Ellrich was all about labor and death. During several months, it had the highest mortality rate within the Dora camp complex and the mass death of its inmates was clearly part of SS calculations. After all, the SS selected prisoners for Ellrich who were already exhausted; the only thing they were still good for, in the eyes of the SS, was a short spell of ruinous labor. “Irreversibly, one [prisoner] after the other has the mark of death branded on the forehead,” an inmate noted in his secret diary on December 26, 1944. By then, some three thousand Ellrich prisoners—almost half of the inmate population—were so ill that they could no longer work at all. In January 1945, more than five hundred Ellrich prisoners died, at a monthly mortality rate of around seven percent. When he had first arrived in Ellrich, Vilmos Jakubovics worked with a group of other Jews from Hungary; “out of these 30 from my hometown,” he testified in summer 1945, “only I stayed alive.”130
Not all construction camps were as infernal as Ellrich.131 Prisoners who moved through several such camps saw major differences. In May 1944, when the sixteen-year-old Hungarian Jew Jenö Jakobovics came to the small satellite camp Erlenbusch, part of the Riese complex, he was probably relieved. Labor was very hard—for twelve hours a day, he worked on a new railway station building—but at least there was food, clothing, and warm water. Conditions were far worse at the nearby Wolfsberg camp, where Jakobovics was transferred in autumn 1944. This was the largest and most important Riese camp, holding 3,012 prisoners on November 22, 1944 (510 of whom were aged between fourteen and eighteen, like Jakobovics). Most had to sleep in flimsy wooden huts and toiled in tunneling and other building work. More than anything, it was the guards’ brutality that shocked Jakobovics: “Here, one aimed directly at the extermination of prisoners.”132 This raises a critical issue, for Wolfsberg was a camp reserved for Jews. As we have seen, most registered Jewish KL prisoners had faced murder through labor in 1942–43. Did this SS approach remain in place during 1944, as the case of Wolfsberg suggests, at a moment when vast numbers of Jews were pressed into the war economy inside Germany?
Nazi Racial Hierarchies
The Third Reich was a racial state and many historians believe that for Nazi leaders, the primacy of racism remained unalloyed to the end.133 Applying this conclusion to the concentration camps, it has been argued that the rigid prisoner hierarchies, based on Nazi ideology, continued to determine the survival of inmates, even as the regime made a last final frantic bid to win the war.134 Recent research paints a more complex picture, however, suggesting that economic pressures started to dilute the full impact of Nazi racial policy, at least temporarily, as the mobilization of the KL system for total war gathered pace.135
The partial “erosion of the ideological,” as the historian Jens-Christian Wagner calls it, was evident in many satellites. In Ellrich, and the Dora complex as a whole, survival rates among French and Belgian prisoners were far lower than those of Gypsies, Poles, and Soviets, despite the fact that the latter occupied an inferior place in the Nazi racial hierarchy.136 Dora was no isolated case. In the Neuengamme satellite camps, too, prisoners from western European countries were often more likely to die than those from eastern Europe.137
What caused this apparent breach of Nazi racial orthodoxy? Two aspects were decisive, it seems. First, there was the time of arrival in satellite camps. In Farge, for example, French prisoners arrived after others had already occupied the key Kapo positions, shutting out the newcomers from life-saving posts.138 Second, a prisoner’s professional background could now count for more than his nationality. French prisoners, in particular, often came from the intelligentsia. Having learned no trade, they were frequently forced into manual labor. A number of Soviet prisoners, by contrast, were skilled and thus more likely to work in production. They were also better equipped to withstand hard work because of their youth, their familiarity with physical labor, and their experience with hunger and shortages back home. The French prisoner Jean-Pierre Renouard recalled a revealing incident at the Neuengamme satellite camp Hanover-Misburg. Ordered to operate a heavy pneumatic drill, he stumbled twice and was beaten unconscious by a furious supervisor; when he came to, a strong and skilled Russian prisoner was doing the job with apparent ease, attracting no blows.139
But there were limits to the ideological flexibility of the SS: economic pressures did not turn prisoner hierarchies upside down. German inmates stayed near the top of the pecking order, while Jewish prisoners largely remained at the bottom, and for them, forced labor still often meant death. The lethal exploitation of Jews in satellite camps was already well established in occupied eastern Europe, and from spring 1944, in the wake of the mass deportations to the German heartland, such SS abuse spread westward. In many mixed KL, the authorities singled out Jews for the worst treatment. “When the Jew swallows too much food,” the SS camp leader of a Neuengamme satellite camp for men is said to have announced, “he becomes fat, lazy, and, in the end, brazen.”140
The SS reserved many new satellites almost entirely for Jews. Mostly, these were deadly construction camps like Kaufering in Upper Bavaria, set up from June 1944. Attached to the Dachau main camp, Kaufering was probably the largest satellite complex for Jewish prisoners within Germany’s prewar borders, with eleven separate camps. Over less than one year, some thirty thousand KL prisoners were taken here, overwhelmingly Jewish men, to work for the Fighter Staff. Prisoners labored in shifts around the clock, largely on the construction of three huge bunkers (two were later abandoned) for aircraft factories; long lines of inmates carrying bags of cement crossed the sprawling building sites, while others worked the cement mixers. Their suffering continued inside the hurriedly thrown-together compounds. Instead of standard-issue barracks, they slept in wooden huts, set up above holes in the ground, with leaking roofs covered by earth; one prisoner likened the conditions to the darkest Middle Ages. A WVHA directive from late 1944, which permitted urgent operations on Jewish prisoners in nearby civilian hospitals (to bolster the slave labor force), went unheeded. Instead, the local authorities cut the rations of the sick. Salamon Fülöp, a young Hungarian Jew, later noted sarcastically that the SS had relied on “starvation cures” to treat the ill; the inmates ate anything they could find, including grass and dry wood. There were also repeated selections; in autumn 1944, for example, more than 1,300 prisoners were deported to the Auschwitz gas chambers. No one knows exactly how many Kaufering inmates died in all, but estimates of almost fifteen thousand dead—around half of those taken to the site—are probably not far off.141
Camp complexes like Kaufering were built on prisoner lives, and for the SS no lives held less value than those of Jews. In many satellite camps, guards continued to indulge in anti-Semitic excesses, seemingly oblivious to the wider economic pressures. As a result, construction camps with Jewish prisoners often had higher death rates than those holding other prisoner groups. This is not the whole story, however. As in the past, some skilled and trained Jewish prisoners were temporarily protected from the worst abuses. Also, senior SS officials did not always send Jews to satellites with the worst conditions. The allocation of slave laborers was often more haphazard, driven not by racial thinking but by the need to fill short-term vacancies. In Neuengamme, for instance, most Jews ended up in production camps, escaping the worst construction sites.142 Evidently, anti-Semitism was not the only factor determining the fate of Jews in satellite camps. And of all the other factors, none proved more decisive than gender.
Gender and Survival
“Women in the camp,” Edgar Kupfer noted in his diary in September 1944, after he heard rumors that French women were being detained inside the main Dachau compound: “Unthinkable!”143 German main camps like Dachau, which had previously held no women at all (with the exception of a few forced sex workers in brothels), were suddenly teeming with female prisoners, even if most of them did not stay for long; once they were registered, the SS normally dispatched them to satellite camps for slave labor.144 The mass influx of women into the
KL system was accompanied by several concessions. The SS discarded its ban on male and female prisoners working together in arms production, and it relaxed its rules for the supply of slave labor, deferring to industry demands for smaller prisoner details; instead of providing only groups of one thousand or more, the SS reduced the minimum “order” to five hundred in the case of women, paving the way for more requests.145
Female prisoners were held in satellite camps all across Germany. Until summer 1944, the great majority of such camps were attached to Ravensbrück. But as the satellite camps mushroomed, the WVHA simplified their administration. In autumn and winter 1944, the supervision of around half the Ravensbrück satellites, holding some fourteen thousand women, was handed to other main camps (though some links remained, as camps like Buchenwald and Flossenbürg regularly deported “invalid” women back to Ravensbrück). Because these main camps established yet more satellites, the network of female camps continued to expand. By the end of 1944, there must have been well over one hundred satellite camps holding female prisoners; some were reserved for women only, others held male prisoners, too.146 Even in these joint camps, however, male and female prisoners largely lived and worked apart.
The most striking difference between the sexes lay in the survival rates. Male prisoners in satellite camps were far more likely to die than women, bringing to mind the gendered delay in SS terror in the years before 1942.147 It is hard to believe that, as some historians have argued, it was the experience of women as homemakers that put them at a significant advantage over men.148 It is equally unlikely that closer bonds among female prisoners made a decisive difference.149 Far more important was the type of labor inmates had to perform: unlike most men, most women worked in production; in the Ravensbrück satellites, the split between production and construction was around 4:1 among women, and the reverse among men. Companies often preferred women for precision work in arms manufacturing, drafting female prisoners to make munitions, gas masks, warships, and fighter planes.150
These female prisoners also experienced less extreme abuse from fellow inmates and officials. For the most part, the SS authorities felt that they had less to fear from women. Although some officers warned about their cunning nature, the Camp SS was not overly concerned about violent attacks and escapes. This was reflected in staffing levels; proportionally, the SS often deployed more than twice as many guards at satellite camps for men as it did at camps for women.151 Moreover, camp compounds for female prisoners were mostly guarded by women.152 Unlike some male guards, none of them had been brutalized by frontline warfare. And although they often acted harshly and unpredictably, they committed relatively few excesses against female inmates; murderous violence remained the exception.153 The same was true, apparently, for many of the older male reservists drafted as sentries. Female survivors of satellite camps often described these men as rather humane, allowing them extra breaks and additional food. Even some Jewish women recalled former soldiers as acting “very decently,” raising the key issue of anti-Semitic terror in satellite camps for women.154
When it came to survival in satellite camps, gender largely trumped race: Jewish women were often more likely to survive than non-Jewish men.155 True, Jewish women in construction—clearing rubble, swinging pickaxes, digging trenches—often faced terrible odds; more than four thousand women (largely Hungarian Jews) were deported to Kaufering alone, where many joined the men on the deadly building sites.156 The majority of female Jewish KL prisoners in Germany, however, worked in production, just like most other women in 1944, and their chances of survival were much higher.157 Jewish women in the Gross-Rosen satellite camps, for example, who mostly worked in textile and arms production, suffered a death rate of around one percent; by contrast, more than twenty-seven percent of Jewish men perished in the Riese construction camp complex.158 In this way, the manufacture of munitions, weapons, and other goods for the Nazi war effort saved thousands of Jewish women from almost certain death, at least for the time being.
Many Jewish women were held in satellite camps together with groups of other female prisoners, and although they often faced additional abuse, they were not singled out for mass murder. In Leipzig-Schönefeld, a satellite camp of Buchenwald, where more than 4,200 women of different nationalities and backgrounds worked in arms production in autumn 1944, the skilled Jewish prisoners were treated more or less the same as other inmates. One Jewish survivor of Leipzig-Schönefeld recalled that the camp leader, a veteran Camp SS man no less, had assured them on arrival that they would be judged on their performance, not the yellow star on their uniforms.159
Other Jewish women found themselves in production camps reserved solely for Jews. One such camp, for the Siemens-Schuckert works, was set up in mid-October 1944 in Nuremberg, opposite the city’s large southern cemetery. Among the 550 women was Ágnes Rózsa, whom we encountered at the beginning of this chapter. Like Rózsa, the other female prisoners had been deported from Hungary to Auschwitz, and onwards for slave labor to Nuremberg. Held in two barracks surrounded by barbed wire, Ágnes Rózsa and many of the others used precision tools to make electrical goods. In the world of the Nazi camps, this was a privileged detail and the women knew it. “We are no longer threatened by the daily selection or the fear of the gassings,” Ágnes Rózsa wrote on December 6, 1944. “I was dead in Auschwitz,” she added a few weeks later. “Only here in Nuremberg, as I started to work, was I reborn.” Forced labor was strenuous—Rózsa worked up to fifteen hours a day—but not geared toward destruction. Living conditions were pitiful—prisoners sometimes shook with hunger and cold—but not lethal. Violence was common—with slaps during work and occasional beatings—but not deadly. This made all the difference for the prisoners. Before the camp was closed down, following an Allied air raid on February 21, 1945, the SS recorded no more than three deaths.160
For most female Jewish prisoners, then, transfer to a satellite camp far inside Germany was an improvement.161 But these women only made up a small proportion of all imprisoned Jews. Far more were murdered in Auschwitz as “unfit for labor.” Talking to Hitler on April 26, 1944, about the deportations of Hungarian Jews, Joseph Goebbels concluded: “If anything, the Führer’s hatred of Jews has grown, not diminished … Wherever we can get our hands on them, they won’t escape retaliation.”162 As for those Jewish women and men selected for slave labor, one should not forget that Nazi leaders had been swayed by short-term economic or strategic considerations before.163 Such exceptions did not alter the fundamentals of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, and the survival of some Jews as forced laborers in satellite camps in 1944 was meant to be a temporary stay of execution only.164 The prisoners themselves were well aware of their perilous existence. “When all is said and done,” Ágnes Rózsa wrote in her diary on December 22, 1944, “I am only alive because at the moment no one wants to kill me.”165
THE OUTSIDE WORLD
Fritz Güntsche was ashamed and angry. Looking back in 1951 at the last years of the Third Reich, the Nordhausen teacher attacked the willful amnesia of his fellow citizens, who often feigned ignorance about the violent history of the nearby Dora concentration camp. “Whoever says that kind of thing is lying!” Güntsche bristled. What about the prisoners who had marched right through the town? What about the corpses driven toward Buchenwald? What about the prisoners who had worked with locals in factories and on building sites? All this was proof enough, Güntsche wrote, “that we knew something about the Dora camp and its browbeaten inhabitants! We did not interfere with things there, we did not dare to kick against the pricks. We are responsible for what happened there.” A lone voice drowned out in the stubborn silence about Nazi crimes that enveloped much of Germany in the early 1950s—his unpublished manuscript was kept under lock and key in an East German archive—Güntsche pointed to the many ways in which the camps had become public toward the end of the Third Reich.166 As more and more satellite camps spread across the country, a vast number of Germans had witnessed the crimes committed in the
ir name. And it was not only the German population that learned more about the camps; the Allies, too, saw SS terror more clearly than ever before.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind?
The KL were never cut off from the outside world, least of all from the communities surrounding them. Having tried to isolate the camps in the late 1930s, the SS could not stop them from becoming more transparent again after the war started. It could not hide completely the murder of Soviet POWs and other Nazi victims, as columns of starved prisoners marched toward the camps, followed by telltale smoke from inside. “The chimney of the crematorium,” a Dachau woman recalled after the war, “stank and stank, day and night.”167 Another local point of contact was slave labor. In theory, the SS still tried to stop onlookers; any spectators who failed to disperse, Dachau sentries were instructed around 1942, should be dragged before the camp authorities.168 But such rules were already impossible to fully enforce in the early 1940s, as the outside deployment of prisoners increased (well before the proliferation of satellite camps).169 Often, the initiative for such employment had come from local officials and traders. Farmers, in particular, petitioned concentration camps for help with the harvest, a well-established custom in state prisons. One of these farmers was Gretel Meier from Flossenbürg, who asked the commandant in June 1942 for “approval of a prisoner mowing detail of four prisoners” because “my husband is at the front” (the request was granted by the WVHA). Shortages among agricultural workers led the SS to rent out sizable numbers of prisoners; in autumn 1942, around thirteen percent of female prisoners from Ravensbrück worked locally in farming.170
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 67