KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  But indifference was a major factor, as well. Many civilian workers lost no sleep over the prisoners’ plight. They were used to foreigners being exploited for the German economy, with KL prisoners merely the latest contingent in a much larger army of forced workers. More generally, death and destruction were all around as the war raged on, a war in which many Germans saw themselves as victims, suffering rationing, bombing raids, and fatalities at the front. Preoccupied with their own struggles, many civilian workers had no time for the fate of prisoners.222 This was true for other ordinary Germans, too. “If I remember correctly, I did not think much at all, however pathetic that may sound,” a German man later described his feelings as a young soldier, when he had seen some SS men and prisoners at Auschwitz in late 1944. “You wondered about what will happen to you, and had no feeling for others.”223

  Camps in the Community

  Redl-Zipf was a sleepy town in a valley of the Upper Austrian countryside, made up of farms and cottages with pretty gardens and orchards, surrounded by open fields and wooded hills. The rural idyll was abruptly shattered in autumn 1943, when the test range for V2 rockets was set up in the mountains nearby. Heavy machinery and high-tech matériel arrived, new concrete buildings were erected, cables and rails were laid, and engine tests caused deafening blasts and tremors. Then there were all the prisoners from the new satellite camp, established just a few hundred yards outside town. Their torment was not hidden from residents, who often watched them marching to and from the camp, and there was plenty of talk about torture and death among engineers, construction workers, secretaries, and SS men, many of whom were quartered with local families. Even the camp itself was not out of bounds: some local children climbed on trees and peered inside. In short, one resident later said, “all the Zipfer knew what was going on.”224

  Similar scenes unfolded in many German towns and villages where satellite camps sprang up late in the war. These camps became part of the local landscape, sharing in the social, administrative, and economic life. Businessmen offered their services, waiters attended to SS men, and local registry officials recorded prisoner deaths. Whether dead or alive, the prisoners could not be overlooked. Some locals could see into the camps, as could some relatives of SS guards; during her visits to the Neuengamme satellite camp Salzgitter-Watenstedt in September and November 1944, the wife of Hugo Behncke caught repeated glimpses of the inmates. Even more encounters took place on the streets outside, as prisoner columns moved past houses and shops. Some details worked in the middle of local communities, clearing snow or rubble from homes and businesses, railway stations, and churches. Open abuse was common, as SS men saw few reasons anymore to hide their brutality. The mass death of prisoners was an open secret, too, as the dead were often taken away in plain sight. In fact, some residents had to assist the SS. In Bisingen, local coachmen were ordered to cart corpses from the satellite camp (part of the Natzweiler complex) to mass graves. “One day, I had to drive 52 dead from the camp to be buried,” an elderly man testified after the war; he even knew which of the prisoners had been executed, as blood would leak from their wooden coffins.225

  In larger German cities, too, KL prisoners became a visible presence. Once again, neighbors living next to the hastily erected compounds gained direct insights. The Buchenwald satellite camp Magda, for example, was established on the edge of a residential area in Magdeburg-Rothensee; from their windows and balconies, residents looked straight into the camp, while their children played next to the electric fence.226 Satellite camps were scattered all across most major German cities. In Munich, there were at least nineteen such camps by autumn 1944, ranging from tiny sites to huge ones like Allach with more than 4,700 inmates; in addition, at least ten prisoner bomb-clearing squads roamed the city.227 It was the same in other large cities. “If one traveled past slowly in the S-Bahn,” recalled a Düsseldorf citizen, who had frequently spotted, from his suburban train, a column of prisoners marching to their camp, “one saw, whether one wanted to or not, the faces of the wretches, their skulls shaved clean, yellowish and emaciated to the bone.”228

  Public reactions to such encounters with the KL were mixed, resembling responses by German civilian workers. Some onlookers, including children, were openly hostile, taunting and swearing at prisoners who marched through the streets. Occasionally, a mob would form and throw sticks and stones. When a group of boys strolled past a building site in Hanover-Misburg in summer 1944 and spotted Jean-Pierre Renouard taking a quick rest from the backbreaking labor, one boy stepped forward and lashed out, egged on by the rest of his gang.229 Other civilians, by contrast, helped the prisoners. In exceptional cases, they supported underground activities in the KL.230 More often, locals left some food for prisoners, sometimes using their children as go-betweens. Ella Kozlowski, a Hungarian Jew forced to clear debris in Bremen, told an interviewer decades later how a German passerby and her young daughter had hidden a bottle with hot porridge for her, every day for several weeks: “I cannot even begin to tell you what this meant to us.”231 The motives behind such charitable acts were manifold and could spring from political, religious, and humanitarian beliefs, or from gratitude to prisoners who had rescued locals trapped under rubble.232

  By far the most common reaction of ordinary Germans, however, was indifference. “I am happy when I hear nothing and see nothing of it,” a resident of Melk said, describing her attitude.233 Prisoners were only too aware of this reticence. During encounters with ordinary Germans, they would closely scrutinize their faces and gestures for small signs of sympathy, and were distraught when cautious glances met with evasion. Alfred Groeneveld, a Dutch resistance fighter who was taken to a Buchenwald satellite camp in Kassel in autumn 1943, was struck by the detachment of locals who passed his prisoner detail on the streets: “It seemed as if the people simply did not want to know anything! They looked as little as possible, as if trying to repress the memory in advance!”234

  But what was the meaning of this silence? It has been argued that the willed blindness of ordinary Germans marks their complicity in Nazi mass murder, turning them from bystanders into perpetrators.235 But this mistakes the result of public passivity for its cause. Popular acquiescence made SS terror easier, to be sure, but it tells us nothing about the motives behind it, and it certainly does not follow that KL crimes built on popular consent. While popular opinion during the war is difficult to read, it is evident that many Germans felt more than apathy. Plenty of them still supported the camps as institutions. To them, looking away from prisoner abuses was a way of ignoring the unpleasant reality of a policy they agreed with in principle. It also betrayed their fears of the prisoners. Nazi propaganda had been successful in branding prisoners as dangerous criminals, and popular anxieties only increased with the influx of foreigners and the spread of rumors about thefts and murders by escaped inmates, played up by local Nazi newspapers; occasionally, recaptured prisoners were even hanged in public, before the eyes of the population.236

  The KL were never universally popular inside Germany, however, and this did not change near the end of Nazi rule. Many Germans were genuinely shocked when they came face-to-face with prisoners for the first time.237 As German defeat became more likely, such moral concerns were fueled by fears of Allied retribution. “God help us, that we won’t suffer vengeance in the same way,” a group of women cried in autumn 1943 when they saw a ghostly procession of Ukrainians from the Dachau railway station to the main camp.238 SS leaders were well aware of the continued unease about the KL. Speaking confidentially to army generals on June 21, 1944, Heinrich Himmler conceded that ordinary Germans thought “very often” about the camps, “greatly pitied” the prisoners inside, and said things like “Oh, the poor people in the concentration camps!”239

  Himmler and other Nazi leaders regarded such critical views as seditious. After the failed bomb plot on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944, Nazi propaganda made much of the supposed plans of the conspirators to free prisoners from the KL (for good measu
re, the authorities dragged many family members of the plotters inside, including relatives of Count Stauffenberg, the would-be assassin).240 Many German resisters did indeed oppose and abhor the camps, as is evident from their leaflets and private papers.241 But disquiet about the KL went beyond Germans who fundamentally opposed the Third Reich, and occasionally even reached veteran Nazi supporters.242

  So why did such reservations about the camps not translate into greater support for prisoners? Fear was clearly a factor, as SS guards openly threatened Germans who tried to help. And just as in the case of civilian workers, the authorities occasionally followed through; in Mühldorf, for instance, a local woman was arrested in August 1944 after she handed fruit to a group of Jewish prisoners.243 But such cases were rare. After years of Nazi rule, many Germans were fatalistic. Their sense of impotence was summed up by a woman who witnessed exhausted prisoners from Stutthof march to work in summer 1944, driven on by SS guards with whips: “Feeling pity, that was the most one could do.”244 Looking away, then, could be a sign of resignation, too.

  The mind-set of many people in Nazi-occupied Europe was different. Although there was plenty of indifference, fear, and collusion, there was far more defiance. The determination to oppose the occupiers was widespread and often led to a clear-cut view of KL prisoners: as victims of the common enemy, they deserved help. Foreign civilian workers, deployed at German factories and building sites, were more likely to come to the prisoners’ aid than their German counterparts.245 POWs, who knew themselves what it meant to fall into Nazi hands, gave some support, as well. Around Monowitz, British soldiers in the local POW camp (set up in autumn 1943) often left some of their Red Cross supplies to KL inmates. Working as a mechanic with a group of British soldiers, the German Jew Fritz Pagel, who spoke a little English, regularly received food from a British gunner; the soldier even wrote to Pagel’s brother in London, at grave danger to himself.246

  Local residents near concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe also acted with more courage than their counterparts inside the Third Reich. This was obvious to prisoners from the SS Building Brigades who were transported to satellite camps in occupied France and Belgium in spring and summer 1944 (for setting up launchpads for German rockets). Despite SS threats, many locals gave food, sometimes walking up directly to prisoners in defiance of SS threats. Some residents even supported escaped inmates, offering clothes and shelter; Gerhard Maurer from the WVHA complained that the French population gave “every help possible” to those on the run. Veteran inmates, like the twenty-four-year-old German Jehovah’s Witness Helmut Knöller, were astonished by the generosity of local people in western Europe: “We prisoners had a great life there in Flanders, the most beautiful time in the KL! The Belgian population brought us prisoners everything, tobacco in abundance … bread and fruit, sweets, sugar, milk and so on.” Returning to Germany a few weeks later, in autumn 1944, Knöller was struck by the very different attitude of the local population, which cheered the accompanying troops, not the prisoners.247

  Hostility to the KL was most vociferous among the anti-Nazi resistance in occupied Europe—hardly surprising, given the camps’ prominent role in the war on the political underground. As symbols of Nazi terror, the camps were frequently denounced in leaflets and graffiti.248 In Vught, locals are even said to have thrown stones at SS guards.249 Most significant were the systematic efforts to help prisoners, reminiscent of the activities by left-wing activists in Germany during 1933–34, before their networks were destroyed. The Polish Home Army and other resistance organizations managed to smuggle money, food, medication, and clothes to prisoners in Auschwitz. “Thank you for everything. The medicine is priceless,” a Polish inmate wrote to the local underground on November 19, 1942. The SS was well aware of the groundswell of local opposition around Auschwitz. Following the first prisoner escape in summer 1940, Rudolf Höss complained to his superiors about the “fanatically Polish” attitude of the population, which was “ready for any action against the hated SS men.”250 Another mission of the organized resistance was the collection and dissemination of information about the KL. Around Auschwitz, the Polish resistance received a large number of secret messages from prisoners, as well as some documents stolen in the camp. The inmates took enormous risks to gather this material, in the hope that it would reach the wider world.251 Against the odds, some of it did.252

  The Allies and the Camps

  Sometime in late 1940, British secret service agents at Bletchley Park, some fifty miles north of London, made a breakthrough: they cracked one (or more) of the advanced Enigma keys used by the SS to code radio transmissions. Now the British could eavesdrop on Nazi terror as it unfolded, including the highly sensitive traffic between concentration camps and their Berlin headquarters.253 Over the coming years, British intelligence collected a vast number of decoded messages and, as a look at the material from 1942 reveals, gained astonishing insights into the KL system. The agents could track movements within and between camps, using the daily statistics of prisoner populations; it was clear, for example, that many “unfit” prisoners were sent to Dachau. The messages revealed much about the Camp SS, as well, including staffing levels and transfers, and the influx of ethnic German guards. Regarding the function of the KL, British intelligence was aware of the shift toward slave labor for industry, on Himmler’s personal orders, with major factories under construction around Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and elsewhere. In addition, there were many glimpses of terror inside, with reports on epidemics, corporal punishment, human experiments, executions, and prisoners “shot trying to escape.” As for the place of Auschwitz in the KL system, it was obvious that huge numbers of Jewish prisoners were arriving in what had become a very deadly camp.254 Revealing as all this material was, however, it was fragmentary. Not only did the British miss many SS messages, but the most secret exchanges were not sent by radio at all.255 This meant that the meaning of orders deciphered in Bletchley often remained hazy. It was not immediately obvious, for example, that sick prisoners were sent to Dachau as part of a program of murdering invalids. Neither was it clear that Auschwitz became a destination for the systematic mass extermination of Jews, who were mostly murdered on arrival and hence absent from the figures seen by the British.

  To gain a clearer picture, the Allies needed information from other sources, in addition to the decryptions. There was no shortage, even in the early war years, and especially in London, where the British authorities collected more extensive and reliable intelligence than their counterparts in the United States.256 Some accounts of abuses and atrocities in the KL came from British staff abroad.257 But the most telling material arrived via outside agencies, such as Jewish groups and the Polish government-in-exile, which collected and circulated numerous reports from the Polish underground. Though sometimes confused and contradictory, and weighted toward the suffering of the Polish population, these reports added crucial details about the camps—including news about the mass extermination of Jews, with isolated references (especially from 1943) to selections, gas chambers, and crematoria in Auschwitz. The Polish authorities in London not only passed confidential material to the British and other governments, they released some reports directly to the media, resulting in newspaper articles in the United States, Switzerland, Britain, and elsewhere. As early as June 1941, the Times of London carried a brief piece on starvation, slave labor, and murders of Polish prisoners in the “dreaded Oswiecim [Auschwitz] concentration camp.”258

  As the war drew to a close, the Allies received ever more detailed reports, especially relating to the Nazi Final Solution. Although Allied governments had been aware since the end of 1942 (at the latest) of the systematic mass extermination of European Jewry, the exact role of Auschwitz and Majdanek in Nazi genocide was not yet fully understood. The famous Allied declaration of December 17, 1942, which publicly denounced the wholesale slaughter of the Jews in eastern Europe, made no direct mention of the KL, referring merely to Jews being worked to death in “la
bor camps.” And even this declaration was quickly forgotten by senior government officials in Britain and the United States, who questioned the reliability of eyewitness testimony and worried that excessive exposure of Nazi atrocities might detract from the business of fighting the war.259 The magnitude of Nazi criminality took a long time to sink in.

  But by 1944, the truth became hard to ignore. To be sure, Allied intelligence was still scattered, which accounts for the continuing confusion about aspects of the KL system.260 And yet, the contours of the KL, above all of Auschwitz itself, came into ever sharper relief. During interrogations, German POWs mentioned mass killings in the camp, and occasionally referred to gassings. German generals secretly recorded in Allied captivity made similar remarks.261 By far the most important information, and also the most recent, came from escaped prisoners. A first detailed report about the slaughter of Hungarian Jews reached Switzerland in mid-June 1944, just four weeks after it had begun. “Never since the foundation of Birkenau,” it concluded with great accuracy, “have so many Jews been gassed.”262