KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Unification in 1990 had a major impact on German memory culture, above all in former East Germany. Over the coming years, the national concentration camp memorials were stripped of GDR propaganda and remodeled, not least by commemorating the Soviet special camps. This process proved particularly painful in Buchenwald, where clashes between the new curators and the Socialist-led KL survivor association degenerated into a public row over the actions of Communist Kapos.138 But unification affected memory in western parts of Germany, as well. The suffering of German Communists and their fellow travelers, previously marginalized by the prevailing Cold War mind-set, gradually received greater recognition.139 Similarly, the fate of Soviet KL prisoners came into sharper focus, and they also finally received some compensation as forced laborers, following a second wave of German reparations (though this came too late for most).140

  The end of the Cold War intensified public engagement with the Third Reich more generally, not least to assuage anxieties outside Germany about a possible resurgence of radical nationalism. Since the 1990s, the German government has taken an active lead in the commemoration of Nazi crimes, from the designation of the Auschwitz liberation date as the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism, to the construction of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of Berlin. Similarly, the national government has started to support KL memorials directly, providing an important catalyst for changes in official commemoration.141 Previously neglected sites, like Dora (in the shadow of Buchenwald) and Flossenbürg (in the shadow of Dachau), have been remade in recent years; in Flossenbürg, the former prisoner kitchen and laundry—used commercially by a private company until the 1990s—now houses an exhibition about the camp.142 And new monuments and museums on the sites of long-ignored satellite camps and death marches make the immense spread of the KL system more visible.143 Even established memorials like Dachau have been redesigned once more in light of new research and changing public perceptions.

  * * *

  Dachau, March 22, 2013. It is a bright, cold spring day, much as it was exactly eighty years ago, when the concentration camp first opened. The site is easy to find, with plenty of signs pointing the way (until the 1980s, the city authorities kept its profile low). Anyone arriving by train can walk along a Path of Remembrance, adorned with multilingual panels, to the memorial. At the entrance stands a new visitor center, opened in a state ceremony in 2009, broadcast live, and attended by the Bavarian political establishment, which had long shunned the memorial. “We don’t forget, we don’t suppress, we don’t relativize what happened here,” the prime minister pledged. As prisoners did in the past, visitors pass through the doorway of the old SS gatehouse, following a path reopened in 2005 despite local opposition. The wrought-iron gates with the inscription ARBEIT MACHT FREI lead directly onto the roll call square, where several large visitor groups are gathered. It is a quiet day, like most Fridays, but there are still some 1,500 visitors. To the left of the square they see the two reconstructed barracks and the outlines of the others, bisected by the camp street that leads toward the crematorium. On the right stands the museum, overhauled in 2003. And straight ahead lie the offices of some thirty academic, archival, and pedagogic staff. Their task, the director says in a newspaper interview to mark Dachau’s anniversary, “is to tell the history of this camp free from all political slant.”144 The memorial has clearly come a long way. This is far from suggesting a sense of closure, though. Commemoration will keep on changing, here and at other former KL sites. Neither will the history of the camps ever come to an end. Blind spots remain. New sources, approaches, and questions will make us reconsider what we thought we knew; on March 22, 2013, for example, none of the historians in Dachau could pinpoint with certainty the building where it had all begun eighty years earlier.

  In the same way, our search for deeper meaning in the KL will go on, even though efforts to extract a single essence are destined to come up short. As we have seen, the concentration camps meant different things at different times of Nazi rule. Even Auschwitz cannot be reduced to its genocidal function alone, as the SS also used it to destroy the Polish resistance and to forge a closer collaboration with industry. Neither was its place as the most deadly site of the Nazi Final Solution preordained. It emerged only gradually over several fateful months in 1942, at a time when hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been killed elsewhere; the path of Auschwitz to the Holocaust was long and twisted.145 And yet, the inadequacy of simple answers should not stop us from asking bigger questions about the nature of the concentration camps. The KL were patently products of modernity, for example, with their reliance on bureaucracy, transport, mass communication, and technology, as well as industrially manufactured barracks, barbed wire, machine guns, and gas canisters. But does that make them paradigms of the modern age, as some scholars have suggested, any more than, say, mass vaccination or universal suffrage? As the historian Mark Mazower pointedly asks: “What makes one choice of historical symbol … better than another?”146 Then there is the question of the camps’ origins. Of course, the KL were products of German history; they emerged and developed under specific national political and cultural conditions, and drew inspiration from the violent practices of Weimar paramilitaries, as well as the disciplinary traditions of the German army and prison service. But does that make them “typically German,” as some prisoners argued?147 It seems doubtful. After all, the men behind the KL system were far more invested in radical Nazi ideology than most ordinary Germans, who felt more ambivalent about the camps. More generally, the KL shared some generic features with repressive camps established elsewhere during the twentieth century. That said, their development still diverged from other totalitarian camps, raising perhaps the most important issue: How best to understand the course of the Nazi concentration camps?

  As this integrated history has shown, there was nothing inevitable about the trajectory of the KL. Looking at the horrors of the wartime years, it is hard not to see them as the inevitable conclusion of the early camps. But there was no direct trail from Dachau in 1933 to Dachau in 1945. The concentration camps could well have taken a different direction, and in the mid-1930s, it even looked as if they might disappear. They endured because Nazi leaders, above all Adolf Hitler himself, came to value them as flexible instruments of lawless repression, which could easily adapt to the changing requirements of the regime. The specific character of individual camps owed much to the initiative of the local SS. But these officials operated within wider parameters set by their superiors, and in the end, the KL acted much like seismographs, closely attuned to the general aims and ambitions of the regime’s rulers. The reason they oscillated so much was that the priorities of Nazi leaders changed over time, and as the regime radicalized, so did its camps.

  Despite some sharp turns, however, the path of the concentration camps unfolded without sharp breaks. The successive stages of the camps might appear like different worlds, as we saw at the beginning of this book, but these worlds were connected nonetheless. The basic rules, organization, and ethos of the Camp SS were already in place by the mid-1930s, and remained largely unchanged thereafter. Similarly, pioneering SS programs of mass extermination, which claimed tens of thousands of infirm prisoners and Soviet POWs in 1941, left an important legacy for the Holocaust, including the use of Zyklon B in Auschwitz. The continuities between the different stages of the camps are personified by core SS professionals like Rudolf Höss, a man who learned about prisoner abuse in Dachau at the start of the Third Reich, graduated to systematic murder in Sachsenhausen early in the war, moved on to genocide in Auschwitz, and then oversaw the final slaughter in Ravensbrück. Throughout his career, new outrages broke new ground, and each transgression made the next one easier, inuring him, like other SS perpetrators, to acts that would have been unthinkable a little earlier. The KL system was a great transformer of values. Its history is a history of these mutations, which normalized extreme violence, torture, and murder. And this history w
ill continue to be written and it will keep on living, and so will the memory of those who were its witnesses, its perpetrators, and its victims.

  APPENDIX

  Tables

  TABLE 1. Daily Inmate Numbers in the SS Concentration Camps, 1934–45

  TABLE 2. Prisoner Deaths in SS Concentration Camps

  Most figures are (often rough) estimates; the precise number of victims will never be known.

  Sources: OdT, vol. 2, 27–30, 98–99; vol. 3, 65; vol. 4, 57; vol. 5, 339; vol. 6, 43, 95, 520; vol. 7, 24, 22, 45, 87, 26; vol. 8, 04, 34–42, 276–80; Piper, Zahl, 67; http://totenbuch.buchenwald.de; Schilde and Tuchel, Columbia-Haus, 5–57, 68; KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau (ed.), Gedenkbuch, 9, 13; http://totenbuch.dora.de; Klausch, Tätergeschichten, 292–94; Association (ed.), Mauthausen, 10; Dieckmann, Besatzungspolitik, 1248–1327; Hördler and Jacobeit (eds.), Lichtenburg; idem (eds.), Gedenkort; Kranz, “Erfassung,” 243; Strebel, Ravensbrück, 510; Helm, If; R. B. Birn to the author, March 28, 2014; D. Drywa to the author, April 8, 2014; F. Jahn to the author, May 6, 2014.

  TABLE 3. SS Ranks, with Army Equivalents

  Source: Zentner and Bedürftig (eds.), Encyclopedia, 753; Snyder (ed.), Encyclopedia, 280.

  Notes

  Abbreviations

  AdsD

  Archiv der sozialen Demokratie

  AE

  Allgemeine Erlaßsammlung

  AEKIR

  Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland, Düsseldorf

  AEL

  Arbeitserziehungslager (Work Education Camp[s])

  AfS

  Archiv für Sozialgeschichte

  AG

  Amtsgericht

  AGFl

  Archiv der KZ-Gedenkstätte Flossenbürg

  AGN

  Archiv der KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme

  AHR

  The American Historical Review

  AM

  Archiv der KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen

  APMO

  Archiwum Państwowe Muzeum w Oświęcimiu

  AS

  Archiv der Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen

  ASL

  Archiv der Stadt Linz

  BArchB

  Bundesarchiv Berlin

  BArchF

  Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv

  BArchK

  Bundesarchiv Koblenz

  BArchL

  Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg

  BayHStA

  Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv

  BDC

  Berlin Document Center

  BGVN

  Beiträge zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung in Norddeutschland

  Bl.

  Blatt (folio)

  BLA

  Bayerisches Landesentschädigungsamt

  BLHA

  Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv

  BoA

  Boder Archive online

  BPP

  Bayerische Politische Polizei

  BStU

  Behörde des Bundesbeauftragten für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR

  BwA

  Archiv der Gedenkstätte Buchenwald

  CEH

  Central European History

  CoEH

  Contemporary European History

  CSDIC

  Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre

  DaA

  Archiv der Gedenkstätte Dachau

  DAP

  Der Auschwitz-Prozeß (DVD-Rom)

  DAW

  Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke GmbH (German Equipment Works)

  DESt

  Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH (German Earth and Stone Works)

  DH

  Dachauer Hefte

  DJAO

  Deputy Judge Advocate’s Office

  DM

  Deutsche Mark

  DöW

  Stiftung Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes

  DP

  Displaced Person

  DV

  Dienstvorschrift

  EE

  Eidesstattliche Erklärung

  EHQ

  European History Quarterly

  ERH

  European Review of History

  EV

  Einstellungsverfügung

  FZH

  Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte, Hamburg

  GDR

  German Democratic Republic

  Gestapa

  Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt (Secret State Police Office)

  Gestapo

  Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police)

  GH

  German History

  GHI

  German Historical Institute

  GPD

  German Police Decodes

  GStA

  Generalstaatsanwalt

  GStA PK

  Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz

  HGS

  Holocaust and Genocide Studies

  HHStAW

  Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv

  HIA

  Hoover Institution Archives

  HIS

  Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung

  HLSL

  Harvard Law School Library, Nuremberg Trials Project

  HSSPF

  Höhere SS und Polizeiführer (Higher SS and police leader[s])

  HStAD

  Landesarchiv NRW, Abteilung Rheinland

  HvA

  Hefte von Auschwitz

  ICRC

  International Committee of the Red Cross

  IfZ

  Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich

  IKL

  Inspektion der Konzentrationslager (Inspectorate of Concentration Camps)

  IMT

  Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal

  ITS

  International Tracing Service

  JAO

  Judge Advocate’s Office

  JCH

  Journal of Contemporary History

  JfA

  Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung

  JMH

  The Journal of Modern History

  JNV

  Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, Rüter and de Mildt (eds.)

  JVL

  Jewish Virtual Library online

  KB

  Kommandanturbefehl

  KE

  Kleine Erwerbungen

  KL

  Konzentrationslager (Concentration Camp[s])

  KOK

  Kriminaloberkommissar

  KPD

  Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party)

  Kripo

  Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Police)

  KTI

  Kriminaltechnisches Institut (Criminal Technical Institute)

  LaB

  Landesarchiv Berlin

  LBIJMB

  Leo Baeck Institute Archives, Berlin

  LBIYB

  Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook

  LG

  Landgericht

  LHASA

  Landeshauptarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt

  LK

  Lagerkommandant(en) (Camp commandant[s])

  LKA

  Landeskriminalamt

  LSW

  Landesgericht für Strafsachen, Wien

  LULVR

  Lund University Library, Voices from Ravensbrück online

  MdI

  Minister/Ministerium des Innern (Minister/Ministry of the Interior)

  MG

  Manuscript Group

  MPr

  Ministerpräsident (Minister president)

  MSchKrim

  Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtsreform

  NAL

  National Archives, London

  NARA

  National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  NCA

  Nazi Conspiracy, Office of U.S. Chief Counsel (ed.)

  NCC

  The Nazi Concentration Camps, Wachsmann and Goeschel (eds.)

&n
bsp; NCO

  Noncommissioned Officer

  n.d.

  no date

  ND

  Nuremberg Document

  NGC

  New German Critique

  NKVD

  People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs

  NLA-StAO

  Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Staatsarchiv Oldenburg

  NLHStA

  Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv

  NMGB

  Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Buchenwald

  NN

  Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog)

  NRW

  Nordrhein-Westfalen

  NYPL

  New York Public Library

  ODNB