KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  An Uprising in Auschwitz

  It was just after lunchtime on Saturday, October 7, 1944, a bright autumn day under a cloudless sky, when a small group of SS men entered the yard outside crematorium IV in Auschwitz-Birkenau and ordered nearly three hundred Special Squad prisoners to line up. The SS announced a selection, supposedly for transfer to another camp, and began to pick out some men. Not all of them came forward, however, and the situation grew tense. Suddenly, one of the oldest prisoners, the Polish Jew Chaim Neuhoff, lunged forward and attacked an SS man with a hammer. Others joined in. Wielding stones, axes, and iron bars, they forced the SS behind the compound’s barbed wire. The air in Birkenau filled with screams, shots, and the sound of sirens, and also with smoke—not from burning bodies, as usual, but from the crematorium building itself, which the prisoners had set ablaze. The uprising of the Birkenau Special Squad had begun.272

  This moment had been coming for months. “For a long time, we, the ‘Special Squad,’ wanted to put a stop to our terrible work,” Salmen Gradowski wrote in Birkenau in autumn 1944. “We wanted to do something big.”273 There had been talk of an uprising back in spring 1944, probably in connection with the imminent liquidation of the Birkenau family camp (which occurred in March), but in the end nothing came of it. Still, the conspirators started to collect arms, including hand grenades, filled with explosives stolen by female prisoners at the nearby Union armaments works and smuggled into the Special Squad. The clamor for armed action became more persistent from midsummer 1944. Special Squad prisoners thought that most of them would be surplus to SS requirements, once the mass gassings of Hungarian Jews had ended. Given the advance of the Red Army, it also seemed likely that Auschwitz would be evacuated, and the prisoners feared that the SS would execute them before leaving; after all, they bore the darkest secrets of the Nazi Final Solution (similar fears had triggered the uprisings in Treblinka and Sobibor the previous year). The men of the Birkenau Special Squad lived in heightened anticipation, but so volatile was their position that the plan for action had to be repeatedly postponed. Soon, the situation gained even greater urgency. On September 23, 1944, the SS selected two hundred Special Squad members, allegedly for transport to a different KL. The others learned the truth the following day, when they found the charred remains of their comrades in the crematorium. When the SS announced in early October that another selection would follow within days, the prisoners at crematorium IV suspected that this would be their death sentence. They would have to move now or never.274

  But the Birkenau rebels were poorly prepared. They could not count on the prisoner underground elsewhere in the camp to join them, after these groups had concluded that a violent confrontation with the SS could only end in a massacre. There was an insoluble conflict of interest between Special Squad prisoners, who had nothing to lose, and most other inmates, who hoped to see out the final months. “Unlike us, they did not have to hurry,” Salmen Lewental noted bitterly in autumn 1944.275 In fact, the Special Squad itself was divided over the issue of armed action; some prisoners were too exhausted, others wanted to wait for a more opportune moment, when the whole camp would rise up with them. Among those who counseled caution were the main leaders of the Special Squad, who did not face immediate selection on October 7, 1944, and decided against participating in the uprising. Not only were the remaining rebels isolated, they were badly organized. There had been no time to make proper plans, and confusion mired the revolt from the start. Once crematorium IV was on fire, the prisoners could not reach their grenades hidden inside; the strongest weapons were left unused, buried under the collapsing roof of the building.276

  The uprising was doomed from the outset. Within minutes, SS reinforcements arrived at crematorium IV to shoot at the exposed prisoners, easy to pick out in the bright daylight. One survivor peered into the yard of the compound and saw scores of his comrades “lying very still in their bloodstained prison uniforms,” with SS men firing at anyone who still stirred. By then, most of the remaining prisoners had run across the path to the adjacent crematorium V, hiding inside. SS guards soon dragged them out, threw them on the floor, together with other recaptured inmates, and shot them in the back of the neck. When the SS had finished, more than 250 corpses covered the grounds of the two crematoria.277

  Meanwhile, around thirty minutes after Chaim Neuhoff had struck the first blow at crematorium IV, a second uprising broke out at crematorium II. The Special Squad prisoners there had heard the shots fired nearby and seen smoke rising. Following the instructions of their leaders, they initially remained calm. When some SS men came marching toward their compound, however, a group of Soviet POWs panicked and pushed a German Kapo into the burning furnace. The other Special Squad prisoners at crematorium II now had to join them, whether they wanted to or not, and armed themselves with knives and hand grenades. After they cut a hole in the fence surrounding their compound, up to one hundred prisoners escaped. But the SS hunted them all down; some got as far as the small town of Rajsko, a couple of miles away, hiding in a shed until the SS surrounded it and burned it to the ground.

  The reprisals were not over yet. Over the coming weeks, the SS executed most survivors of the uprising, among them Lejb Langfus, who was murdered after the last Special Squad selection on November 26, 1944. Just before, he had written a final note: “We are sure that they will lead us to our deaths.” Among the other victims were four female prisoners who had smuggled explosives into Birkenau. One of them, Estusia Wajcblum, sent a last letter to her sister from the bunker, after weeks of SS torture: “Those outside of my window still have hope, but I have nothing … everything is lost and I so want to live.”278

  In contrast to the revolts at Sobibor and Treblinka, where several hundred prisoners had evaded their pursuers, not a single Special Squad prisoner got away. This was due to the greater SS presence around Auschwitz and the elaborate security arrangements, which had been strengthened earlier that year to thwart an uprising. Within a few hours of the revolt, the SS had slaughtered more than two-thirds of the estimated 660 Birkenau Special Squad members (the SS itself lost three men, who were mourned as heroes). Only those Special Squad prisoners stationed at crematorium III, who did not rise up, were left unscathed and carried on with their duties as if nothing had happened.279

  Neither did the uprising interrupt the mass extermination of Jews in Birkenau. The burned-down crematorium IV had been out of commission since May 1943, and the Camp SS continued to use its other facilities, gassing an estimated forty thousand men, women, and children after the uprising, in a lethal spurt lasting little more than two weeks. Among the dead were thousands of Jews from Theresienstadt. Although the SS preserved the ghetto to the very end, it deported most inhabitants to Auschwitz in autumn 1944, where the majority were murdered on arrival. The last Theresienstadt transport came on October 30; of the 2,038 men, women, and children on board, the SS sent 1,689 straight to their deaths, in what may have been the last mass gassing in the history of the camp.280

  The Birkenau uprising throws a light on the terrible dilemma of violent opposition in the KL. Prisoners knew that a revolt would most likely result in their own deaths. Few were willing to take this risk. In general, only those who knew that they were about to be murdered were ready to fight; this was the courage of the doomed in the face of certain death. “We have given up hope that we’ll live until the moment of liberation,” Salmen Gradowski wrote, not long before his death during the uprising of October 7, 1944.281 By contrast, inmates who still had hopes of survival, however small, shied away from suicidal rebellions. This was why the main underground groups in Auschwitz decided against joining the armed revolt in autumn 1944, leaving the Special Squad feeling abandoned and alone.282

  The uprising remains a powerful symbol of prisoner defiance, and much of our knowledge of the events comes directly from survivors of the Special Squad. When the SS abandoned the Auschwitz camp complex in mid-January 1945, some one hundred Special Squad prisoners were among the tens
of thousands forced westward. Somehow, almost all of them—including Shlomo Dragon and his brother Abraham, and Filip Müller—survived until liberation.283 Such good fortune was the exception, however. The final months of the KL system were among the most lethal, bringing death to several hundred thousand registered prisoners. The closer these men, women, and children came to freedom, the more likely they were to die in the concentration camps.

  11

  Death or Freedom

  On Sunday, February 25, 1945, Odd Nansen followed his usual routine. Since his deportation to Sachsenhausen as a political prisoner almost one and a half years earlier, the forty-three-year-old Norwegian had visited the camp’s infirmary on most weekends. Usually he came to help fellow countrymen, but this time he headed straight for one of the youngest patients, a ten-year-old Jewish boy called Tommy, who had been born in Czechoslovakia in 1934, after his parents’ emigration from Nazi Germany. Tommy was all alone. Separated from his mother and father in Auschwitz in 1944, he had only recently arrived in Sachsenhausen. Nansen had first met him in the infirmary on February 18 and was greatly touched, wondering how a child who had witnessed unimaginable suffering could still be so sweet-natured. Looking at Tommy that day, with his large eyes and his infectious smile, Nansen felt as if an angel had descended into the depths of Sachsenhausen. He desperately missed his own children in Norway and resolved to watch over Tommy, bribing the infirmary Kapo to save the boy from selections. When Nansen came back to visit the following week, on February 25, he brought rare treats like sardines. And as he sat beside the boy, Tommy told him about the evacuation of Auschwitz.

  The Camp SS had forced Tommy out of the Auschwitz complex on January 18, 1945, with most of the remaining inmates. Staying close to two other boys from the Birkenau children’s barrack, he had joined an endless procession of prisoners dragging themselves westward. Everything was covered in snow and ice, and the roads—littered with dead horses, burned vehicles, and mangled corpses—were submerged by waves of German soldiers and civilians fleeing from the Red Army. Tommy saw many prisoners perish along the way, and soon felt that he, too, would die.

  After six months in Birkenau, Tommy was bone-thin, and the boots his mother had left him offered little protection against the winter. More than once, he thought about giving up. Still he pushed himself forward. After three interminable days, Tommy and the other survivors finally reached Gleiwitz, the German border town where Nazi forces had staged the phony attack by “Polish” troops that marked the beginning of World War II. Here they were forced onto an open railcar. At first, Tommy was pressed so tightly against the adults that he could hardly breathe, but later death thinned their ranks. The creeping cold tormented Tommy’s frozen feet. He had little to eat but snow, trying to imagine that it was ice cream. “And I cried terribly,” he told Nansen. After more than ten days, the train arrived near Sachsenhausen. Tommy was soon taken to the main camp infirmary, where two of his toes, black with frostbite, were amputated. “Poor little Tommy, what will become of him?” Odd Nansen thought as he wrote down Tommy’s story.1

  The young boy was one of thousands of Auschwitz prisoners who entered Sachsenhausen in early 1945.2 Other concentration camps inside the prewar German borders also filled with prisoners from abandoned KL nearer the front line. Faced with the relentless Allied advance, the SS closed camp after camp, forcing hundreds of thousands to leave on foot, trains, trucks, and horse-drawn carriages. The deadly treks led through what was left of Nazi-controlled Europe, sometimes winding over hundreds of miles.3

  The KL system broke apart rapidly, just as it reached its zenith: climax and collapse went hand in hand. Despite some disruption by the war in 1944, which led the SS to close several main camps and dozens of satellites, its terror apparatus had still been going strong at the end of the year. On January 15, 1945, the eve of the evacuation of Auschwitz, the SS registered a record number of 714,211 KL prisoners in all.4 Over the coming months, the remaining camps grew into behemoths, bursting with prisoners from evacuated sites, as well as newly arrested inmates. The prisoner population of the Mauthausen complex, for example, exceeded eighty thousand by late February 1945, over fifty thousand more than one year earlier.5 Not only were the remaining camps inside Nazi Germany now at their largest, they were at their most lethal, too. Starvation and disease were rampant, and the SS went on a last killing spree as the Third Reich went down in flames.6

  The morale of the prisoners inside was closely tied to the progress of the war, as it had been for years. News of major Allied victories, such as the landings in Italy (1943) and France (1944), had been greeted ecstatically, with prisoners smiling, whistling, even dancing.7 But their hopes of swift liberation had been dashed again and again, leading many inmates to seek solace in fantastical rumors and in the stories of spiritualists and fortune-tellers, which flourished in the KL.8 Only in early 1945 could the prisoners really be sure that the war would soon be over. The Allies were now unstoppable. In the east, Soviet troops penetrated deep into the Third Reich. In the west, the all-or-nothing offensive by the Wehrmacht in December, on which Nazi leaders had pinned their last hopes, quickly stalled, followed by a decisive push from the western Allies, who advanced steadily until they crossed the Rhine in early March 1945. On April 25, 1945, American and Soviet soldiers met on the Elbe, splitting the remnants of the Third Reich in half. The German surrender came less than two weeks later, in the early hours of May 7, 1945.9

  Life during the final months and weeks in concentration camps was unbearably tense. As prisoners heard the detonations from the front come closer, they felt as if “on tenterhooks,” one of them wrote in a secret note.10 The KL resembled beehives, with swarms of inmates gathering to exchange the latest news. Their mood fluctuated wildly between hope and anguish. Some were sure that liberation would come at any moment. Others feared that the SS would execute them before the Allies arrived, or force them out. The prospect of leaving the camp terrified many prisoners, especially after they had witnessed the arrival of earlier death marches. But they were also scared of being left behind, especially if they were ill and weak, like little Tommy in Sachsenhausen. “[If] this camp is evacuated—what then?” the boy asked Odd Nansen in late February 1945. “If I’m still lying here and can’t run, what will they do with me?” When Nansen visited Tommy for the last time two weeks later, shortly before Norwegian prisoners like him departed from the camp, he feared that he would never see the boy again.11

  It is impossible to say how many prisoners perished between January and early May 1945 during the evacuations and inside the KL. However, an estimate of forty percent dead—some three hundred thousand men, women, and children—is probably not wide of the mark. Never before had so many registered prisoners died so quickly.12 Perhaps some four hundred and fifty thousand prisoners came through the final catastrophe, with Jews, Soviets, and Poles making up the largest groups.13 Most of these survivors were rescued inside the KL, though some sites stood eerily empty by the time the Allies arrived. In the Sachsenhausen main camp, Soviet troops found no more than 3,400 prisoners on April 22–23, 1945, mostly in the abominable sick bays.14 One of them was Tommy. After the boy limped out of his barrack, he saw Red Army soldiers moving through the big gate and shouting “Hitler kaputt, Hitler kaputt!” Ever since this moment, Thomas (Tommy) Buergenthal has reflected on the reasons for his survival against all odds. “If there is one word that captures the conclusion to which I always returned,” he wrote decades later, “it is luck.”15

  THE BEGINNING OF THE END

  When Soviet troops reached the Auschwitz main camp and Birkenau, at around three o’clock on the afternoon of January 27, 1945, the site looked nothing like it had just a few months earlier. The SS had dismantled or destroyed many buildings and set fire to the thirty barracks of Canada II, the huge compound storing the property of murdered Jews; the ruins were still smoldering as Soviet soldiers walked among them. Before SS officials had torched these warehouses, they sent some of the most valuabl
e goods back toward central Germany. Building materials had been moved out, too, as had technical equipment like the X-ray machine used for sterilization experiments. The SS had demolished the Birkenau crematoria and gas chambers, as well, beginning in November 1944; crematorium V, the last operational one, was blown up shortly before liberation. Now the Birkenau “death factory” lay in ruins. As for the once overcrowded prisoner compounds, they were largely deserted. Less than five months earlier, in late August 1944, over 135,000 prisoners had been held across the camp complex. By the time the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, there were just 7,500 left, mostly sick and weak prisoners abandoned during the final evacuation.16 But the loss of Auschwitz was still a big blow for the SS, as the camp had been the jewel in its crown: a model for the collaboration with industry, an outpost for German settlements, and its principal death camp.

  In recent times, the day of the liberation of Auschwitz has become the focal point for remembrance of the Holocaust.17 Symbolic as the date is, however, January 27, 1945, marked neither the beginning nor the end of the camps’ liberation. The end of suffering was still a long way off for most prisoners; if freedom came at all, it came weeks or months later, often after another round of death marches in April and May 1945. As for the beginning, the first phase of KL evacuations had occurred earlier, between spring and autumn 1944; and although it is widely forgotten today, it foreshadowed much of the horror that was to follow.