KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  As an ambitious empire builder, Himmler also saw the mass raids as a way to enlarge his camps, and thereby his power. Indeed, his purpose for calling a meeting with legal officials in February 1937 had been to poach their prisoners: Himmler wanted to get his hands on thousands of inmates in state prisons. Reich minister Gürtner was still strong enough to brush aside Himmler’s advance, but it would not be the last time Himmler tried to add state prisoners to his fast-growing KL empire.57

  SS concentration camps were soon packed, following the March 1937 raids against alleged criminals; further suspects arrived over the coming months.58 Meanwhile, the RKPA clamped down on their release, so that the great majority of those arrested in spring and summer 1937 were still inside when war broke out over two years later.59 The total number of “criminal” prisoners remained high as a result, with several thousands held in the camps during 1937–38.60 In 1937, most of them ended up in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, completely changing the composition of the local prisoner population. Shortly after it opened, the new Buchenwald KL took in over five hundred “professional criminals” from Lichtenburg, among them Emil Bargatzky, who arrived on the afternoon of July 31, 1937, with the same transport as his later accomplice Peter Forster.61 By January 1938, the Buchenwald SS counted 1,008 so-called criminals, making up more than thirty-eight percent of the camp’s prisoner population.62 Later in 1938–39, most of them would leave for the new camp in Flossenbürg, which together with Mauthausen became the main KL for alleged criminals.63

  Men arrested as professional criminals often faced the wrath of the Camp SS. Rudolf Höss spoke for many SS colleagues when he described the prisoners as “brute and base” villains devoted to a life of crime and sin. He claimed that these “real enemies of the state” were impervious to normal punishment, however strict, thereby justifying the extreme violence of the Camp SS.64 A political inmate in Dachau later recalled the relish with which SS camp compound leader Hermann Baranowski greeted so-called criminals in spring 1937:

  Listen up, you filth! Do you know where you are?—Yes?—No, you don’t know? Well then, I’ll explain it to you. You are not in a prison and you are not in a penitentiary, either. No. You are in a concentration camp. That means you are in an educational camp! You are to be educated here—and we’ll educate you all right. You may rely on that, you stinking swine!—You will be given useful work here. Anyone not performing it to our satisfaction will be helped by us. We have our methods! You’ll get to know them. There’s no loafing about here and let no one believe he can run away. No one escapes from here. The sentries have instructions to shoot without warning at any attempt to escape. And we have here the elite of the SS!—our boys are very good shots.65

  Baranowski was not bluffing. Camp SS officers really did regard so-called professional criminals as masters of escape and warned guards to be vigilant and to use their weapons without hesitation.66 And SS men were quick to attack “criminals” inside the KL, too; they were easy to pick out because of special markings on their uniforms, with a green triangle becoming standard in the late 1930s.67 In Sachsenhausen, at least twenty-six “criminals” died in 1937, ten of them in March and April, exceeding the death rate among political prisoners in this period.68 The same was true in Buchenwald, where at least forty-six so-called professional criminals died during their first year inside the camp in 1937–38.69

  Prisoners with the green triangle could expect little support from other inmates, whose hostility toward the “BVer,” as they were often called (short for Berufsverbrecher, or professional criminal), sometimes matched that of the SS men. Just like Soviet political prisoners in the faraway Gulag, many political inmates in the KL despised so-called criminals as coarse, cruel, and corrupt—“the dregs of society,” as one of them put it.70 Such loathing grew from social prejudices against men thought to have been arrested as brutal thugs and from the daily encounters inside the KL, with political prisoners claiming that the new arrivals used their criminal energies against fellow inmates and collaborated with the SS.71

  The picture of the “criminal greens” has long been shaped by these testimonies of political prisoners.72 But it requires correction. Even in the late 1930s, the vast majority of so-called professional criminals were property offenders, not violent felons; just like Emil Bargatzky, most of those arrested during the spring 1937 raids were suspected burglars and thieves.73 Also, the “greens” forged no united front against other KL inmates.74 Of course, some formed friendships and cliques inside, since they often worked together and slept in the same barrack.75 These bonds appear to have been looser than those among political prisoners, however, since so-called criminals could rarely build upon a shared past or ideological beliefs.76 Finally, although the tensions between some “red” and “green” prisoners were real, they did not always arise from the latter group’s alleged brutality, but simply from competition for scarce resources, a struggle that would escalate during the war.77

  Following the 1937 police offensive against so-called criminals, Himmler and his police leaders soon plotted the next move in the war against social outsiders. To coordinate and extend the preventive fight against crime, the RKPA drafted the first nationwide regulations, introduced in a confidential decree of the Reich Ministry of the Interior on December 14, 1937.78 This decree enshrined preventive police custody of criminal suspects in the KL, drawing on the earlier Prussian regulations. Even more important, it greatly extended the number of suspects. In addition to hardened offenders, it threatened “anyone who, without being a professional or habitual criminal, endangers the general public through his asocial behavior.”79 The scene was set for a massive police crackdown on deviance.

  Action “Work-Shy Reich”

  Why was a pauper like Wilhelm Müller hounded as an enemy of the German state? Divorced and unemployed, the forty-six-year-old was living hand to mouth in Duisburg, deep in the German industrial heartland. The welfare authorities forced him to perform menial labor, four days a week, in return for a paltry 10.40 Reichsmark, barely enough to get by. He occasionally asked for money on the streets, and on the afternoon of June 13, 1938, a police officer caught him in the act. Wilhelm Müller had been fined twice before for begging. This time, the police took a far more drastic step and placed him into preventive custody as an “asocial human being.” Müller found himself labeled as a work-shy beggar and criminal who “cannot accustom himself to the discipline required by the state,” and on June 22, 1938, he was taken to Sachsenhausen.80

  Wilhelm Müller was among some 9,500 “asocial” men arrested during mass raids in June 1938 and dragged to concentration camps.81 These nationwide raids by the criminal police, its most radical attack yet on social outsiders, had begun in the early hours of June 13 and lasted several days, with officers searching railway stations, bars, and shelters.82 The raids followed an earlier concerted action: in the last ten days of April 1938, the Gestapo had arrested almost two thousand “work-shy” men and forced them to Buchenwald.83 Meanwhile, local police forces carried out their own measures against so-called asocials in 1938–39, bringing even more suspects to the camps, including several hundred women accused of moral offenses.84

  Many of the men rounded up during the 1938 mass raids were shocked and bewildered by their sudden detention.85 Regional police officials had an almost free hand when it came to arrests, as the definition of “asocial” was left deliberately vague, a catch-all term for all kinds of deviant behavior. According to Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the security police (which combined the criminal and political police), the targets included “tramps,” “whores,” “alcoholics,” and others who “refuse to integrate into the community.”86 In practice, the mass raids centered on vagrants, beggars, welfare recipients, and casual workers. In addition, the police arrested a number of suspected pimps, some of whom were guilty of nothing more than frequenting bars of ill repute.87

  German police leaders also extended the attack on “asocials” to men regarded as racially suspect.
In his orders for the June 1938 raids, Reinhard Heydrich specifically targeted “criminal” Jews. In addition, he picked out men described as Gypsies, who had a criminal record or “have shown no liking for regular work.”88 Because of their often nonnormative lifestyle, the small minority of so-called Gypsies (today frequently referred to as Sinti or Roma) had long faced official harassment in Germany. State-sponsored discrimination escalated dramatically in the Third Reich, especially from the late 1930s. After the June 1938 raids, hundreds of male Gypsies arrived in the KL; Sachsenhausen alone held 442 by August 1, 1938 (almost five percent of the prisoner population). Many had been arrested as self-employed musicians, artists, or itinerant merchants.89 One of them was the thirty-eight-year-old August Laubinger, a father of four who had been living in poverty with his family in Quedlinburg near Magdeburg. Although he had no criminal record, had worked for years as a textile trader, and had tried to find a steady job, the criminal police still arrested him on June 13, 1938, as “work-shy,” accusing him of having “wandered around the country” without fixed employment. A few days later, Laubinger arrived in Sachsenhausen, where he would remain for more than a year.90

  There was no single driving force behind the all-out assault on “asocials” in 1938. Nazi leaders were attracted to the chilling vision of the police as a doctor that could cleanse Germany of all deviants and degenerates, a vision increasingly inflected with racism.91 Meanwhile, regional police officials and others involved in the raids—in German welfare offices and labor exchanges—used the mass raids as a pragmatic opportunity to eliminate men long seen as nuisances and threats, including alleged benefit cheats, welfare clients resistant to state control, persistent beggars, and criminal suspects who could not be legally prosecuted. So enthusiastic were regional police officials about rounding up social outsiders that they far exceeded the minimum arrest targets set by Heydrich for the June 1938 raids.92

  Economic factors were important, too, even more so than before.93 The charge of “work shyness” had already featured prominently in early campaigns against social outsiders in the Third Reich. Not only were the “work-shy” seen as biologically inferior, as many scholars and scientists insisted at the time, they failed one of the major demands made on national comrades—the performance of productive labor.94 The Nazi leaders’ desire to force “work-shy” men to work gained added urgency as the German economy was gearing up for war. As Reinhard Heydrich put it, the regime “does not tolerate asocial persons avoiding work and thereby sabotaging the [1936] Four-Year Plan.”95 Adolf Hitler shared these views and strongly supported—and possibly even initiated—the mass detention of the “professional unemployed” and “scum,” as he called them.96 At the same time, SS leaders were beginning to pursue a far more ambitious economic policy inside the KL, and were eager to get their hands on forced laborers. Himmler’s hunger for more prisoners clearly influenced the raids in 1938, with the police orders for mass arrests of “asocials” stressing the importance of targeting men who could work.97

  The concentration camps expanded dramatically in 1938 and social outsiders were soon in the majority. According to one estimate, so-called asocials made up seventy percent of the entire prisoner population by October 1938.98 This figure would have dropped over the following months, but overall numbers still remained high, as many “work-shy” men waited in vain for their release.99 On the eve of the Second World War, more than half of all the inmates in Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were still classified as “asocial,” instantly recognizable by the black triangle on their uniform (some Gypsies wore brown markings instead).100 Initially, Buchenwald had been designated as the KL for all men detained in the 1938 mass raids.101 But the police arrested so many in June that Dachau and Sachsenhausen threw open their gates, too; in fact, Sachsenhausen took in most detainees, with the total number of “work-shy” prisoners reaching 6,224 by June 25, 1938.102

  Camp SS men labeled these prisoners “asocial parasites,” and dismissed them as dirty, dishonest, and depraved.103 The SS immediately set out to break them with overwhelming force. On arrival in Sachsenhausen in June 1938, prisoners were greeted with invective, kicks, and slaps. Afterward, Commandant Baranowski, a recent appointment from Dachau, ordered his men to select some victims, who were strapped on a buck and whipped in front of the other horrified newcomers. And just as he had threatened “professional criminals” in Dachau, Baranowski had a word of warning for any “asocials” in Sachsenhausen who thought about escape, loudly announcing the motto of his trigger-happy sentries: “Bang—and the shit is gone!”104

  The prisoners with the black triangle endured particularly poor living conditions. The mass arrests in summer 1938 had caught the Camp SS off guard, leading to chaotic scenes inside overcrowded camps. In Sachsenhausen, the SS replaced bed frames with straw sacks to press some four hundred “asocials” into space meant to hold 146 men; as an emergency measure, the SS also threw up eighteen new barracks, northeast of the roll call square, which formed the so-called little camp. The new prisoners’ uniforms were ill fitting and dirty, and the shortage of shoes and caps caused bleeding feet and sunburned heads.105 If anything, things were even more harmful in Buchenwald. Not only was it still under construction, but the local SS men were also fired up after the murder of SS Rottenführer Albert Kallweit just a few weeks earlier.106

  To make matters even worse, the “asos” (as they were known) stood near the bottom of the prisoner hierarchy. Just like those with the green triangle, they faced plenty of contempt from fellow inmates. Unlike them, however, prisoners with the black triangle largely failed to gain influential Kapo positions, despite their much larger numbers. And while there was some camaraderie—with inmates helping others, or diverting them with jokes and with romantic tales of life on the road—their sense of shared identity was weak, as “asocials” had even less in common than so-called criminals.107 Worst off were those regarded as disabled or mentally unstable, who often found themselves isolated under the most dreadful conditions. In Buchenwald, the SS pressed them into the so-called idiots’ company, wearing white armbands with the word “stupid.”108

  Some “asocial” prisoners were butchered in the name of Nazi eugenics. The new German rulers had lost no time in 1933 in introducing a law for the compulsory sterilization of the “hereditary ill.” By 1939, at least three hundred thousand women and men (many of them inmates of mental asylums) had been mutilated, owing largely to the prejudices of physicians and judges at newly established Hereditary Health Courts.109 Professor Werner Heyde supervised the sterilization program inside the KL, having been put in charge of “hereditary monitoring” after a 1936 meeting with Inspector Eicke, whom he had last encountered as a patient in his Würzburg clinic. Apparently, all prisoners were to be screened for possible sterilization, with so-called asocials especially vulnerable, since Heyde believed there to be “quite a few feebleminded” among them. Having initially worked alone, Heyde soon taught Camp SS doctors to complete the formal court applications. In the late 1930s, some otherwise indifferent SS doctors developed a sudden zeal when it came to prisoner sterilizations, which were largely carried out in local hospitals.110

  Inhumane SS treatment, together with the general deterioration of conditions in the late 1930s, killed prisoners on a scale never seen before in the concentration camps. The first huge rise in the death rate came in summer 1938, after the victims of the June raids arrived. During the first five months of 1938 (January to May), ninety men are known to have died in all the KL. Over the next five months (June to October), at least 493 men perished—almost eighty percent of them “asocials.”111 In Sachsenhausen, at least thirty-three “asocials” lost their lives in July 1938 alone, when one year earlier (in July 1937) the Sachsenhausen SS had recorded just a single death among all its inmates.112

  Worse was yet to come; if summer and autumn 1938 were already toxic, the following months were truly lethal. From late 1938, the death toll among “asocials” rocketed to new heights. During the six
-month period between November 1938 and April 1939, at least 744 “asocial” men perished in the KL.113 In Sachsenhausen, the most deadly month was February 1939, when 121 so-called asocials died, dwarfing the eleven deaths among all other prisoner groups that month. In total, at least 495 “asocials” lost their lives in Sachsenhausen during a single year, from June 1938 to May 1939, accounting for a staggering eighty percent of all prisoner fatalities. The main causes, one survivor of the camp recalled, were “starvation, freezing, shooting, or the effects of abuse.”114 Clearly, death became far more commonplace in the KL during the late 1930s, and men arrested as asocial bore the main brunt: between January 1938 and August 1939, well over 1,200 “asocial” men died across all the SS concentration camps.115 Even today, it is widely unknown that these men from the margins of society made up the largest group of KL victims in the final period before the war.

  Propaganda and Prejudice

  The shift from browbeating political opponents to terrorizing social outsiders shaped the public presentation of the KL. To be sure, the regime never drew a strict line between its opponents, and the longer it stayed in power, the more the criminal, racial, and political enemy categories merged in the minds of Nazi leaders; by the end of the war, Heinrich Himmler spoke of having faced a “Jewish-communist asocial organization” in 1933.116 Still, the early camps had concentrated on the destruction of the left-wing opposition, as we have seen, and this target had also dominated reports and rumors at the time.117 As the function of the KL changed, however, so did their official image in Nazi Germany. Already in the mid-1930s, media reports placed growing emphasis on the detention of social outsiders.118 Most prominent was a five-page story on Dachau, published in late 1936 in a glossy Nazi magazine, with twenty pictures of the camp and its inmates. Right from the beginning, the article stressed how much the prisoner population had recently changed: