All this leads to a surprising conclusion. More than eighty years after the foundation of Dachau, there is no single, panoptic account of the KL. Despite the enormous literature—by survivors, historians, and other scholars—there is no comprehensive history charting the development of the concentration camps and the changing experiences of those inside. What is needed is a study that captures the complexity of the camps without fragmenting, and sets them into their wider political and cultural context without becoming reductive. But how to write such a history of the KL?
Approaches
To forget the present, SS prisoners often talked about the future, and for several days in 1944 the discussion among a small group of Jewish women, deported from Hungary to Auschwitz, turned around a fundamental question: if they were to survive, how could they convey their fate to outsiders? Was there any medium that would allow them to express what Auschwitz meant? Maybe music? Or speeches, books, artworks? Or perhaps a film about a prisoner’s passage to the crematorium, with the audience forced to stand to attention outside cinemas before the screening, without warm clothes, food, and drink, just like the prisoners during roll call? But even this, the women feared, would not give any insight into what their life was really like.61 Inmates in other SS concentration camps came to similar conclusions. Prisoners who kept secret diaries, for example, frequently agonized over the limits of testimony. “The language is exhausted,” the Norwegian Odd Nansen wrote on February 12, 1945. “There are no words left to describe the horrors I’ve seen with my own eyes.” And yet, Nansen kept writing, almost every day.62 This dilemma—the urge to speak about the unspeakable—became ever more acute after liberation, as many more survivors struggled to describe crimes which seemed to defeat language and defy reason.63
The question of how to frame the past is obviously central for historians, too. Writing history is always fraught with difficulty, and such problems are compounded in the case of Nazi terror. For a start, no historical method can hope to capture the full horror of the camps. More generally, it is hard to find an appropriate language, and this has troubled scholars and other chroniclers as much as the survivors themselves. “I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it,” the CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow concluded in his celebrated radio report from Buchenwald on April 15, 1945. “For most of it I have no words.”64 Still, we have to try. If historians fall silent, much of the history of the camps would soon be left in the hands of cranks, dilettantes, and deniers.65
The most effective way of writing a comprehensive account of the KL is as an integrated history, an approach advanced by Saul Friedländer to connect “the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society, and the world of the victims.” In the case of the SS camps, this means a history which examines those inside and the wider populace outside; a history which combines a macro analysis of Nazi terror with micro studies of individual actions and responses; a history which shows the synchronicity of events and the intricacy of the SS system by contrasting developments between, and within, individual camps across Nazi-controlled Europe.66 Weaving together these different strands will produce a nuanced and expansive history, though it can never be fully exhaustive or definitive. However wide-ranging, it remains a history, not the history of the KL.
To create such an integrated history, this book views the SS concentration camps from two main perspectives, which merge into a single picture. The first perspective focuses, often close up, on life and death inside the camps, examining the foundations of the camp microcosm—conditions, forced labor, punishment, and more—and how they changed over time. To move beyond abstractions, much of this history will be told through the eyes of the individuals who made it: those who ran the camps and those who suffered in them.67
Several tens of thousands of men and women—perhaps sixty thousand or more—served in SS concentration camps at some stage.68 In the popular imagination, guards often appear as unhinged sadists, a picture which draws on their representation in prisoner memoirs, with nicknames such as “beast,” “bone breaker,” and “bloodhound.”69 Some guards fit these descriptions, but inspired by recent research into Nazi perpetrators this book paints a more complex portrait.70 The background and behavior of SS staff varied greatly, and it also changed over the course of the Third Reich. Not every guard committed excesses and only a few were driven by psychological abnormality. As Primo Levi recognized a long time ago, the perpetrators were human beings, too: “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men.”71 But how “common” were the guards? What was the purpose of their violence? What drove some to extreme brutality? What stopped others? Did female guards act any differently from men?
Just as there was no typical perpetrator, there was no typical prisoner. To be sure, SS terror tried to strip inmates of their individuality. But underneath their identical uniforms, each prisoner experienced the camp differently; suffering was universal, but not equal.72 Prisoners’ lives were shaped by many variables, not least when and where they were held (though even inmates in the same place, at the same time, often seemed to inhabit separate spheres).73 Another crucial factor was the position individual prisoners held. So-called Kapos, who gained powers over fellow inmates by taking over official functions from the SS, enjoyed special privileges—though at the price of participating in the running of the camp, blurring the conventional categories of victim and perpetrator.74 The prisoners’ background—their ethnicity, gender, religion, politics, profession, and age—also greatly influenced their behavior and options, as well as their treatment by the SS and by other inmates. Prisoners formed different groups, and the histories of these groups, and of their relationships with one another and the SS, need to be explored.
When doing so, the prisoners should be viewed not just as objects of SS terror, but as actors. Some scholars have depicted the prisoners as blank and apathetic automatons, drained of all free will. The total domination of the SS had extinguished every spark of life, Hannah Arendt wrote, turning inmates into “ghastly marionettes with human faces.” But even in the exceptional surroundings of the KL, prisoners often retained a degree of agency, however small and constrained, and a close look at their actions will highlight chinks in the armor of total SS supremacy. At the same time, we must resist the temptation to make our encounter with the concentration camps more bearable by sanctifying the prisoners, imagining them as united, unsullied, and unbowed. For the most part, the prisoners’ story is not an uplifting account of the triumph of the human spirit, but a tale of degradation and despair. “Confinement in the camp, destitution, torture, and death in the gas chamber are not heroism,” three Polish survivors of Auschwitz cautioned as early as 1946, in a book bound in the striped cloth of former prisoner uniforms.75
The terror inside the KL can only be fully understood by looking outside the barbed wire. After all, the camps were products of the Nazi regime. Prisoner composition, conditions, and treatment were shaped by outside forces, and these forces have to be carefully examined. This forms the second main perspective of this study, which looks—through a much wider lens—at the course of the Third Reich and the place of the camps within it. The history of the concentration camps was bound up with broader political, economic, and military developments. The camps formed part of the wider social fabric, not only as symbols of repression, but as real places; they did not occupy some metaphysical realm, as some studies have suggested, but stood in villages, towns, and cities.
Most important, the SS concentration camps belonged to a wider Nazi web of terror, which encompassed other repressive bodies, such as the police and the courts, and other places of confinement, such as prisons, ghettos, and labor camps. These other sites of detention often had connections to the concentration camps and shared some of their general characteristics.76 Important as these links were, however, one also has to stress the distinctiveness of the KL and their strong gravitational pull. For many victims, the concent
ration camps were the final stop on a torturous journey. Countless prisoner transports arrived here from other sites of detention; few ever went in the opposite direction. As the fugitive Adolf Eichmann told Nazi sympathizers in 1957, when reminiscing in Buenos Aires about the SS camps, “It’s pretty easy to get inside, but awfully hard to get out.”77
Sources
Anyone writing about the KL faces a paradox: although the amount of available documentation is overwhelming, it is insufficient. Since its demise, the Third Reich has been examined in more detail than any other modern dictatorship. And few, if any, aspects have generated more publications than the concentration camps. There are tens of thousands of testimonies and studies, and even more original documents, scattered all around the world. No one can fully master this material.78 At the same time, there are obvious gaps, both in the historical record and the scholarly literature. Despite its daunting size, recent historical scholarship has been selective, overlooking some crucial aspects.79 As for primary sources, the SS made sure to destroy the bulk of its files at the end of the Second World War, while Himmler and other leading officers died before they could be interrogated, taking some secrets to their graves.80
Survivor accounts are inevitably incomplete, too. Ordinary prisoners rarely caught glimpses of the wider camp system. Take Walter Winter, a German Sinto deported to Auschwitz in spring 1943. At the time, he never moved far beyond the small so-called Gypsy enclosure. Only when he returned as a free man, more than forty years later, did he realize the sheer size of the camp complex as a whole.81 Nor are the available testimonies fully representative. Many inmates did not return. No Jewish prisoner has spoken about life in the Mauthausen subcamp Gusen between 1940 and 1943, for example, because none survived. They belong to the mass of the “drowned,” as Primo Levi called them, who will never be heard.82 Then there are those who were saved, but who had no voice or could not remember.83 The stigma attached to social outsiders, for instance, meant that only a few spoke openly after liberation. The first memoir by a criminal prisoner was not published until 2014, posthumously, and even he did not disclose his background, pretending to have been detained on political grounds.84 Most former prisoners from the USSR were also condemned to silence, long suspected as potential Nazi collaborators by the Soviet authorities.85
Still, an integrated history of the KL demands an expansive approach. This book therefore draws on the huge body of scholarship, pulling together its main findings. Only today, thanks to the immense achievements of recent research, is it possible to embark on such a project. But a synthesis of existing studies alone would not be enough. To deepen our understanding of the KL, to bridge remaining gaps in our knowledge, and to give a clearer voice to prisoners and perpetrators, this study also makes extensive use of primary sources. It draws on a wide range of SS and police records, including circulars, local orders, and prisoner files.86 Some of this material has only recently become accessible, having been locked away for decades in Russian, German, and British archives, and numerous documents are cited here for the first time.87
Contemporaneous material produced by prisoners constitutes another invaluable primary source. Prisoners always tried to gather information. First and foremost, this was about survival, since insights into SS intentions could be life-saving. But some prisoners were thinking about posterity, too. Drawings and paintings, for example, documented the lives of inmates and their state of mind.88 Prisoners also took secret pictures and hid SS photographs.89 Even more important are the written records. Some privileged prisoners stole or transcribed SS papers. Between late 1939 and spring 1943, for example, the Sachsenhausen inmate Emil Büge copied confidential records onto wafer-thin paper and then glued them into his glasses case (almost 1,500 notes survived).90 Other prisoners kept secret diaries, as we saw in the case of Edgar Kupfer, and dozens of such records surfaced after the war. Or they wrote secret reports and letters, hiding them on the camp grounds or smuggling them outside.91 Such accounts can be augmented by testimonies from escaped or released prisoners, recorded before 1945.92 Contemporary sources such as these are precious because they give a direct glimpse of those trapped inside. Created in the shadow of the camps, they show the immediate fears, hopes, and uncertainties of prisoners, written without knowledge of what would become of themselves and how the KL would be understood and remembered after the war.93
The vast majority of inmates, however, could only testify after liberation. Each of their accounts is unique and it would be impossible to capture them all. This study uses a sample of hundreds of published and unpublished memoirs and interviews of survivors from many different backgrounds. For the most part, it draws on testimonies from the first months and years after liberation, when events were still fresh in the survivors’ minds and less likely to be superimposed with collective memories of the KL.94 To give one example for the malleability of memory: as the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele gained in notoriety after the war, his face found its way into more and more recollections of prisoners who had never encountered him.95 But it would be a mistake to discount more recent testimony altogether. After all, the significance of some events only revealed itself with the passage of time. And although many survivors spoke with surprising candor early on, others were only able to recount their most painful memories much later, if at all.96
Material gathered for postwar trials provides another important source for this study. Hundreds of Camp SS perpetrators were brought before Allied courts in the immediate postwar period, followed by further trials later on. Prosecutors collected original documents for these proceedings and questioned former prisoners, including some from forgotten groups.97 Although these survivor testimonies pose their own methodological challenges, they provide more missing pieces for our jigsaw of the KL.98 Moreover, the trial records are indispensable for an analysis of the perpetrators. As a general rule, SS guards did not write memoirs or give interviews after the war, preferring to lie low and disappear.99 Only courts could force them to break their silence. Of course, their statements have to be read with care, sifting truth from evasions and lies.100 Nonetheless, their testimonies illuminate the mind-set of SS foot soldiers, who committed most of the daily violence but left few traces in the historical record.
Structure
The main constant of the KL was change. True, there were continuities from one period to the next. But the camps took an unsteady route, with many twists and turns during little more than a decade. Only a largely chronological narrative can capture their fluidity. This study opens, therefore, with an account of the prewar origins (chapter 1), formation (chapter 2), and expansion (chapter 3) of the KL system between 1933 and 1939. The picture of this first half of the camps’ existence—when most inmates were released after a period of suffering—is often overshadowed by the later wartime scenes of death and devastation.101 But it is essential to examine what “preceded the unprecedented,” as the historian Jane Caplan has put it.102 Not only did the prewar camps leave a baleful legacy for lawless terror during the war. Their history is important in its own right, as it throws fresh light on the development of Nazi repression and the paths that were left untaken.103
The Second World War had a dramatic impact on the KL system and forms the backdrop for the remaining chapters of the book, beginning with its descent into mass death (chapter 4) and executions (chapter 5) during the first phase of the war, between the German attack on Poland in autumn 1939 and the failure of the blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union in late 1941. The book then turns to the Holocaust, examining the transformation of Auschwitz into a major death camp (chapter 6), and the daily lives of prisoners and SS staff in occupied eastern Europe (chapter 7). The following chapter covers the same period from a different perspective, exploring the wider development of the KL system in 1942–43, especially its growing emphasis on slave labor (chapter 8). This theme dominates the next chapter, too, which charts the rapid spread of satellite camps in 1943–44 and the exploitation of hundreds of thousands of prisone
rs for the German war effort (chapter 9). The study then turns to prisoner communities during the war and the often impossible choices inmates faced (chapter 10), before concluding with the destruction of the Third Reich and its camps in 1944–45, in a final paroxysm of violence (chapter 11).
This broadly chronological approach will highlight a fundamental feature of the Nazi regime. Although the Third Reich was propelled by what Hans Mommsen called a “cumulative radicalization,” with terror escalating over time, this process was by no means linear.104 The KL system did not swell like an avalanche, gathering ever more destructive force as it hurtled toward the abyss; its trajectory sometimes slowed and even reversed. Conditions did not always go from bad to worse; occasionally they improved, both before and during the war, only to deteriorate again later on. A close analysis of this development will give new insights into the history of the camps, and indeed of the Nazi regime as a whole. Terror stood at the center of the Third Reich, and no other institution embodied Nazi terror more fully than the KL.
1
Early Camps
“So you want to hang yourself?” SS Private Steinbrenner asked as he entered Hans Beimler’s cell in Dachau on the afternoon of May 8, 1933. The tall Steinbrenner looked down on the haggard prisoner in his filthy brown jacket and short trousers, whom he had tortured for days in the camp’s lockup, the so-called bunker. “Well, watch closely so that you learn how to do it!” Steinbrenner ripped a long piece of fabric from a blanket and tied a noose at the end. “Now all you have to do,” he added in the tone of a helpful friend, “is to put your head through, fix the other end to the window, and everything is ready. It is all over in two minutes.” Hans Beimler, his body covered in welts and wounds, had withstood earlier SS attempts to drive him to suicide. But he knew that time was running out. Only an hour or two earlier, Private Steinbrenner and the Dachau SS commandant had shown him into another cell, where he found the naked corpse of Fritz Dressel, a fellow Communist politician, stretched out on the stone floor. Over the previous days, Dressel’s screams had echoed through the Dachau bunker and Beimler assumed that his old friend, unable to bear more abuse, had cut his wrists and bled to death (in fact, SS men probably murdered Dressel). Still in shock, Beimler was dragged back to his own cell, where the commandant told him: “So! Now you know how to do it.” Then he issued an ultimatum: if Beimler did not kill himself, the SS would come for him the next morning. He was given little more than twelve hours to live.1
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