KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

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  may the world at least behold a drop, a fraction of this tragic world in which we lived

  —Letter by Salmen Gradowski, September 6, 1944 (discovered after liberation, in a flask buried on the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematorium)

  List of Maps

  MAP 1. Early Camps in Berlin (by District), 1933

  MAP 2. SS Concentration Camps, Summer 1935

  MAP 3. SS Concentration Camps, September 1, 1939

  MAP 4. SS Concentration Camps (Main Camps), Summer 1944

  MAP 5. The Auschwitz KL Complex, c. 1944

  MAP 6. Buchenwald and Its Satellite Camps, Autumn 1944

  MAP 7. The Evacuation of Auschwitz (Main Routes), Early 1945

  Sources: von Götz, “Terror in Berlin” (map 1); OdT, vol. 3 (map 6); Długoborski, Piper (eds.), Auschwitz, vols. 1 & 5 (map 5 and 7).

  Note on place-names: Both maps and text mostly use the official names of camps and cities at the time events described in this book took place, though occasionally the name in use today, or more familiar to readers, has been used instead (or is given as an alternative).

  Prologue

  Dachau, April 29, 1945. It is early afternoon when U.S. troops, part of the Allied force sweeping across Germany to crush the last remains of the Third Reich, approach an abandoned train on a rail siding at the grounds of a sprawling SS complex near Munich. As the soldiers come closer, they make a dreadful discovery: the boxcars are filled with the corpses of well over two thousand men and women, and also some children. Gaunt, contorted limbs are entangled amid a mess of straw and rags, covered in filth, blood, and excrement. Several ashen-faced GIs turn away to cry or vomit. “It made us sick at our stomach and so mad we could do nothing but clinch our fists,” an officer wrote the next day. As the shaken soldiers move deeper into the SS complex and reach the prisoner compound, later that afternoon, they come upon thirty-two thousand survivors from many ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds, representing about thirty European nations. Some seem more dead than alive as they stumble toward their liberators. Many more lie in overcrowded barracks, infested with dirt and disease. Wherever the soldiers turn, they see dead bodies, sprawled between barracks, dumped in ditches, stacked like logs by the camp’s crematorium. As for those behind the carnage, almost all career SS men are long gone, with only a ragtag gang of perhaps two hundred guards left behind.1 Images of this nightmare soon flashed around the world and burned themselves into collective memories. To this day, concentration camps like Dachau are often seen through the lens of the liberators, with the all-too-familiar pictures of trenches filled with bodies, mountains of corpses, and bone-thin survivors staring into cameras. Powerful as these pictures are, however, they do not reveal the full story of Dachau. For the camp had a much longer history and had only recently reached its last circle of hell, during the final throes of the Second World War.2

  Dachau, August 31, 1939. The prisoners rise before dawn, as they do every morning. None of them know that war will break out the next day, and they follow their usual schedule. After the frantic rush—jostling in the washrooms, devouring some bread, cleaning the barracks—they march in strict military formation to the roll call square. Nearly four thousand men with cropped or shaven heads stand to attention in striped uniforms, dreading another day of forced labor. Except for a group of Czechs, virtually all the prisoners are German or Austrian, though their common language is often all they share; colored triangles on their uniforms identify them as political prisoners, asocials, criminals, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Jews. Behind the rows of prisoners stand rows of one-story prisoner barracks. Each of the thirty-four purpose-built huts is around 110 yards long; the floors inside are gleaming and the bunks are meticulously made up. Escape is almost impossible: the rectangular prisoner compound, measuring 637 by 304 yards, is surrounded by a moat and concrete wall, watchtowers and machine guns, and barbed and electric wire. Beyond lies a huge SS zone with over 220 buildings, including storerooms, workshops, living quarters, and even a swimming pool. Stationed here are some three thousand men from the Camp SS, a volunteer unit with its own ethos, which puts prisoners through well-rehearsed routines of abuse and violence. Deaths are few and far between, however, with no more than four fatalities in August 1939; as yet, there was no urgent need for the SS to build its own crematorium.3 This was Camp SS terror at its most controlled—a far cry from the lethal chaos of the final days in spring 1945, and also from Dachau’s ramshackle beginnings back in spring 1933.

  Dachau, March 22, 1933. The first day inside the camp is drawing to a close. It is a cold evening, less than two months after the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor set Germany on the road to the Nazi dictatorship. The new prisoners (still in their own clothes) are having bread, sausage, and tea inside the former office of a dilapidated munitions plant. This building had been hastily converted in recent days into an improvised camp, cordoned off from the rest of the deserted factory ground with its crumbling structures, broken concrete foundations, and derelict roads. In all, there are no more than 100 or 120 political prisoners, largely local Communists from Munich. After these men had arrived on open trucks a little earlier, the guards—some fifty-four men strong—announced that the captives would be held in “protective custody,” a term unfamiliar to many Germans. Whatever it was, it seemed bearable: the guards were not Nazi paramilitaries but amiable policemen, who chatted with the prisoners, handed out cigarettes, and even slept in the same building. The next day, the prisoner Erwin Kahn wrote a long letter to his wife to say that all was well in Dachau. The food was good, as was the treatment, though he was getting restless waiting for his release. “I am just curious how long this whole business will last.” A few weeks later, Kahn was dead, shot by SS men after they took over the prisoner compound. He was among the first of almost forty thousand Dachau prisoners to perish between spring 1933 and spring 1945.4

  * * *

  Three days in Dachau, three different worlds. In a span of only twelve years, the camp changed time and again. Inmates, guards, conditions—almost everything seemed to alter. Even the site itself was transformed; after the old factory buildings were demolished and replaced by purpose-built barracks in the late 1930s, a veteran prisoner from spring 1933 would not have recognized the camp.5 So why did Dachau transform from its benign beginnings in March 1933 to the SS order of terror, and on to the catastrophe of the Second World War? What did this mean for the prisoners inside? What drove the perpetrators? And what did the population outside know about the camp? These questions go to the heart of the Nazi dictatorship, and they should be asked not just about Dachau, but about the concentration camp system as a whole.6

  Dachau was the first of many SS concentration camps. Established inside Germany in the early years of Hitler’s
rule, these camps soon spread, during the Nazi conquest of Europe from the late 1930s, to Austria, Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and even the small British Channel Island of Alderney. In all, the SS set up twenty-seven main camps and over 1,100 attached satellite camps over the course of the Third Reich, though numbers fluctuated greatly, as old camps closed down and new ones opened; only Dachau lasted for the entire Nazi period.7

  The concentration camps embodied the spirit of Nazism like no other institution in the Third Reich.8 They formed a distinct system of domination, with its own organization, rules, and staff, and even its own acronym: in official documents and common parlance, they were often referred to as KL (from the German Konzentrationslager).9 Guided by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s main henchman, the KL came to reflect the burning obsessions of the Nazi leadership, such as the creation of a uniform national community through the removal of political, social, and racial outsiders; the sacrifice of the individual on the altar of racial hygiene and murderous science; the harnessing of forced labor for the glory of the fatherland; the mastery over Europe, enslaving foreign nations, and colonizing living space; the deliverance of Germany from its worst enemies through mass extermination; and finally, the determination to go down in flames rather than surrender. Over time, all these obsessions shaped the KL system, and led to mass detention, deprivation, and death inside.

  We can estimate that 2.3 million men, women, and children were dragged to SS concentration camps between 1933 and 1945; most of them, over 1.7 million, lost their lives. Almost one million of the dead were Jews murdered in Auschwitz, the only KL to play a central role in what the Nazis called the Final Solution—the systematic extermination of European Jewry during the Second World War, now commonly known as the Holocaust. From 1942, when the SS started to dispatch deportation trains from across the continent, KL Auschwitz operated as an unusual hybrid of labor and death camp. Some two hundred thousand Jews were selected on arrival for slave labor with the other regular prisoners. The remainder—an estimated 870,000 Jewish men, women, and children—went directly to their deaths in the gas chambers, without ever being registered as inmates of the camp.10 Despite its unique role, Auschwitz remained a concentration camp and continued to share many features with the other camps, most of which—KL like Ellrich, Kaufering, Klooga, Redl-Zipf, and many more—have long since been forgotten. Together, they occupied a unique space in the Third Reich. They were sites of lawless terror, where some of the most radical features of Nazi rule were born and refined.

  Precedents and Perspectives

  In April 1941, German audiences flocked to cinemas to watch a star-studded feature film, purportedly based on a true story and released with much fanfare by the Nazi authorities. The climax of the movie was set against an unusual background—a concentration camp. There was to be no happy end for the starved and disease-ridden inmates, all of them innocent victims of a murderous regime: a brave prisoner is hanged, his wife shot, and others massacred by their vicious captors, leaving only graves behind. These chilling scenes bore an uncanny likeness to life in SS concentration camps at the time (there was even a special screening for guards in Auschwitz). But this was not a drama about the SS camps. The film was set decades earlier, during the South African War, and the villains were British imperialists. Ohm Krüger, as the film was called, was a powerful piece of German propaganda during the war with Britain, and mirrored a public speech made a few months earlier by Adolf Hitler: “Concentration camps were not invented in Germany,” he had declared. “It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.”11

  This was a familiar refrain. Hitler himself had made the same point before, telling the German people that his regime had merely copied the concentration camps from the English (though not their abuses).12 Nazi propaganda never tired of foreign camps. During the early years of the regime, speeches and articles routinely harked back to the British camps of the South African War, which had caused much indignation across Europe, and also pointed at present-day camps in countries like Austria, said to be scenes of great suffering for domestic Nazi activists. The real meaning behind this propaganda—that the SS camps were not exceptional—could hardly be missed, but just to make sure that everyone got the message, SS leader Heinrich Himmler spelled it out during a speech on German radio in 1939. Concentration camps were a “time-honored institution” abroad, he announced, adding that the German version was considerably more moderate than foreign ones.13

  Such attempts to relativize the SS camps had little success, at least outside Germany. Still, there was a grain of truth in the crude Nazi propaganda. “The Camp” as a place of detention really was a wider international phenomenon. In the decades before the Nazi seizure of power, camps for the mass confinement of political and other suspects—outside regular prisons and criminal law—had sprung up in Europe and beyond, usually during times of political upheaval or war, and such camps continued to flourish after the demise of the Third Reich, leading some observers to describe the entire epoch as an Age of Camps.14

  The first of these sites appeared during colonial wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as brutal military responses to guerrilla warfare. Colonial powers aimed to defeat local insurgents through the mass internment of civilian noncombatants in villages, towns, or camps, a tactic used by the Spanish in Cuba, the United States in the Philippines, and the British in South Africa (from where the term “concentration camp” gained wider circulation). The colonial authorities’ indifference and ineptitude caused mass hunger, illness, and death among those inside such internment sites. However, these were not prototypes of the later SS camps, differing greatly in terms of their function, design, and operation.15 The same is true for camps in German Southwest Africa (now Namibia), run by the colonial authorities between 1904 and 1908 during a ferocious war against the indigenous population. Many thousands of Herero and Nama were imprisoned in what were sometimes called concentration camps, and around half of them are said to have died due to the neglect and contempt of their German captors. These camps diverged from other colonial camps, as they were propelled less by military strategy than a desire for punishment and forced labor. But they did not provide a “rough template” for the SS camps, either, as has been claimed, and any attempts to draw direct lines to Dachau or Auschwitz are unconvincing.16

  The era of the camps really began with the First World War, which brought them from faraway colonies into the European heartlands. In addition to POW camps holding millions of soldiers, many of the belligerent nations set up forced labor camps, refugee camps, and civilian internment camps, driven by doctrines of total mobilization, radical nationalism, and social hygiene. Such camps were easy to establish and guard, thanks to recent innovations like machine guns, cheap barbed wire, and mass-produced portable barracks. Conditions were worst across central and eastern Europe, where prisoners often endured systematic forced labor, violence, and neglect, and several hundreds of thousands died. By the end of the First World War, Europe was littered with camps, and their memory lingered long after they had been dissolved. In 1927, for example, a German parliamentary commission still angrily denounced wartime abuses of German prisoners in French and British “concentration camps.”17

  Many more camps emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, as much of Europe turned away from democracy. Totalitarian regimes, with their Manichean division of the world into friend and foe, became the strongest champions of camps as weapons to permanently isolate and terrorize alleged enemies. By birth, the KL belonged to this breed of camp and shared some of its generic features. There were even a few direct links. The camp system in Franco’s Spain, for example, which held hundreds of thousands of prisoners during and after the civil war, apparently drew some inspiration from the Nazi precedent.18

  Probably the closest foreign relative of SS concentration camps could be found in the Soviet Union under Stalin.19 B
uilding on the experiences with mass detention during the First World War, the Bolsheviks had used camps (sometimes labeled as concentration camps) ever since the revolution. By the 1930s, they presided over a vast system of detention—known as the Gulag—which encompassed labor camps, colonies, prisons, and more. The corrective labor camps of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) alone held some 1.5 million prisoners by early January 1941, many times more than even the SS camp system. Like the KL complex, the Soviet one was driven by destructive utopianism, aiming to create a perfect society by eliminating all enemies, and its camps followed a somewhat similar trajectory: from haphazard sites of terror to a huge network of centrally directed camps, from the detention of political suspects to the imprisonment of other social and ethnic outsiders, from an early emphasis on rehabilitation to often deadly forced labor.20

  In view of these parallels, and the prior emergence of the Soviet system, some scholars have suggested that the Nazis simply seized the idea of the concentration camp from the Soviets—a misleading claim, though one that is almost as old as the SS camps themselves.21 There are two specific problems. First, there were profound differences between both camp systems. Although the Soviet camps were initially more deadly, for example, the KL later took a more radical turn and developed along far more lethal lines, culminating in the Auschwitz extermination complex, which had no equal in the USSR or anywhere else. NKVD prisoners were more likely to be released than to die, whereas the opposite was true for prisoners in the wartime SS concentration camps. In all, some ninety percent of inmates survived the Gulag; in the KL, the figure among registered prisoners was probably less than half. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt put it in her pioneering study of totalitarianism, the Soviet camps were purgatory, the Nazi ones pure hell.22 Second, there is little evidence of the Nazis copying the Soviets. To be sure, the SS kept an eye on Soviet repression in the Gulag, especially after the German invasion of summer 1941: Nazi leaders considered taking over “concentration camps of the Russians,” as they put it, and sent a summary about the organization and conditions in Soviet “concentration camps” to their own KL commandants.23 More generally, the violence of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, both real and imagined, served as a permanent reference point during the Third Reich. In Dachau, SS officials told the first SS guards in 1933 to act as brutally as the Cheka (security organization) had done in the USSR. Years later in Auschwitz, SS men referred to one of their cruelest torture instruments as the “Stalin Swing.”24