KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  But a general interest in Soviet terror should not be mistaken for influence. The Nazi regime was not inspired by the Gulag in any major way and it is hard to imagine that the history of the SS concentration camps would have been substantially different had the Gulag never existed. The KL were largely made in Germany, just as the Gulag was primarily the product of Soviet rule. There were similarities, of course, but they were largely outweighed by differences; each camp system had its own form and function, shaped by specific national practices, purposes, and precedents. A study of international comparisons and connections can still provide useful perspectives, but such an analysis lies beyond the scope of this book; what follows is the story of the SS concentration camps, with occasional glances beyond Nazi-controlled territory.

  History and Memory

  “In the future, I believe, when the word concentration camp is used, one will think of Hitler’s Germany, and only of Hitler’s Germany.” Thus wrote Victor Klemperer in his diary in autumn 1933, just a few months after the first prisoners had arrived in Dachau and long before the SS camps descended into mass murder.25 Klemperer, a liberal German-Jewish professor of philology in Dresden, was one of the shrewdest observers of the Nazi dictatorship, and his prediction proved prescient. Nowadays the KL really are synonymous with “concentration camps.” What is more, these camps have become symbols of the Third Reich as a whole, occupying an exalted place in history’s hall of infamy. They have appeared almost everywhere in recent years, in blockbuster movies and documentaries, bestselling novels and comics, memoirs and scholarly tomes, plays and artworks; google “Auschwitz” and you get well over seven million hits.26

  The urge to understand the concentration camps began early. They took center stage in the immediate postwar period, starting with the Allied media offensive in April and May 1945. The Soviet press had made little of the liberation of Auschwitz a few months before—one reason why the camp initially remained peripheral in popular discourse—so it was not until the liberation of Dachau, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen by the western Allies that the KL made it onto the front pages in Britain, the United States, and beyond; one Australian news report described Germany in April 1945 as “the concentration camp country.” There were radio broadcasts, newsreels, magazine spreads, pamphlets, exhibitions, and speeches. And although they lacked historical perspective, these accounts did convey the scale of the horrors unveiled inside; in a May 1945 survey, ordinary Americans guessed that around one million concentration camp prisoners had been killed.

  Of course, these media revelations should not have come as a complete shock. Reports about atrocities in the KL had appeared abroad since the early days of the Nazi regime—sometimes written in exile by former prisoners or relatives of murdered inmates—and the Allies had received vital intelligence during the war. But the reality turned out to be far worse than almost anyone expected. As if to make up for this failure of the imagination, Allied leaders encouraged journalists, soldiers, and politicians to inspect liberated camps. For them, the camps proved the absolute righteousness of the war. “Dachau gives answer to why we fought,” declared one U.S. army newssheet in May 1945, echoing the sentiments of General Eisenhower. In addition, the Allies used the camps to confront the German population with its complicity, inaugurating a reeducation campaign that continued over the coming months, reinforced by early trials of SS perpetrators.27

  At the same time, survivors themselves helped to put the KL in the public eye. They were not stunned into collective silence, as has often been said.28 On the contrary, a loud, polyphonic chorus rose up after liberation. Throughout their suffering, prisoners had dreamed about bearing witness. Some had even kept secret diaries. One of them, the German political prisoner Edgar Kupfer, was probably the most diligent chronicler of Dachau. Taking advantage of his sheltered office job on the camp grounds and his reputation among fellow inmates as a loner, he secretly wrote more than 1,800 pages, starting in late 1942. Prior to his detention in 1940 for critical comments about the Nazi regime, the nonconformist Kupfer had worked as a tour guide, and he envisaged his book as a grand tour of Dachau. He knew that the SS would likely murder him if they discovered his secret, but somehow he survived and so did his notes; barely recovered, he typed up his manuscript in summer 1945, ready for publication.29

  Other liberated men, women, and children were yearning to tell their story, too, now that they were free to speak. Some started straight away, still inside the camps; even the sick would grab the sleeves of passing Allied medical staff to get their attention. Survivors quickly coordinated their efforts. They had to work together to alert “world public opinion,” a former prisoner told fellow survivors in Mauthausen on May 7, 1945. Within days of liberation, survivors everywhere had started to collaborate on joint reports.30 Thousands more accounts followed soon after former prisoners left the camps. Jewish survivors, for example, testified before historical commissions dedicated to commemoration and research, culminating in the first ever international conference of Holocaust survivors in Paris in 1947, attended by delegates from thirteen countries. Survivor testimonies were also encouraged by occupation forces, foreign governments, and NGOs, to help punish the perpetrators and preserve the memory of the camps.31 Some of these accounts later appeared in journals and pamphlets.32 Other survivors wrote directly for publication. Among them was the young Italian Jew Primo Levi, who had endured almost a year in Auschwitz. “Each of us survivors,” he later recalled, “as soon as we returned home, transformed himself into a tireless narrator, imperious and maniacal.” Writing almost everywhere, day and night, Levi completed his book If This Is a Man in just a few months; it appeared in Italy in 1947.33

  During the first postwar years, a wave of memoirs hit Europe and beyond, mostly searing testimonies of individual suffering and survival.34 Some former prisoners also reflected on wider themes, writing important early studies of the camp system and the inmate experience, from a sociological or psychological perspective.35 Others produced first historical sketches of particular camps, or expressed their pain in poems and fictionalized accounts.36 Most of these early works, including Primo Levi’s own, sank with few ripples, but a number of books made a splash. Celebrated survivor accounts appeared in several European countries. Amid the ruins of Germany, too, mass-market paperbacks and pamphlets were printed, while other accounts were serialized in major newspapers. Most influential was a general study of the KL system (with Buchenwald at the center) compiled by the former political prisoner Eugen Kogon, which shaped popular conceptions for years to come; first published in 1946, its German print run had reached 135,000 copies a year later, and it soon appeared in translation, as did other early works by survivors.37

  By the late 1940s, however, when it came to a U.S. edition, Kogon’s publisher, Roger Straus, a passionate believer in the book, was concerned about the “apathy on the part of the public to reading about this type of thing.”38 The popular interest in the KL—which had accompanied their liberation, as well as some of the first memoirs and perpetrator trials—was waning on both sides of the Atlantic. In part, this was a simple case of saturation following the spate of graphic early accounts. More generally, public memory of the camps was being marginalized by postwar reconstruction and diplomacy. With the front line of the Cold War cutting right through Germany, and turning the two new, opposing German states into strategic allies of the USSR and the United States, talk about Nazi crimes seemed impolitic. “Nowadays it is bad taste to speak of the concentration camps,” Primo Levi wrote in 1955, adding: “silence prevails.” Within ten years of liberation, the camps had been sidelined—a result not of survivors unable to speak, but of a wider audience unwilling to listen. Former prisoners still tried to keep the memory of the camps alive. “If we fall silent, who then will speak?” Levi asked angrily. Another survivor who persevered in the face of widespread indifference was Edgar Kupfer, who finally saw the German publication of his Dachau book in 1956, albeit in a greatly abridged version. Despite som
e good reviews, however, it left little impression and no foreign publisher picked it up, “afraid that the public would not buy it,” as the depressed author concluded.39

  Popular interest in the concentration camps was rekindled in the 1960s and 1970s. Major trials of Nazi perpetrators, such as the 1961 Israeli case against Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had overseen deportations of Jews to Auschwitz, and media sensations like the 1978 U.S. miniseries Holocaust, broadcast to a vast audience in West Germany the following year, played an important part in confronting the public with the Nazi regime and its camps. In turn, some early KL memoirs were rediscovered, among them Primo Levi’s masterpiece about Auschwitz, which has long since entered the canon of modern literature. At the same time, a wave of new survivor testimonies appeared. This wave kept swelling—Edgar Kupfer’s complete Dachau diaries, for example, finally saw publication in 1997—and it is only now subsiding, as the last witnesses are passing away.40 Survivors also continued to explore the development of individual camps, producing source editions and standard historical surveys.41 And just like in the early postwar period, former inmates went far beyond writing history, creating an extraordinarily rich body of medical, sociological, psychological, and philosophical studies, as well as literary reflections and works of art.42

  In sharp contrast to survivors, the wider academic community was slow to engage with the KL. A few specialist studies appeared in the late 1940s and 1950s, particularly on medical aspects.43 But it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that academic historians published preliminary surveys of some individual Nazi camps and the wider KL complex, based on documentary research. Most influential were the works of two young German academics, Martin Broszat’s pioneering survey of the camp system’s development and Falk Pingel’s powerful study of life inside.44 Such historical analyses were augmented by works from scholars in other disciplines, on themes like the perpetrator mind and the experience of survival.45

  Despite inevitable shortcomings, these early studies made important contributions to knowledge about the SS concentration camps. But they remained exceptions and could only sketch outlines. To write a comprehensive history of the camps, Broszat himself concluded in 1970, was simply impossible, because of the dearth of detailed research.46 Paradoxically, this void was created, at least in part, by the misguided belief that there was little more to learn about the camps, an assumption shared by even some otherwise sharp-eyed observers.47 In reality, scholars were only starting to discover the KL.

  Historical knowledge advanced rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, above all in Germany itself. With grassroots history on the rise, local activists scrutinized the record of former camps in their neighborhood. Meanwhile, camp memorials moved beyond remembrance and developed into places of scholarship. The opening of the archives in Eastern Europe, following the end of the Cold War, provided further momentum for research. Meanwhile, a younger generation of academics untainted by the past was discovering the Third Reich as a subject and established the study of its camps as a distinct historiographical field, producing major works like Karin Orth’s account of the KL organization and structure.48 Having been ignored for so long, the study of the SS concentration camps was now booming, at least in Germany (few studies were translated).49

  The boom shows no sign of settling, as historical research continues to expand at a rapid rate. New perspectives have come into view as we learn more about individual perpetrators, prisoner groups, and camps, about the beginning and the end of the SS system, about the local environment around the camps, about forced labor and extermination policy. While all the important scholarly studies of the KL published before the late 1970s comfortably fit onto a single bookshelf, one needs a small library to gather the works published since then.50

  Recent academic research has culminated in two huge encyclopedias—over 1,600 and 4,100 pages long, respectively—that summarize the development of every single main and satellite camp; the entries were penned by well over 150 historians from around the world.51 These two indispensable works demonstrate the breadth of contemporary scholarship. But they also point to its limits. Most important, the wealth of specialist studies has greatly fragmented the picture of the SS concentration camps. Where it was once impossible to see the camp system as a whole, because so much detail was missing, it is now almost impossible to see how all the different features fit together; looking at recent scholarship is like looking at a giant unassembled puzzle, with additional pieces being added all the time. It comes as no surprise that the conclusions of the new KL histories have generally failed to connect with a wider public.

  As a result, popular images of the Nazi concentration camps remain rather one-dimensional. Instead of the intricate detail and subtle shades of historical scholarship, we see broad brushstrokes and vivid colors. Above all, popular conceptions are dominated by the stark images of Auschwitz and the Holocaust, which have made this camp a “global site of memory,” as the historian Peter Reichel put it.52 It was not always like this. In the early decades after the war, anti-Jewish terror was largely subsumed under the general destruction wreaked by Nazism, with Auschwitz as one place of suffering among many. The awareness of the singularity and enormity of the Nazi war against the Jews has grown sharply since then, and the Third Reich is now largely viewed through the lens of the Holocaust.53 The SS concentration camps, in turn, have become closely identified with Auschwitz and its Jewish victims, obscuring other camps and other inmates. A German poll found that Auschwitz is by far the most recognized KL and that the vast majority of respondents associate the camps with the persecution of Jews; by contrast, less than ten percent named Communists, criminals, or homosexuals as victims.54 In popular memory, then, the concentration camps, Auschwitz, and the Holocaust have merged into one.

  But Auschwitz was never synonymous with the Nazi concentration camps. True, as the largest and most lethal camp by far, it occupied a special place in the KL system. But there was always more to this system. Auschwitz was closely integrated into the wider KL network, and it was preceded and shaped by other camps. Dachau, for example, was more than seven years old when Auschwitz was established, and clearly influenced it. Also, despite its unprecedented size, most registered KL prisoners—that is, those forced into barracks and slave labor—were detained elsewhere; even at its biggest, Auschwitz held no more than around one-third of all regular KL inmates. The great majority of them died elsewhere, too, with an estimated three-quarters of registered KL inmates perishing in camps other than Auschwitz. It is important, then, to demystify Auschwitz in the popular conception of the camps, while still emphasizing its uniquely destructive role.55

  Nor were concentration camps synonymous with the Holocaust, although their histories are intertwined. First, anti-Jewish terror largely unfolded outside the KL; it was not until the final year of World War II that most of the surviving Jews found themselves inside a concentration camp. The significant majority of the up to six million Jews murdered under the Nazi regime perished in other places, shot in ditches and fields across eastern Europe, or gassed in distinct death camps like Treblinka, which operated separately from the KL. Second, the concentration camps always targeted various victim groups, and except for a few weeks in late 1938, Jews did not make up a majority among registered prisoners. For most of the Third Reich, in fact, they formed a relatively small part, and even after numbers rose sharply in the second half of the war, Jews did not constitute more than perhaps thirty percent of the registered inmate population. Third, the concentration camps used many different weapons, in addition to mass extermination. They had multiple purposes, constantly evolving and overlapping. During the prewar years, the SS used them as boot camps, deterrent threats, reformatories, forced labor reservoirs, and torture chambers, only to add further functions during the war, promoting them as centers for armaments production, executions, and human experiments. The camps were defined by their multifaceted nature, a crucial aspect absent from most popular memories.56

  More p
hilosophical meditations on the concentration camps have often been reductive, too. Ever since the end of the Nazi regime, prominent thinkers have looked for hidden truths, investing the camps with profound meaning, either to validate their own moral, political, or religious beliefs, or to grasp something essential about the human condition.57 This search for meaning is understandable, of course, as the shock the KL dealt to faith in progress and civilization made them emblems of humanity’s capacity for inhumanity. “Every philosophy based on the inherent goodness of man will forever be shaken to its foundations because of them,” warned the French novelist François Mauriac in the late 1950s. Some writers have since endowed the camps with an almost mysterious quality. Others have reached more concrete conclusions, describing the KL as products of a peculiar German mind-set or of the dark side of modernity.58 One of the most influential contributions has come from the sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky, who depicts the concentration camp as a manifestation of “absolute power,” beyond rationality or ideology.59 However, his stimulating study suffers the same limitations as some other general reflections on the camps. In its quest for universal answers, it turns the camps into timeless and abstract entities; Sofsky’s archetypal camp is a wholly ahistoric construct that obscures the core characteristic of the KL system—its dynamic nature.60