KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

Then there were the brothels for Camp SS men. Inside the German heartland, SS men normally frequented existing municipal brothels. As there were none in Auschwitz, the authorities set up a new brothel with German prostitutes, in line with the order Oswald Pohl had given during his September 1942 inspection of the camp. SS leader Heinrich Himmler generally approved of such establishments, as he feared that his troops were becoming sex starved. But the new Auschwitz brothel was not open to all Camp SS men. Nazi racial thinking dictated that Ukrainian SS men had to visit another site, set up for IG Farben foreign workers.201

  Although the Auschwitz SS largely kept to itself, it did build up local contacts outside the camp. Told to avoid the Polish population, SS officials developed social contacts with other Germans in town, who arrived as part of the general “Germanization” program. The plans for Auschwitz town were vast, with big apartment complexes, major roads, parade grounds, and several stadiums. As the Holocaust unfolded inside the camp, the nearby town was turned into a major building site (only a few projects were completed by the time the Germans fled in early 1945). The makeup of the local population was transformed, too. Nazi ethnic cleansing had led to the deportation of thousands of Poles and Jews and the influx of some seven thousand Germans by autumn 1943; most of them had been attracted by the financial rewards of employment in the east and worked for IG Farben. The new civic elite built ties to the Camp SS, mingling during theater and variety evenings, Christmas celebrations, and dinner parties.202

  The SS presence in Auschwitz town was hard to overlook. The SS settlement grew into a district of its own, as SS managers grabbed more and more buildings to accommodate the swelling ranks. The nicest houses were reserved for officers, with most of the rank-and-file staff living in large barracks. Married officials received visits from their families, often for several weeks at a time. Sometimes whole families relocated to Auschwitz. Among them were children who had spent all their life in the Camp SS entourage. The son and daughter of the first Auschwitz camp compound leader, Karl Fritzsch, for example, had been born in the Dachau SS settlement; after seven years, during which the children had attended the local SS nursery, the Fritzsch family packed up and went to Auschwitz, moving into the first floor of a large house. They soon met some familiar faces, including former neighbors from Dachau. In fact, so many families moved into town that the local SS leadership put a stop to it in summer 1944.203

  What made Auschwitz so attractive to the families of SS staff? Apart from the desire to be reunited with their loved ones, married SS men were keen to move from barracks into private accommodation. Their wives and children, meanwhile, often enjoyed greater peace of mind after relocating, as they felt safer from Allied bombing than deeper inside Germany. Besides, life in the shadow of the camp often meant social advances: nobodies became somebodies. The families of Auschwitz SS officers occupied an elevated social status, and enjoyed a lifestyle well beyond their normal means. Men and women from humble backgrounds lived like members of the upper middle class back home, in lavish villas set in large gardens full of flowers and fruit trees, waited on by servants.204

  The presence of their families also made the job easier for some Camp SS officers, as we saw in the case of Dr. Delmotte. The company of children and wives provided stability and emotional support—some officers hurried home from the Auschwitz camp to eat lunch with their family—and helped to normalize their actions inside the camp. After his family moved out of the SS settlement, leaving him behind, chief garrison physician Dr. Eduard Wirths wrote to his wife in December 1944: “When you and the little ones were with me in Au[schwitz], one could feel nothing of the war!”205

  The camp was not taboo in the homes of the Auschwitz SS, despite an official ban on discussing their duties.206 True, there were some limits. When Rudolf Höss found his children playing “Kapo and Prisoner” in the garden, he angrily ripped the colored triangles off their clothes; seeing his children enact the camp in his own private sanctuary was too much for him.207 Still, Auschwitz SS men frequently spoke about the camp to relatives and friends, just like SS officials in the other KL.208 Even Commandant Höss himself ignored his own orders and discussed the Nazi Final Solution with his wife, who apparently referred to her husband as the “special commissioner for the extermination of Jews in Europe.”209

  The lives of local SS families were inseparable from the camp. Food, furniture, clothes, and even toys came from the Auschwitz compounds, as did prisoners used as servants and handymen. The wives and children of SS men also attended official Camp SS functions, such as Christmas parties, films, and puppet shows.210 As for the crimes in the camp, the smoke and stench from the Birkenau crematorium “permeated the entire area,” Höss later noted, including the SS settlement; when SS men returned home in the evenings, their uniforms and shoes gave off the camp’s distinctive smell of decay and death.211

  Even the Auschwitz compounds themselves were open to relatives of the Camp SS staff. Although it was forbidden, SS men regularly showed their wives or girlfriends around, perhaps to satisfy their curiosity.212 SS families made use of the SS medical facilities inside the camp—one located opposite the old crematorium, the other near the so-called Gypsy camp—and treated the prisoners as a source of entertainment. In summer 1944, Birkenau camp compound leader Johann Schwarzhuber forced Soviet prisoners to dance at the electric fence, for the amusement of his family, who watched from the other side. Some children of SS men also entered the compounds, despite attempts by their mothers to protect them from witnessing abuses. In fact, such visits became so widespread that in July 1943 Commandant Höss banned unaccompanied children of SS staff from the camp and its labor commandos. Any direct contact with prisoners, Höss noted sternly, was morally indefensible.213

  In short, the truth about the camp was well known among Auschwitz SS families. This did not stop the wives from supporting their husbands and from enjoying their time in the SS settlement. In some cases, at least, such support was ideologically rooted. Several wives were fervent followers of the Nazi cause. Frau Höss, for one, had met her husband on the far-right fringes during the 1920s. Several of these women may have treated individual prisoners rather humanely, but they stood behind the camps and condoned their husbands’ crimes, tacitly or openly. By performing their role as SS wives and creating a semblance of normality at the anus mundi, these women became complicit in the atrocities.214

  Part of the attraction of Auschwitz for the wives of SS officers was material gain; few, if any, of them ever lived in greater style and luxury. The same was true for SS wives in other KL in occupied eastern Europe. Talking frankly in the late 1970s, the widow of the former Plaszow commandant Göth looked back at her time in the camp with great sorrow—not sorrow for the crimes, but for the “beautiful time” that had long since passed: “My Göth was the king, and I was the queen. Who wouldn’t have traded places with us?”215 Frau Höss, too, felt so happy that she stayed behind in Auschwitz with her children after her husband was transferred to WVHA-D headquarters (formerly the Camp Inspectorate) in Oranienburg in autumn 1943. Her lavish lifestyle was fed with riches taken as a matter of course from local SS supplies and from Jews killed in Birkenau. Her wardrobe was filled with murdered women’s dresses and shoes, and her pantry was bulging with sugar, flour, chocolate, meat, sausages, milk, and cream. Even the gardening supplies for her exotic flowers had arrived from the camp. When the time finally came to leave the commandant’s villa in late 1944, as the Soviet troops approached, the Höss family needed a couple of railway trucks to transport all their possessions to safety.216 Of course, they were not the only pilferers in the Camp SS; corruption was rife across the KL, and nowhere more so than in occupied eastern Europe.

  PLUNDER AND CORRUPTION

  Heinrich Himmler was a mass murderer greatly concerned with decorum. He had long cultivated an image as a deeply principled man, and during the Second World War he became a prominent preacher of a new kind of Nazi morality that saw mass killing as a sacred duty to protec
t the German people from its mortal enemies.217 Contrary to the views of some historians, Nazi perpetrators like Himmler did not see themselves as nihilists.218 Himmler regarded the Nazi Final Solution as a righteous act, committed out of necessity, idealism, and “love for our people,” as he put it in a notorious speech to SS group leaders in Posen in the early evening of October 4, 1943. That the killers had remained unblemished and “decent” during the mass slaughter of Jews was a truly “glorious page in our history,” he told himself and the other SS grandees.219

  In his Posen speech, Himmler also outlined the rules governing the use of the murdered Jews’ property. On his orders, Himmler said, all the “riches” were going to the Reich, via Oswald Pohl’s WVHA: “We did not take any of it for ourselves.” In Himmler’s moral universe, state-sponsored mass murder and robbery was just, but individual theft was a sin: “We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our people, to kill this people [the Jews] which wanted to kill us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves with so much as a fur, with a watch, with a Mark or with a cigarette or with anything else.” The handful of SS men who had broken this hallowed rule, Himmler shouted, briefly betraying some emotion, would be punished “without mercy” and executed on his own personal orders. After all, they had not stolen from Jews but from the Nazi state, which owned all the loot.220

  Himmler knew only too well that this vision of the SS as a virtuous order was deeply disingenuous. He and his judges were in fact rather sympathetic to thieves within the SS ranks and regarded the tempting availability of valuables belonging to murdered Jews as an extenuating circumstance; even big-time thieves were sentenced to no more than detention (often on probation). Moreover, theft and corruption in the SS was not rare, as Himmler suggested, but rampant: in 1942, property offenses accounted for almost half of all sentences passed by SS courts (a far higher proportion than among soldiers in the German armed forces, who had fewer chances to enrich themselves). Theft was particularly widespread in the KL, above all in those at the forefront of the Holocaust. In a camp like Auschwitz, where the WVHA was engaged in a gigantic operation of robbery on Himmler’s orders, his insistence on the “sanctity of property” was bound to fall on deaf ears: if it was right for the state to rob the Jews, local SS officials asked themselves, why should it be wrong for them to do the same?221

  Looting for Germany

  Official SS plunder was meticulously arranged during the Holocaust. In Auschwitz, a well-rehearsed routine was followed as soon as a deportation train reached the camp. The Nazi authorities allowed Jews to bring some luggage for the promised “new life” in the east, including clothes, food, tools, and other personal items. These possessions were seized at the ramp by a special prisoner unit, piled up, and put on trucks to be sorted. Meanwhile, edible goods were taken to a food warehouse. Once the ramp was empty, another prisoner unit scoured the area for money and valuables discarded before or after the selections.222

  A second phase of plunder followed near the gas chambers. Here, prisoners from the Special Squad gathered up clothes, shoes, and other personal effects, such as glasses and watches, after the victims had undressed. Following the gassings, the Special Squad also searched the dead for valuables hidden on their bodies. The hair of women, shorn after they were dead, was collected and dried in rooms above the crematoria, and later used for the production of felt and threads (contrary to rumors, no soap was made from human fat). Gold teeth were cleaned and melted down in a special workshop, together with other precious objects, such as jewelry. According to a secret report compiled by Auschwitz prisoners, some ninety pounds of gold and white metal were extracted from the teeth of murdered Jews in the second half of May 1944 alone (at the height of the extermination of Hungarian Jewry).223

  Most loot in Auschwitz ended up in a special section of the camp known among inmates (and later the SS) as Canada, named after the faraway country associated with great riches. As the Holocaust had gathered momentum, Commandant Höss asked in early June 1942 for the urgent assembly of wooden barracks to store the property of murdered Jews. In the end, six barracks near the main camp were used, but these warehouses (Canada I)—inspected by Oswald Pohl during his visit on September 23, 1942—soon proved too small. The Camp SS killed faster than it could process its plunder, and despite the use of additional huts, the bags and suitcases kept mounting up. Eventually, a much larger compound of thirty barracks was opened in Birkenau (Canada II) in December 1943. But it, too, could not keep up with the pace of genocide, and luggage piled up between the new barracks or had to be moved to other sites.224

  Inside the Auschwitz storage areas, hundreds of male and female prisoners from the so-called Canada Commando worked around the clock to sort the spoils. The largest labor details were combing through the mountains of clothes, which were fumigated, searched for valuables, separated, and stacked. As they emptied jackets and coats, prisoners from the Canada Commando sometimes found letters or photos. “I never dared to look at them,” the Polish Jew Kitty Hart wrote after the war. “Only a few meters away from us—and perhaps at the very same moment—the people, to whom all this had belonged, were burned.” Meanwhile, a specialist SS unit sifted through the banknotes and other valuables; German money was deposited in a designated WVHA account, and the rest was itemized and packed up.225

  Some of the loot stayed inside the camps. In Majdanek and Auschwitz, the SS supplemented its stock of prisoner clothing with suits, shoes, and hats of murdered Jews.226 But the bulk was shipped elsewhere in Poland and Germany. The transports of human hair, for instance, went to the Reich Economic Ministry and to private companies, some of them hundreds of miles away; in a wool combing plant in faraway Bremen, workers one day discovered small coins inside thickly woven plaits cut from the heads of Greek girls back in Auschwitz. Human hair arrived from other concentration camps as well. From summer 1942, the WVHA had issued instructions to several KL to collect the hair of registered prisoners (including men), though the plan to use it for the production of socks for submarine crews and other goods in an SS workshop was soon dropped.227

  Most garments amassed during the Holocaust in Auschwitz and Majdanek were sent to agencies designated by the Reich Economic Ministry. Other shipments of clothes went to the Ethnic German Liaison Office (VoMi), an SS office that facilitated the settlement of ethnic Germans in the Nazi-occupied east. Under the new Nazi Order, German settlers would not only take over some houses and farms of murdered Jews, but also their clothes. By early February 1943, Auschwitz and Majdanek had sent 211 railway carts of clothing to VoMi, including 132,000 men’s shirts, 119,000 women’s dresses, and 15,000 children’s overcoats. The new owners were not supposed to know about the murderous provenance, so the SS leadership gave strict instructions to remove all yellow stars from the clothing.228

  At the center of SS plunder in the concentration camps stood the WVHA. As we have seen, it masterminded the looting of property amassed in all Operation Reinhard camps (the two WVHA camps Auschwitz and Majdanek, and the three Globocnik death camps). In the words of the U.S. judges who sentenced WVHA chief Oswald Pohl to death in 1947, his office had become the “clearinghouse for all the booty.”229 In addition to issuing detailed directives for the processing and dispatch of the spoils, and supervising the accounts, the WVHA handled many of the goods.

  By autumn 1942, SS couriers regularly dropped crates full of watches, alarm clocks, and fountain pens at the WVHA-D office in Oranienburg. They were repaired in a special workshop in Sachsenhausen by around 150 skilled prisoners, some two-thirds of them Jews; like prisoners in the camp’s counterfeiting commando, these men lived under privileged conditions (SS plans to set up a similar workshop in Auschwitz never came to pass). The finished goods were then distributed via WVHA-D—on Himmler’s orders—to officers and men from the Waffen SS; the navy and air force benefited, too. Indeed, different agencies competed for the spoils, with gold watches and pens in particular demand; one SS Obergruppenführer asked Himmler in 1943 for �
��large quantities” to give “real pleasure” to wounded SS men at Christmas time. The ongoing genocide meant that the supply did not dry up, and as late as November 1944, the WVHA-D officials still sat on more than twenty-seven thousand watches and clocks, as well as five thousand fountain pens. (When he later heard about this scheme, Adolf Eichmann could not believe that the “weirdos” in the WVHA had wasted their precious time on such “bullshit.”)230

  Meanwhile, jewelry, foreign currency, dental gold, and other precious metals amassed in the Operation Reinhard camps were delivered to the central WVHA headquarters in Berlin; Odilo Globocnik frequently appeared in person to hand over valuables from his camps. The goods were then taken by SS Hauptsturmführer Bruno Melmer in locked crates to the German National Bank (Reichsbank).231 Melmer was a busy man: between summer 1942 and late 1944, he made no fewer than seventy-six trips. Normally, the National Bank deposited the equivalent value of the goods in a special account. Purified gold was melted into bars by the Prussian Mint, while other metals were supposed to be sent on for further refining.232 At the same time, the National Bank handled gold extracted in other KL. In the early war years, dental gold of dead prisoners had been used for the fillings of SS men and their families. But by autumn 1942 the SS had stockpiled enough supplies to last for several years, and so the WVHA decided to deposit the surplus with the National Bank.233

  The total value of the SS booty in Auschwitz and Majdanek is impossible to determine, but it is likely to have amounted to several hundred million Reichsmark; some was retained by the SS, but most went into the coffers of the German Reich.234 Still, this was only a fraction of the property seized by the Nazi regime from its victims across the occupied continent—European Jews had been systematically stripped of their belongings long before they reached the KL—and it was rather insignificant for the wider German war effort.235