had sabotaged the German war effort by blowing up bridges and poisoning wells (reviving old anti-Semitic tales).187 The murder of Jewish children was equally essential, Höss reassured his men. Echoing Himmler’s views, he explained that the children who looked so innocent would otherwise turn into the most dogged avengers. Höss illustrated his point with a revealing image: if little piglets were not slaughtered, they would grow into proper pigs.188
Such vicious propaganda must have fallen on fertile ground. It also added to the residual fears of Camp SS officials, for whom the initial shock about the basic living conditions in the east often gave way to general anxieties about their safety. They might have felt like colonial masters, but their sense of supremacy was undercut by the alien surroundings, fretting about partisan attacks from outside, and prisoner assaults and illness inside.189 The fear of epidemics, in particular, continued to haunt the Camp SS, despite partial vaccinations. The paranoid Unterscharführer Bernhard Kristan, for example, always pressed the door handle to the office of Jewish clerks in the Auschwitz political office with his elbow, rather than his hand, to avoid any contact.190 From this perspective, Jewish prisoners posed not just a general threat to Germany’s future, but a more immediate risk to the well-being of local SS officials.191
Especially important for the making of Holocaust perpetrators was their habituation to mass extermination. The Camp SS staff in the occupied east regarded bloodshed and murder as part of the job, with shifts and breaks, training and specialization.192 Genocide became routine, and even Camp SS officials not at the forefront of mass murder became immersed in it.193 It is particularly striking how quickly novices fit in. Take the SS physician Dr. Kremer. During ten weeks in Auschwitz in autumn 1942, he participated in the murder of Jews on thirteen RSHA transports, as well as other prisoner selections and experiments; he also attended corporal punishments and executions. For a man like Kremer, extreme violence turned into an everyday event.194
Even SS officials who were initially shaken by mass murder generally fell into line. A German soldier who spent a few days in Auschwitz in summer 1944 told an SS man that he could never participate in mass extermination. The man replied: “You will get used to it, too, everyone here becomes obedient and eats humble pie.”195 How this worked in practice becomes clear in the case of Dr. Hans Delmotte. A young SS physician, Delmotte suffered a breakdown after witnessing his first selection at the Auschwitz ramp. He appeared paralyzed and had to be escorted to his quarters, where he got drunk and vomited. The next day, still dazed, he demanded to be transferred to the front, as he could not participate in mass slaughter. But Delmotte soon calmed down. He was placed under the wing of his experienced colleague Dr. Josef Mengele, who gradually persuaded him of the necessity of mass extermination in Auschwitz. Delmotte was also reunited with his wife and before long, he had settled into his job, carrying out selections and even drawing praise from his superiors.196 The presence of his wife in Auschwitz may well have helped him to perform his murderous duties, turning the spotlight on another important aspect—the private lives of the Camp SS in the east.
Happy Days in Auschwitz
In early 1947, as he was writing his memoirs in the Krakow prison, filling 114 double-sided pages with his small and neat script, Rudolf Höss looked back nostalgically at his family life in Auschwitz. Although he himself had been preoccupied with the camp, his family had enjoyed a great time, he remembered. “Every wish of my wife, of my children, was met.” They lived together in a spacious villa adjacent to the main camp, mostly furnished in natural wood, the favored SS style. Here, Höss and his wife hosted many dinner parties for local SS men and other dignitaries. His children “could live free and easy,” Höss reminisced, while his wife “had her paradise of flowers.” Her gardener was a Polish prisoner, Stanisław Dubiel, who grew exotic plants for her, and Frau Höss used numerous female prisoners (including Jews) as personal tailors, hairdressers, and servants. Meanwhile, the four children (a fifth was born in September 1943) became attached to two female prisoners, elderly Jehovah’s Witnesses from Germany, who looked after them. Höss’s children liked to play with horses and ponies, and with animals caught for them by inmates, like turtles, cats, and lizards. But their greatest pleasure, Höss remembered, was a swim “with daddy” in the Sola River or the paddling pool in the garden, no more than a stone’s throw from the main camp.197
The social life of the Auschwitz SS largely turned around the camp. Sports were particularly popular, reflecting the SS emphasis on physical exercise and competition. On July 14, 1944, Höss even used his staff circular to congratulate an Unterscharführer Winter who had just been crowned the Upper Silesian champion in the shot put, discus, and javelin. Camp SS men also competed against teams from outside. On the afternoon of September 6, 1942, for example, they played a soccer match on the local athletic field against visitors from the Oranienburg SS (just a few hours after the game, hundreds of Jews arriving from Drancy were gassed in nearby Birkenau). To relax after physical exercise or after a day inside the camp, SS men of all ranks could frequent the Commandant Staff sauna. And there was plenty of entertainment. An old theater on the camp grounds was used for shows featuring dancers, actors, acrobats, and jugglers (some of whom toured through different concentration camps). As late as December 1944, just weeks before the camp was abandoned, Jupp Hussels, famous across the Third Reich as a film comedian and the sunny voice of German breakfast radio, arrived to entertain the Auschwitz SS troops.198
Music played an important part, too. There were several orchestras in the Auschwitz complex, including an eighty-strong symphonic orch
estra and the only women’s ensemble in a concentration camp (led by the prisoner Alma Rosé, the daughter of a famous Viennese violinist). While their main role was to play as the prisoner commandos departed for work (and returned), setting the tempo for all the marching columns, they put on regular concerts, as well. Many SS officials valued these occasions, not just for the music itself but also as signs of the supposed ordinariness of Auschwitz. In addition, prisoners had to give private performances, just as in other KL, ranging from classical music for more high-minded officials to renditions of popular songs and dance music. The Dutch prisoner Richard van Dam, for instance, was frequently ordered to the Auschwitz political office, the scene of so much gruesome torture, where he had to sing jazzy American tunes like “I’m Nobody’s Sweetheart Now,” accompanied on the accordion by Rottenführer Pery Broad, an SS official known as much for his sly interrogations as his musical skill.199
Diversions beyond the camp complex included a cinema in Auschwitz town, though the favorite stomping ground of the Camp SS and their guests was the Haus der Waffen SS, near the railway station, which offered rooms to visitors and a large Germans-only bar and restaurant; female KL prisoners were forced to work as chambermaids and cooks. SS officers, meanwhile, had their own exclusive building, a little closer to the main camp, where they met in the evenings to eat, drink, and play cards. As a special treat, they could visit the Camp SS weekend retreat, the so-called Sola-Hütte. The rustic log cabin, built by prisoners on an idyllic spot some twenty-five miles away from the Auschwitz main camp, accommodated around twenty people, who could swim in an adjacent lake in summer or go skiing in winter.200
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