KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Mass Murder

  Along with death by deprivation, the Camp SS relied on mass executions to decimate the weak. Lethal selections expanded across the remaining KL in the early months of 1945, probably in line with WVHA orders. The SS killed several tens of thousands of frail prisoners by shooting, lethal injection, and gas, determined to rid the camps of prisoners seen as health risks, drains on resources, and obstacles during evacuations.134 Sometimes the SS chose its victims as they arrived in the camp.135 Further selections followed in the compounds, especially inside the death zones. In Uckermark—a police camp for “deviant” girls and young women, which was largely taken over by the Ravensbrück SS in January 1945 to isolate the weakest and oldest women from the main camp and its satellites—the SS conducted daily selections. “We may be sick, but we are still human beings!” one wrote in despair on February 9, 1945. Those who were spared listened as the victims were driven off on SS trucks, their cries and screams growing fainter. The trucks stopped by the nearby Ravensbrück crematorium, where the doomed were forced into a hut that had been converted in January 1945 into a gas chamber. In all, some 3,600 out of the 8,000 (or more) Uckermark women were murdered there, perhaps half of them Jews.136

  In addition to the sick, the Camp SS executed political prisoners and others it wanted to silence forever. These murders were part of a final killing frenzy that swept across the Third Reich as the regime collapsed. Driven by the same self-destructive desires as Hitler, a small band of fanatics targeted German defeatists, foreign workers, prisoners, and many more; if Nazi Germany was going to perish, so were these “community aliens.”137 Inevitably, the concentration camps, which were meant to hold the most dangerous enemies, stood at the center of the carnage. Hitler and other Nazi leaders had long envisaged a bloody reckoning with KL prisoners in case of defeat, and that moment had arrived in early 1945.138 The casualties included selected “high-value” prisoners like Allied agents and prominent resistance fighters. Among those hanged in the final days by the Flossenbürg SS, for example, were thirteen British secret agents, three French women accused of sabotage, and seven leading German opponents of the regime, including the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.139

  Initially, many such murders followed the top-down route established in 1939, with formal execution orders issued by the RSHA. Apparently, concentration camp commandants had been asked in early 1945 to report those prisoners they regarded as a threat, in case the camp had to be abandoned. The RSHA probably added further names to these lists from its database of dangerous inmates, and then gave the go-ahead for the executions.140 As central government structures broke down, however, regional and local officials across Germany gained greater powers to kill on their own initiative, leading to a final escalation of violence.141 In the KL, commandants received the official license to order prisoner executions, awarded powers they had long claimed for themselves anyway.142

  Some of the doomed fought back, just as the Special Squad prisoners had done in Birkenau. The largest rebellion involved so-called “Bullet” prisoners in Mauthausen. Faced with a growing number of POW escapes, the Wehrmacht High Command had ordered back in March 1944 that fugitive enemy officers and NCOs (except for U.S. and British nationals) should be sent to Mauthausen upon recapture. The code name for the secret operation—Action “Bullet” (Kugel)—made clear that no one was supposed to survive. Over the coming months, some five thousand condemned men came to Mauthausen. Almost all were Soviet POWs who had fled from sites of Nazi slave labor. The Mauthausen SS executed several hundred upon arrival, isolating the others in barrack 20, a quarantine block surrounded by a stone wall and electric fence. “It was the intention to have the inmates under me slowly starved to death,” the responsible SS block leader later confessed, “or to have them perish through diseases.” This is exactly what happened, and by late January 1945, only some six or seven hundred prisoners were still alive.143

  On the night of February 1–2, 1945, most of the surviving “Bullet” prisoners, facing certain death, tried to escape from Mauthausen. Several conspirators strangled the senior Kapo, a German (or Austrian) political prisoner loyal to the SS. Then, armed with nothing more than rocks, wooden shoes, pieces of soap, and a fire extinguisher, the men attacked the SS at nearby searchlights and guard towers, capturing a machine gun. Using clothes and wet blankets, which short-circuited the electric fence, over four hundred men climbed over the wall: the greatest mass escape in the history of the KL. The merciless pursuit of them across the region lasted for around two weeks. Most of the fugitives were captured within a day or two and executed on the spot; only a handful are known to have survived the “hare hunting,” as the SS and some locals called it. “We really shot down those guys,” one SS man boasted at the time.144

  Elsewhere, the SS killed to rewrite history, by silencing witnesses to some of its most heinous crimes. This included numerous privileged KL prisoners, who paid with their lives for all the secrets they had learned.145 And it also included some survivors of human experiments. One of the victims was young Georges Kohn, whom we last saw as he was deported from Auschwitz to Neuengamme in November 1944, together with nineteen other Jewish boys and girls. Here, they had soon fallen seriously ill, after an SS doctor infected them with tuberculosis and supervised operations on their glands. Georges was the weakest, stretched out lifelessly on his bunk. Still, the children had survived until the last days of the war. Then, on April 20, 1945, three days before his thirteenth birthday, the SS came for Georges and the others. The drowsy children were taken late at night to an empty school at Bullenhuser Damm in Hamburg, previously an SS satellite camp. In the cellar, they were drugged by the senior SS camp physician and hanged; afterward, the SS doctor had a coffee to steady himself and drove back to Neuengamme.146

  The dedication of diehard SS men was undimmed. Although the Camp SS had undergone massive changes in recent years, its core was still made up of zealots. With the end of the war in sight, they redoubled their assault on prisoners.147 Many of them had previously served in the occupied east and brought all they had learned about prisoner abuse and killing to the remaining KL. This was true, above all, for some of the one thousand former Auschwitz staff redeployed in early 1945, together with their most violent Kapos. “I must admit that I had been hardened by conditions in Auschwitz,” an SS officer later said to justify his actions in Mauthausen, which absorbed around one hundred former Auschwitz SS men. Even more ended up in Dora, among them the new commandant, Richard Baer, who oversaw an immediate increase of violence. Another new commandant, Josef Kramer in Bergen-Belsen, had arrived via Auschwitz, as well, followed by more veterans of the camp. “They are all bastards, thugs, and sadists,” Arieh Koretz noted in his diary.148

  Rudolf Höss, meanwhile, was a frequent presence in Ravensbrück, where he appeared in late 1944 (his wife and family had moved next door) to supervise mass shootings and the construction of the new gas chamber. Höss must have felt at home there, surrounded as he was by familiar faces from Auschwitz, such as the new camp compound leader Johann Schwarzhuber (whom he had known since his Dachau days). These killing experts had not come to Ravensbrück by chance, but had evidently been dispatched by the WVHA to decimate supposedly dangerous and sick prisoners. Even after its demise, then, Auschwitz cast a shadow over the KL camp system.149

  Few Auschwitz alumni were more versed in mass murder than twenty-nine-year-old Otto Moll, the former chief of the Birkenau crematorium complex. The WVHA valued Moll’s expertise and put him in charge, in early 1945, of a mobile killing unit made up of other Birkenau veterans. The unit participated in mass gassings in Ravensbrück, and was also behind the Lieberose massacre and executions in Sachsenhausen. In late February 1945, the WVHA then moved Moll to the south of Germany, to the Kaufering complex, where he continued his murderous spree; the inmates here simply knew him as the “henchman from Auschwitz.”150 Moll was an extreme case, however, and while he continued to rage, some of his colleagues turned away from murder.

/>   The Camp SS had never spoken with one voice, and it sounded more disjointed than ever in early 1945. By then, domestic support for Hitler and the Nazi regime had largely collapsed.151 The Camp SS was infected by the grim popular mood, not least because more and more ordinary Germans—customs officials, railway workers, members of the People’s Storm (the ramshackle last-ditch Nazi militia), and other civilians—were drafted into guard units right at the end of the war, a sign of how frantic KL recruitment had become.152 Resignation had already crept into Camp SS ranks in summer 1944, following the Allied landings in France and the gains of the Red Army in the east. “Soon you will be liberated,” SS guards had told prisoners in Klooga. “And our lot is bad. They will slaughter us with no mercy.”153 Defeatism spread further over the coming months, until even the model camp at Sachsenhausen conspicuously stopped flying the Nazi flag above its entrance.154 The growing sense of desperation was summed up by a guard in a Flossenbürg satellite camp, who asked the Jewish prisoners to pray for a German victory.155

  Some SS staff scrambled to distance themselves from KL crimes. In the past, they had felt invincible.156 But as the Thousand-Year Reich crumbled, they feared that the tables would turn. “I wish you all the best for the coming year,” Elie Cohen recalls an Auschwitz guard saying at the end of 1944. “In that year I shall most likely find myself in your shoes and you in mine.”157 More and more Camp SS men simply stayed away, in the same way that Wehrmacht soldiers absconded from the army, feigning illness or deserting.158 Some of the remaining SS staff put on a friendlier face. They made a calculated bid for prisoner sympathies, hoping that this would help them later on. One such attempt to buy “life insurance,” as the prisoners called it, was made by the Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis, who suddenly posed as a friend of Jews. More than once in April 1945, he paraded a young Jewish boy through the camp, whom he had dressed in specially tailored clothes.159 A few SS officers even engaged in acts of disobedience. The SS physician Franz Lucas, who had previously participated willingly in Auschwitz selections, apparently refused to do the same in Ravensbrück in early 1945. After the war, an SS colleague dismissed this change of heart as a cynical ploy to purchase a “return ticket” to postwar society.160

  Camp SS leaders reacted furiously to the progressive breakdown of morale and discipline. In late February 1945, Oswald Pohl branded all those who entered into “personal relationships” with prisoners as “traitors,” and threatened them with execution.161 Commandants, wedded to the world of the KL, echoed this hard line. During a screening of the Nazi propaganda film Kolberg—a crude historical epic celebrating individual sacrifice for the nation—on April 20, 1945, Hitler’s last birthday, the Neuengamme commandant Max Pauly vowed that anyone who sullied the SS uniform faced brutal punishment. His men did not doubt his words, for he had just handed over one of them—an officer whom Pauly disliked, possibly because of his reputation for greater civility to prisoners—to an SS court for dereliction of duty; he was executed four days later.162

  Himmler’s Endgame

  In early 1945, Nazi leaders had to face up to defeat. The Allied coalition held firm and there were no miraculous reverses on the battlefield, as the Wehrmacht was routed and German arms production, in rapid decline since autumn 1944, collapsed. In his Berlin bunker, Hitler sank further into gloom and paranoia, ranting against all those he blamed for his downfall, from his own generals to the Jews. Hopeless as the situation was, however, Hitler did not deviate from his uncompromising course—total victory or total destruction. There would be no retreat, no capitulation, no negotiation.

  Some of Hitler’s lieutenants, by contrast, were hoping to save themselves and some of their powers. Planning their own endgame, Himmler and other Nazi leaders considered approaches to the West, hoping that the western Allies’ fears of Soviet domination in Europe would prompt them to agree to a separate peace. But any such plans were delusional from the start. Even if the Allied policy of total German surrender had not been set in stone, Himmler would have been the most improbable of all associates: this was the man who had been featured on the front cover of Time magazine as the infamous butcher of Nazi Europe, pictured before a huge mound of corpses. Himmler’s folly was exposed at the end of the war. Assuming that Hitler had effectively abdicated, he made a secret capitulation offer to the western powers through an emissary. The Allies rebuffed Himmler, brusquely and publicly. When Hitler heard the news on April 28, 1945, he dissolved into a last fit of rage, screaming about “the most shameful betrayal in human history.” A few hours later, not long before his suicide, he expelled Himmler from the party.163

  For Himmler, the pursuit of a deal with the western Allies ended in humiliation. For thousands of KL prisoners, however, it meant salvation, as they benefited from Himmler’s efforts to transform himself into a respectable negotiation partner. He had first tried to pose as a pragmatic statesman back in 1944, when he approved the release of some Jewish prisoners. On June 30, 1944, following secret negotiations with Jewish organizations abroad, the SS transported a select group of 1,684 Jews from Budapest to Bergen-Belsen, where they were held under privileged conditions until their transport (in August and December) to Switzerland. The SS was looking for goods and money in return, though the deal was also driven by Himmler’s desire for a peace agreement.164

  Secret negotiations about prisoner releases intensified in early 1945. Although Himmler remained cautious, his search for an exit strategy made him seek closer contacts abroad. This coincided with growing efforts by foreign governments (such as Sweden and France) and organizations (such as the World Jewish Congress) to save prisoners, animated by reports about mass deaths in the KL. The rescue efforts were led by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), headed by the Swiss diplomat Carl J. Burckhardt, and by the Swedish Red Cross, represented by its vice president, Count Folke Bernadotte. There was a flurry of letters and meetings between January and April 1945, occasionally involving Himmler’s shady masseur Felix Kersten as go-between.165 The foreign envoys met with a rogues’ gallery of the Third Reich, including the new RSHA boss Ernst Kaltenbrunner and his Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, Camp SS managers like Rudolf Höss and Enno Lolling, and senior SS officers like Standartenführer Kurt Becher (a key figure during the occupation of Hungary in 1944, he had been appointed by Himmler in April 1945 as Reich commissioner for the KL, primarily to negotiate with the Allies and the Red Cross).166

  As for Himmler himself, he appealed for sympathy from the foreign officials, whining that he was a much misunderstood man. Despite his terrible image, he insisted, he had always been a good shepherd, concerned only with prisoner well-being. To lend some credence to his story, he made a few tactical adjustments behind the scenes, ordering a temporary stop to corporal punishment and deadly human experiments.167 Himmler and his men constructed an alternative reality of the KL to impress their foreign guests. On the occasion of a visit to Ravensbrück in April 1945, Commandant Suhren regaled an ICRC official with tales about the camps’ educational mission. Such claims were echoed by Himmler. Reports about mass death and murder were just “atrocity propaganda,” he assured his interlocutors. He also brushed aside concerns about conditions in Bergen-Belsen, claiming that a team of medical experts had everything under control.168

  For all their contacts with the SS, the foreign rescuers initially had little to show. True, the ICRC continued its delivery of food parcels (especially for western European and Scandinavian prisoners), dropping off supplies directly at the camps.169 But the negotiators were frustrated by German refusals to allow proper inspections and complained about broken promises by WVHA managers.170 Above all, there was almost no movement on the critical issue of prisoner releases. Only in exceptional cases, Himmler decided in February 1945, could sick and elderly inmates from Denmark and Norway be handed over; between January and March, the Danish authorities received just some 140 freed prisoners.171

  Himmler’s most significant concession during this period concerned the mo
ve of Scandinavian prisoners to a special compound in Neuengamme. From mid-March 1945, buses and trucks of the Swedish Red Cross carried inmates from other KL to this camp. One of them was Odd Nansen. As he walked out of Sachsenhausen with fellow Norwegian prisoners, “it was as though we sprouted wings and flew out, to where the row of white buses stood.” By the end of March, Nansen and more than 4,800 other Scandinavians enjoyed decent food, adequate conditions, and medical care in Neuengamme. Their joy meant more misery for others. To make room for the incoming prisoners, the SS had thrown inmates out of a so-called recuperation block. Some died within hours. More than two thousand others were taken away on buses—the very same white buses that had brought the Scandinavian prisoners—after the Swedish Red Cross reluctantly agreed to help transport these exhausted inmates to satellite camps (where many of them would perish). Some of the Scandinavian prisoners were deeply troubled by these developments. He was feeling a “gnawing sense of undeserving and unfairness,” Odd Nansen wrote on March 31, 1945, “in our being preferred to other people who are worse off, and who are going under and dying while we live in plenty.”172